Opowieści nowoczesne

The book deals with the nineteenth‑century relations between the notion of modernity — prior to that epoch, and the subsequent literary periods — namely, romanticism, positivism, and modernism. Modernity is defined here with regard to tradition that used to read it within the frames of steam and electricity as a certain breakthrough, or rift that marked the beginning of the nineteenth century, rather than a simple continuum of the Enlightenment projects. It would thus be a broadly understood dynamic social, cultural, economic, and political construct that would be rich in strong as well as multifaceted effects. In this way, the subsequent periods would represent various types of reaction (from negative to affirmative ones with neutral in‑between) to the challenges posed by a modern and modernizing world. The argument presented in this book is predominantly based on texts that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly positivist literature as well as from the texts representative of anti‑positivist turn. The very notion of positivism has been critically examined in the book. The reader, however, will find here few references to works written earlier — that is, in the romantic period, as well as later ones, composed in the late modern era. The exemplifications comprising this book most often concern, however, they are not limited to, short pieces of writing — namely, novellas and stories in the main. The reader will also encounter discussions on the whole novels as well as their carefully selected fragments. The authors whose works have been analyzed and interpreted are the following: Bolesław Prus, Eliza Orzeszkowa, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Adam Mickiewicz, Józef Wybicki, Wacław Berent, Władysław Stanisław Reymont, Aleksander Świętochowski, and Maria Konopnicka. In elaborate and often “microphysical” analyses theoretically drawn from post‑structuralism, deconstruction, and psychoanalysis there are such conceptual constructs as the issue of the state of emergency, phantasmatic sphere, anagrammatic forms, homo sacer, and many others. The book presents the quest for the genius loci that gave rise to Polish culture and literature; the unique space that is stretched between East and West, between novelty and underdevelopment, between freedom and bondage. The underlying inspiration for the book was an overriding, yet hitherto unformulated in any direct way, question of modernity, and to put it more precisely, the question of historical provenience and intricacies of Polish phobias, phantasms, and collective sensitivity. Thus understood, the book reads as an essay which, by delving into the bygone matter, makes an attempt at understanding its epoch.