Wyjść poza tekst. Literatura wobec tradycji i rzeczywistości
Going beyond the text. Literature in reference to tradition and reality

Contributor(s): Szymon Piotr Kukulak (Editor), Józef Olejniczak (Editor)
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
Keywords: tradition; reality
Summary/Abstract: The collective monograph entitled Going beyond the text. Literature in reference to tradition and reality presents a variety of methodological attitudes and equally diverse literary and historical interests of a group of young researchers from the Universities of Warsaw and Silesia, and The Jagiellonian University and Adam Mickiewicz University. What binds all the sketches is the correlation of the literary texts and events of the contemporary literary life (the 20th and 21st centuries) with the literary and cultural tradition, as well as the attitude to reality, which has been understood and defined in different ways. The monograph presents the undertakings of historical and literary interpretation of the works by Joseph Mackiewicz (P.A. Kowalczyk), Stanislaw Lem and Jacek Dukaj (Sz. P. Kukulak), Jacek Malczewski (S. Trela), Jacek Kaczmarski (P. Marciniak), Janusz Głowacki (K. Olczak), Dorota Masłowska, Jacek Hugo-Bader and Joanna Bator (M. Olejniczak). Moreover, lesser-known episodes of the literary life (A. Grochowska, P. Potasińska, S.P. Kukulak, P. Urbańska, P.A. Kowalczyk, M. Mijatovic) have been recalled and interpreted. Modern comparative analysis has been undertaken (by R. Pulkowski and P. Urbańska), and original methodological suggestions have been put forward (by P. Potasińska, P. Zając and M. Olejniczak). However, the emerging from the accumulated volume of sketches picture of the condition of the literature and its ‘relation to reality’ and to the literary tradition, which is being contemporarily revived, is not full, and even was not intended to be as such. The authors of the individual chapters of the monograph present there their cognitive intuitions, rather than advance ‘firm’ historical and literary or theoretical thesis. This is also in accord with the intention of the editors of the monograph – to present a panorama, a historical and literary catalog of the problems faced by researchers in the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century. And what is more, to do this without attempting to settle the question whether this ‘project of the future’, i.e. of the future literary studies in Poland, will materialize and will be developed and added into future monographs by the researchers who have just started their scientific career, or it will be merely an episode that will not be further elaborated on in future research or monographs. The monograph presents two perspectives: 1. traditional, historical, being apparently in accordance with the the principle that if something has happened, and if some text has been written, it is subject to the description and interpretation; 2. ‘involved’ – putting important questions about the status of literature ‘here and now’, about being a literary scholar and humanist in the post-modern civilization. It is just these elements, wherein the significance and relevance of the monograph Going beyond the text. Literature in reference to tradition and reality should be looked for. On another level, it might be written that the articles collected in the monograph constitute a kind of incomplete panorama of what is going to happen in Polish literary studies in the coming years.

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