Małe ojczyzny i limitowanie różnicy : ze sporów nad literaturą i wizjami kultury w ostatnich latach

Abstract

Departing from the reception, from the point of view of literary criticism, of Piotr Szewc’s novel Zmierzchy i poranki (2000) [Dizsfes and Dawns], the author of the present article tries to trace back the ideological factors that conditioned the enormous success achieved, in the 1990s, by the literature of “homelands” (here belong the works of S. Chwin, P Huelie, and O. Tokarczuk). In practice, this literary current was recognised as an artistic legitimisation of the liberal-conservative discourse. This has happened at the cost of an aestheticization of the key categories, including that of the “homeland” itself, which functions merely as a phantasm. Consequently, the project of transforming the category of identity or of home (understood as a dynamic link with absence, lack, or difference) has been belittled. Further on, while referring to the anti-modemist crusade launched by Daniel Bell in his Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, the author has noticed that Bell’s project, on the local Polish scale, has been carried out, unconsciously, by the groups of conservative liberals. The said project was at first directed mainly against the avant-garde wing of modernism, but later was used against other intellectual and artistic currents perceived as extreme, radical, or destructive. All this means that the favoured kind of literature was the one that stemmed from the mythographic wing of modernism, or, to be more precise, stylised as mythographic, for it aestheticizes this tradition.