Mierzenie się z esejem : studia nad polskimi badaniami eseju literackiego

Abstract

Coping with an essay shows two research perspectives. The part entitled The presence of an essay in the Polish literature is a historical perspective of the very phenomenon. Motivating it, the assumption is that writing essays consciously, as texts clearly different from others, by Polish authors has been dated back to the 1920s. A separate, but parallel issue was the ingraining of the term „essay” in the awareness of the participants of the Polish literary life, and various propositions to define its scope. Chronologically, the research and literary reactions to the appearance of subsequent texts referred to as essays were traced. Historical conditions influencing an increase in knowledge on a Polish essay, created and read under the circumstances of both a free flow of ideas, and gradually with a return of the literary diaspora overcome at the end of the century. The part called In the circle of the theory contains five cross-sectional perspectives of an essay, already treated as a defined genological model. Analysing various theoretical standpoints, and observing contemporary linguistic tendencies, first terminological misunderstandings were presented, and a suggestion to specify the name designation (in order to achieve a communicative efficiency) was offered. Complex conditions of pronouncing a literary nature of an essay were shown from today’s point of view. The author was confirmed in her beliefs that being in favour of the existence of a paradoxically precise genre model of an essay is justified. Finally, the popularization of writing forms deriving from a literary essay in its traditional form (which is still gaining new textual realizations). It concerns both the esseisation of various texts described by researchers for a long time, and a hypothetical prediction concerning significant trends in the Polish literature nowadays.