Search

In the article the author addresses the problem of censorship of literature in Poland during the communist years. The introduction describes the basic assumptions of communist censorship and emphasizes Poland’s close dependence on the USSR. The state of research on communist censorship in the former Eastern Bloc is briefly outlined in order to provide background for the discussion of the communist censorship in Poland. The methods of Polish censors are also described: preventive censorship, making two reviews, eliminating a part of the text or banning the printing of the whole text. The main part of the article details the methods of censorship in Poland by period (a chronological aspect), characterizes the banned topics (political, moral and ideological censorship) and gives examples of authors who had trouble with publishing. It also discusses the differences between censorship of Polish contemporary literature, classics and translations from foreign languages. It is argued that the existence of state control determined the peculiarity of Polish literature during the communist period. Censorship influenced the formation of the canon and restricted the development of some topics and aspects of poetics. Furthermore, state control destroyed the careers of writers and a broader potential of literature. Finally, the translations of important texts of world literature were not allowed to be printed or were very late, which resulted in the isolation of Polish literature (and readers). In the last part of the article the author presents new perspectives for further research: a transnational, postcolonial and “minority narrative” perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coordinating a long-term research project on transculturalism and bilingualism in Slovakia and Poland, Zoltán Németh discusses the opportunities opened up by a methodology based on transculturalism studies. With a special focus is on authors affiliated to Hungarian literatures, the author argues that such approaches are able to reframe discussions about Hungarian minority literatures and exile literatures, highlighting the possibility to include into the Hungarian literary canon works written in different languages. In a dialogue with Imre József Balázs, Németh clarifies the differences between transnationalism and transculturalism studies, the effect of such research projects on the history of Hungarian literature, the possibilities to combine network theory with transculturalism studies, and also individual authors whose works became increasingly relevant from a transculturalist perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article aims at presenting the emergence, the evolution and the most recent trends in Gender and Queer Studies in Poland, paying specific attention to their impact on research in Polish literature. The author shows how gender-related theories started to be widespread in Poland only after the sociocultural changes that occurred in 1989. During the first half of the 90s, groundbreaking writings of Anglo-American scholars were translated into Polish, while key concepts and ideas begun to be disseminated. In the meantime, a debate on their applicability to the reality of a post-communist country took place. In the second half of the 90s started to be published the first monographs that tried to reinterpret Polish women writers from a feminist and a gender-sensitive point of view. Meanwhile, Gender Studies programs were established in many Polish universities. In the new millennium, gender binarisms and essentialist conceptions begun to be criticized and subsequently deconstructed, while Polish scholars increasingly focused on queer and until then marginalized topics and authors. At present, Gender and Queer Studies in Poland show an eclectic, intersectional and multifaceted nature, mainly due to such factors as their belated reception, their dissemination together with other theories and methodologies, their rethinking and reworking carried out by Polish scholars, the interplay with other branches of knowledge. Providing new instruments, conceptions, and approaches, Gender and Queer Studies have proven to be an essential instrument to reread Polish literature in a new light. Furthermore, they are part of a wider process of reevaluation of the role of ‘minoritarian’ subjects (women, Jews, LGBT+, nonPolish authors) in the creation of the national literary canon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2006 Dariusz Skórczewski considered it an axiom that Polish literature was not (yet) recognized as postcolonial. Clare Cavanagh (2003) had in fact previously recognized in the Marxist origins of postcolonial studies the main obstacle to their rooting among those who had suffered the effects of Soviet Marxism. On the other hand, Aleksander Fiut (2003) was afraid that the request to include Poland in the field of investigation of postcolonial studies could rekindle a victim image of the country. For Bogusław Bakuła (2006) “it is said nowhere that a colonized community cannot show colonial symptoms”. It is therefore possible to outline two currents of Polish postcolonial studies that at first do not seem to interact with each other: one linked to the traditional ‘martyrological’ connotation of national history, and one attentive to the events attesting to the role of Poland as a colonial and cultural hegemon. Both sides seem to offer interesting proposals for reinterpreting the canon of Polish literature. Ewa Thompson in 2007 proposed a reinterpretation of this canon in the light of a ‘poetics of resentments’ unknown to Sarmatic culture but rooted in Poland after the XVIII Century partitions. For Grażyna Borkowska, on the other hand, the influence exerted by Polish literature on readers in Russia ruled out any hypothesis of colonial subordination. Since 2011 the postcolonial paradigm has begun to be replaced – not without resistance – by a post-dependency orientation. Already in 2010 for Dorota Kołodziejczyk the category of postcolonialism was not suitable for defining the role of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe from a historical perspective and had to be replaced with that of a “post-dependency condition”. Emilia Kledzik in 2015 explained what was hidden behind the resistance to move from the postcolonial to the post-dependency paradigm: “In Central Europe [...] we often see ourselves as excluded from Western civilization, and at the same time we consider ourselves exempt from reflecting about our own subalterns”. A post-dependency perspective solves (setting them aside) the questions of definition of what is meant by ‘colony’ and highlights the ambivalent nature of the Polish colonial discourse, not only in the context of the colonized / colonizing dialectic but also in that of the problem of national identity and geopolitical location. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]