Wojciech Rusinek
Konteksty Kultury, Vol. 9 , 2012, pp. 161 - 170
The author of the essay attempts to follow the history of the ‘workshop prose’ concept in the critical consciousness of the 20th century. The deliberations are based on autothematic strategies, as proposed by Michał Głowiński in his paper Powieść jako metodologia powieści, however, the key role here is given to situations in which the ‘meta’ reflection is ‘in the very story, in the very style, in general in every element which appears in the novel.’ As the focus is on the literary ‘consciousness’, at the very beginning, representative opinions of critics are referred to (W. Browarny, P. Czapliński, B. Kaniewska, K. Uniłowski), who reflected on the scope of occurrence of textual tendencies in the Polish prose of the 1990s – the tendencies regarded by the author of the article as the contemporary variation of the latest model of autothematism according to Głowiński. Referring to the postmodernist view of the text, the author shows in further parts of the article that the traditionally conceived workshopness, whose indicators in artistic prose was a set of metatext tools, and which was rooted in the modernist paradigm, does not constitute today a strong analytical category, or, all the more, a distinct assessment criterion. One of the symptoms of operative ‘expiry’ of the eponymous term is the popularization of the autothematic strategies and the presence thereof in popular literature. Another one – the postmodernist views on the nature and limits of the text. At the end of the essay the author indicates that the notion of the ‘workshop prose’ retains its potential as a descriptive category.