Do we still need a literary tradition?

Abstract

The literary tradition is treated more and more ambivalently in school practice. However, it is not only what subsequent generations of readers find – it is shaped by them in a process of constant choice, while depreciating it is also a way of defining
the tradition as chosen by the next generation. As for the literature of the Baroque era – knowledge about it has undergone the deepest change over the last half-century – the main barrier seems to be the archaic language and the scale of references to the Greco-Roman tradition. However, there is no adequate motivation to overcome it. The way to break the distance to the literature of the past is, first of all, to update the tradition at least partially; some of the works present in the school programs were selected a hundred years ago and are often not adequate to contemporary problems. There are no specific proposals for change, although the names of Wacław Potocki, Jan Andrzej Morsztyn and other poets of that time are mentioned. School literary education gives students the opportunity to find themselves in the here and now reality, builds in them a system of assessment and ways of understanding that will remain part of the intellectual and aesthetic formation of a high school graduate.