Kto się boi Jonathana Littella?
Who is afraid of Jonathan Littlel?

Summary/Abstract: The paper presents the analysis of a set of reviews and critical essays, which have been published in the Polish press after the publication of Jonathan Littel’s novel The Kindly Ones. Using the tools offered by the so-called “memory studies” and the Marianne Hirsch’s concept of post-memory, the author examines the reasons of various suppressions and peculiar self-censorship, which characterise those texts. The Littell’s novel in this depiction turns out to be a provocation, to which critics of different generations respond very differently. What is also a result of their belonging to a certain generation is the way in which they display the analyzed texts and the way of grasping and understanding the holocaust as a historical event and an open cognitive problem. The second part of the essay proves that Jonathan Littell constructs his novel basing on the mechanisms of social and cultural memory, which’s structure is not free of schemes, clichés and key-words. The novel turns out to be purposely aimed at the modern and postmodern methodologies of reading, which is a fact that has not been properly noticed and interpreted by the critics (who, however, have themselves used those methodologies).

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