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Book Discussion: "Being Poland: A New History of Polish Literature and Culture since 1918" edited by Tamara Trojanowska, Joanna Niżyńska, and Przemysław Czapliński

Fri, December 7, 2:30 to 4:15pm, Boston Marriott Copley Place, Floor: 3rd, Exeter

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

It has been over sixty years since the publication Manfred Kridl’s A Survey of Polish Literature and Culture (1956), forty-eight since the appearance of Czesław Miłosz’s The History of Polish Literature (1969), and almost forty since Julian Krzyżanowski’s A History of Polish Literature (1978) became available to English-speaking audiences. Being Poland: A New History of Polish Literature and Culture since 1918 does not compete with these histories as it focuses on the periods that these authors either could not cover or covered scantily. With a general Anglophone audience in mind, an international team of renowned and promising scholars brings to this volume a comparative, interdisciplinary, and theoretically sophisticated vision of Polish literature and culture. Being Poland does five things: 1) It focuses only on modern and postmodern cultural formations and brings the 21st century into the picture. 2) It provides the reader with four interpretative frameworks for Polish culture: “Transitions,” “Strategies,” “Transmissions,” and “Genres.” 3) It treats literature as one of many elements of the Polish cultural mosaic, extending its scope to discussion of theatre, film, cultural theory, popular culture as well as mass media. 4) It engages current theoretical and methodological tools 5) Finally, instead of the singular authorial readings, the volume capitalizes on the multiple intellectual, cultural, generational, and institutional perspectives as well as various theoretical tools and approaches brought into play by the collaboration of some sixty scholars from Europe and North America.

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