The Classless Left. On a Certain Tradition of Politically Engaged Criticism from the Turn of the Century

The Classless Left. On a Certain Tradition of Politically Engaged Criticism from the Turn of the Century

Paweł Kaczmarski

A b s t r a k t

The paper identifies (selected) reasons and strategies of removing the notion of class from Polish critical-literary discourse after 1989, especially a certain tradition of non-Marxist leftist criticism defined by Maria Janion, Kinga Dunin and Igor Stokfiszewski. The paper shows how a general vision of the world and politics implicitly outlined in the works of those critics excludes the possibility to meaningfully use the notion of class.