Kultura pamięci w szkolnym dyskursie polonistycznym

Abstract

Remembrance across generations as well as means of its consolidation, preservation and passing on are subjects of interest for researchers of a number disciplines. Culture of remembrance is understood as a social obligation to remember the past in the form of testimonies, commemoration, rituals, paintings and symbols. Contemporary Polish schools witness an abandonment of the past, history and remembrance. The emphasis is put on the future success, and young people turn away from history failing to understand its significance for the present. The role of education – Polish literature and culture included – should be to restore the culture of remembrance and a related cultural memory, i.e. remembrance amongst members of a community and between generations in the form of language, narration, pictures and sounds. The article proposes a classification of the forms in which a culture of remembrance can manifest itself in Polish literature and culture education. It exists in three spheres: intertextual, related to compulsory reading and narrative. Each of them is a significant form of passing on the collective memory. Intertextual culture of remembrance is a form of preserving the memory of motifs, themes, forms and genres; it is literature having a memory of itself. Reading culture of remembrance stores a collection of written works important for a cultural identity of a given community, whereas narrative culture of remembrance is a form of participation in the past through preservation and creation of individual remembrance forms. Spatial culture of remembrance is complementary to the three above, with a goal to reconstruct remembrance of a given place or a record of collective memory rooted in the place in the form of an educational project. Traces of remembrance preserved in the contemporary topography of a city serve as a depiction of the continuity between the past and the present.