Description
Book SynopsisThis anthology presents a selection of texts on Polish socialist realist literature, written from the early 1980s to date. They depict a comprehensive picture of this literary phenomenon: starting from its holistic interpretations, through detailed analyses of the poetics of literary and political texts and a presentation of specific, also untypical embodiments of this artistic doctrine, to descriptions of the functioning of the institutions of literary life under socialist realism. All the texts in this anthology share a historically and culturally determined general methodological perspective, representing a combination of the Polish version of structuralism in literary studies – on the descriptive plane – with the anti-communist attitude on the plane of evaluation of presented phenomena.
Table of ContentsContents: Anna Artwińska/Bartłomiej Starnawski/Grzegorz Wołowiec: Introduction: Socialist Realism in Polish Literary Research – Anna Artwińska/Bartłomiej Starnawsk/Grzegorz Wołowiec: «
Fluctuat nec mergitur…» On Socialist Realism in Meta-Discursive Perspective – Michał Głowiński: Realism and Demagoguery – Zdzisław Łapiński: How to Co-Exist with Socialist Realism? – Janusz Sławiński: A «New Type» of Literary Criticism in the Stalinist Period – Zbigniew Jarosiński: Literature as Power – Leszek Szaruga: The Literary Canon of Polish Socialist Realism – Michał Głowiński: «Don’t Let the Past Run Wild»:
The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course as Mythical Narrative – Jerzy Smulski: The Literature of Socialist Realism: Selected Genological Issues – Wojciech Tomasik: Newspeak: Style as Language – Wojciech Tomasik: Literary Clichés in Polish Tendentious Novel 1949-1955 – Dariusz Śnieżko: The 20th-Century Panegyric Situation – Grzegorz Wołowiec: The Ambiguous Charm of Self-Criticism – Edward Balcerzan: Socialist Realism - Subversions and Deviations – Jerzy Smulski: Variance in the Socialist Realist Literary Text as a Scholarly Issue: Thoughts on Examples from Russian and Polish Literary Studies – Anna Zarzycka: Wisława Szymborska as an Author of Socialist Realist Poems – Tadeusz Kłak: Scenes from the Life of a Poet: Tadeusz Różewicz’s Adventures with Socialist Realist Criticism – Daria Mazur: PAX and Socialist Realism: A Marriage of Convenience? – Anna Artwińska: Two Left Shoes: «The Marxist Breakthrough» in Poland and Its Context – John M. Bates: Censorship in the Stalinist Era – Stefan Zabierowski: Melania Kierczyńska: The Socialist Realist Critic – Wojciech Tomasik: Literature Without Literariness: On Socialist Realist Literature and Research.
