A poetics of the moment would appear to postulate the end of, or at least a limit to, the problems traditionally assigned to genre theory. After all, a literary genre enables us to find constants among literary elements, to look for invariants amid literary variability: common, constant, and intersubjective traits – a kind of model, representing the idealization of the real, the momentary, of a given literary work. (...)
“The present work is the fruit of reflection on Polish verse of the last half century” – with these words, in 1999, Artur Grabowski began his great book Wiersz: forma i sens (Poem: Form and Sense), in which he offered an intriguing elaboration of his concept of momentaneous systems in the history of Polish poetry. (...)
One reason for a change in the meaning of a literary term can be the reassessment of whether its current definition corresponds to the reality it refers to. This can be spurred on by new or newly interpreted literary trends, seasonal reconsiderations of artistic devices, the discovery of previously unseen configurations of elements in a work, and so on.
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I dream that one day I shall remove the stickers that other people have assiduously attached to me and become just my name. Because that, just a name, is the greatest literary recognition that any writer can earn. For everyone else: Cyprus, five points, Poland, two points, Belgium, ten points…[1]
Dubravka Ugrešić wrote the declaration quoted above in 1999. (...)
Travel writing is one of many literary genres. In it we further find the subgenres of the travel essay and the travel novel: thus it includes both the genre of literary fiction and that of journalistic nonfiction, not to mention biography and autobiography. (...)
Reading it today, there’s something quaint about the prediction made by eminent scholar and theoretist of literature Michał Głowiński, in a text written in the 1980s, that the dichotomy between internal and external methodologies inherited from the reaction against Positivism would eventually be abandoned, yielding to the advent of a new era in literary studies, thanks to the application of an integral method based on a communicative conception of the work of literature. (...)
Poetics has often been described in recent times as a field forced into making defensive gestures. There have also been assertions that the charges mounted by post-structuralism of a tendency to search for eidetic literariness, the need to generalize from what is consummately idiomatic, the shuttering of literature inside a closed system, and so on, are still valid. (...)
Experience is the outcome of work; immediate experience is the phantasmagoria of the idler.
Walter Benjamin1)Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Cambridge 1999, p. (...)