Polowanie na postmodernistów we wsi Maniowy

Abstract

It was an opening paper of the academic conference The Polish Prose of the End of the 2th Century. Post- modernism?, which was organised by the Institute of Polish Philology in the village of Maniowy at the end of April 2001. To begin with, the history of the village was recalled together with other conferences of this type organised twenty years earlier by the Chair of Literature of the 20th century, which fulfilled an important academic function as well as produced subsequent yearbooks and integrated the academic circles of the Higher School of Pedagogy then. The present session had similar objectives, however, it had its own specific character, too. Twelve academic faculty, six doctorate students and two fifth-year Polish Philology students participated in the conference. The assumption was that such confrontation of various academic workshops, life experiences and ways of reading literature would prove highly educating for everybody. As concerns the issues indicated in the topic of the conference what attracts particular attention is the question mark beside the word post-modernism. It is not about an artificial labelling of particular texts using just one notion, which may be better or worse defined, but it is rather an attempt at depicting diverse phenomena to be observed in narrative prose at the end of the previous century, whereas in cases of secondary output towards this notion, like in the case of Manuela Gretkowska, it is to show how it is incorporated in the literary substance. The paper presented stages, which the category of post-modernism underwent during the last decades of the 20th century. The presentation was mainly based on the book entitled Post-modernism by Ryszard Nycz. Furthermore, it presented the views of Jean Baudrilllard, Jacques Derrida, Zygmunt Bauman and Loytard (Post-modernism for Children). It brought to attention the fact that similar statements, especially about deconstruction, can be found in Polish writings by Andrzejewski, Konwicki and Mach. The authors, who are mentioned in the context of vast Polish literature on postmodernism, are Ryszard Nycz, Włodzimierz Bolecki, Kazimierz Bartoszyński and Zdzisław Łapiński. Bolecki is distinguished as the author of the most successful attempt at organising the notion. The text ends with his final statement that ‘the civilisation that brought about postmodernism, has not come into being on the Vistula river yet.’