The Postmodern Avant la Lettre. The Decline of the Grand Recits in West-Slavonic Literature
The Postmodern Avant la Lettre. The Decline of the Grand Recits in West-Slavonic Literature

Summary/Abstract: The intention of this study is to present, by means of the comparative method, the concurrence between the postmodern theory of the fall of the grand narratives, as formulated by Jean François Lyotard, and the oeuvre of three Western Slavonic writers: Dominik Tatarka, Milan Kundera and Jerzy Andrzejewski. Owing to their representative qualities, selected works including "The Demon of Consent" and other writings by the late Tatarka, the political tetralogy by Milan Kundera and Jerzy Andrzejewski’s novel The Pulp, are treated as paradigmatic cases, and simultaneously as consecutive stages in the same phenomenon the postmodern, avant la lettre struggle for emancipation from the totalizing obsessions of modernism, the intellectual terror of the majority (which is supposedly always right), justified by modernity, and its leftist future-oriented myths, based on a belief in the reasonability of history, the irreversible nature of its “iron laws,” and the necessity of an absolute subjugation of the individual to them. The works of the selected authors do not exhaust the problem of grand narratives in West Slavonic literature, they are merely the most typical examples of the rejection of grand narratives by means of postmodern poetics.

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