Von Grenzlandliteratur zur Poetik der Grenze. Deutsch-polnische Transiträume und die kosmopolitische Imagination

Abstract This contribution considers the changes in German-Polish border narratives since 1989, and it argues for a flexible transnational approach to studying borderlands literature. In particular, the article discusses ›border poetics‹ as an idiom of the cosmopolitan imagination: it is a broadly applicable narrative and cultural practice that connects locally and historically specific border experiences with universally understood liminal experiences (e.g., life and death) or with epistemic and ontological boundaries. Using examples from German and Polish literature, the article explains that border poetics both emerges from and expands upon an understanding of the border as a contact zone.

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Black humour in Polish fiction after 1989

Tekstualia ◽

10.5604/01.3001.0013.4486 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 4 (39) ◽

pp. 31-42

Author(s):

Tomasz Bocheński

Keyword(s):

Andre Breton ◽

Literary Works ◽

Polish Literature ◽

Life And Death ◽

André Breton ◽

The Aesthetic

The article examines the differences between black humour in the work of André Breton and the reinterpretation of this category in contemporary Polish literature. For Breton, the aesthetic of black humour was a blasphemous gesture against the mediocrity of culture and society, against a sentimental approach to life and death. By contrast, recent conteptualizations of black humour are often linked with the carnivalesque and ironic aspects of culture, which are interpreted as a sign of forgetting about the nonsense of existence and death. The literary works by authors like Manuela Gretkowska, Krzysztof Varga and Ignacy Karpowicz only confi rm these observations. The article is also concerned with the writings by Zbigniew Kruszyński, Wiesław Myśliwski and Magdalena Tulli, whose uses of black humour signify resistance against trivialization of eschatological issues.

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