Culturally, Locally. A Few Remarks on the Study of Postwar Polish Literature

Abstract

The aim of this article is to put forth two exemplary methods for writing about literature from the PRL period and, in a broader context, two forms of constructing a history of literature by this model. Enumerating the basic premises for a contemporary history of literature (the loss of neutrality for critical languages, the blurring of borders that define the object of literary studies, and the the altered state of the human sciences), this article’s author proposes the form of the single year study as well as studies inspired by the conceptual apparatus of new regionalism. These approaches offer a chance to investigate thematics that have thus far been ignored in scholarship on PRL-era culture (local culture, the relationship between official and local culture, and the persistence of the internal borders of partitioned Poland in postwar culture) as well as an intimate approach to postwar experience through the multifaceted representation of an isolated moment in time (the single year study).