Republiki literackiej nowoczesności
The Republics of Literary Modernity

Author(s): Krzysztof Krasuski
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Applied Linguistics, Studies of Literature, Sociology of Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
Keywords: Modern Literature; Literary Criticism; Stanisław Brzozowski; Czesław Miłosz; Development of Modernity;
Summary/Abstract: The development of the concept of modern literature in Poland, documentedwith literary criticism and essay writing, constitutes the maintheme of the book. In the presented overview, the selected literary andstrictly intellectual projects, included in the texts of Stanisław Brzozowskiand Czesław Miłosz, were taken into consideration. The examplesillustrate the significant factors which influenced the developmentof modernity in Polish literature of the previous century. It has beenillustrated that different writers of successive generations experiencedand defined the concept of modernity differently and that, in varioushistorical periods, they drew different conclusions in respect of theartistic texts realisations.Each of the book’s chapters is based on the assumption that the categoryof modernity is historically relative. Thus, the subsequent parts of thisstudy present the development of modernity in chronological order. Theinitial stages of the history of modernity in Polish literature of the 20thcentury, which were selected as crucial, include the analysis of the aspectof Stanisław Brzozowski’s (1878—1911) artistic activity that is reflectedin the theory of postcolonial studies, since until now it has not beenthe subject to interpretation with regard to this critic’s writing. Theassumptions of this theoretical approach may also be applied to theresearch into the later literary periods in Poland, the post- 1989 period.Tadeusz Żeleński (Boy) (1874—1941), the propagator of the rapid culturalchanges, has become an advocate of the literary and social modernityin the interwar period.The writers creating in political exile after 1945, also actively participatedin the process of shaping the Polish modern cultural awareness.Like i.a. Czesław Miłosz (1911—2004) and Tymon Terlecki (1905—2000),they represented various ideas about modernity, ranging from the liberalto the conservative ones. In these terms, the intellectual and artisticpropositions which might have seemed classicist or traditional, wereturned against the concept based on a considerable dose of mystification,for instance, the totalitarian social practices. Such a liberal anddemocratic attitude may be observed in the literary criticism of CzesławMiłosz, Paweł Hertz (1918—2001), and Tomasz Burek (born 1938).The book ends with the analyses of statements issued by literary criticsparticipating in the creation of the modern trend in the contemporaryliterature, but not in the least belonging to the avant-garde.With regard to the artistic output of the older and the consecutivegenerations of writers and critics, for instance those belonging to the NewWave generation, the author pays less attention to the extreme avant-gardeprojects than to the projects which remain related to the contemporaryliterary references, reactivating the existential experiences of the earlierand the more recent past, as well as the present. This type of modernitystrives for a broad social reception. Hence, it is not the state of elimination,but the state of homeostasis of tradition and contemporaneity thatis expected to be a remedy for the canons of modernity favoured in thecritical activities presented in the book.

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