Krańce wyobraźni
OUTSKIRTS OF IMAGINATION

Summary/Abstract: The article proposes to treat literature as a template of the collectiveimagination. The basis for discussion is the Polish prose of the period 1986–2016, and the main thesis of the article says that the Polish culture reached theends of the imagination. These are the ends of our geography and democracy. Getting to the ends of the geographical imagination is the result of movingout of the current larger units, to which Poland belonged or to which it aspired (weakening of the presence in the European Union, the disappearance of Central Europe, halting efforts to follow the Scandinavian model of the state and civic culture, destruction of relations with Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine). Weakening or breaking ties with neighboring countries leads to a four-sided isolation – that is, the above mentioned ends of the geographical imagination. The condition of getting out of the impasse is to develop new narratives linking Poland with the neighboring cultures and locating our country on the European map. Getting to the ends of democracy stems from the discovery that political majority turns out to be a constructed collective entity, and violence takes on the character of a constitutive element of democratic order.

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