Nieistniejący gatunek
A Non-Existent Genre

Summary/Abstract: Book review: Roma Sendyka, Nowoczesny esej. Studium historycznej świadomości gatunku [‘The Modern Essay. A study on historical awareness of the genre’], Universitas, Krakow, 2006. Ms. Sendyka’s book is the first study in Polish that presents in such broad terms and so exhaustive a manner the history of twentieth-century reflection on essay. The resources collected for the purpose not only show the different scholarly or view-of-the-world positions appearing in the reference literature, criticism and theory in Poland, but also embrace the most important foreign-language texts. The author believes that the key characteristics of essay include inconclusivity, critical verve, and a distance to the world of ideologies and the essayist’s own form alike. These premises allow one to consider essay to be one of the most important literary genres to our contemporary time.

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