Co se můžeme z literatury dozvědět o společnosti?
What Can Literature Tell Us about Society?

Summary/Abstract: This is a Czech translation of the introduction to Kinga Dunin’s Czytajac Polske: Literatura polska po roku 1989 wobec dylematów nowoczesnosć (Reading Poland: Polish Literature since 1989 with Regard to Present Dilemmas; 2004). In it, Dunin, an important Polish sociologist of culture, asks what a literary text can tell us about society. She also asks whether there is even such a thing as society. With an analysis of Piotr Sztompka’s Socjologia (2002), she comes to the conclusion that society is not an entity that can be comprehended dispassionately, but a fictional reality, which can be understood only by interpretation. She rejects, however, the possibility of a single valid interpretation of a literary text. She stresses that one can talk not about objectively knowing a text, but only about our understanding of it. From literature (at least from part of it) we can, nevertheless, learn something about society by making the portrayed fictional world our own interpretations and comparisons, and by contrasting these with the interpretations of others.

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