Instytut Badań Literackich Polskiej Akademii Nauk

Room 110

Members of the Department:

Professor Bernadetta Kuczera-Chachulska
Dr. Tomasz Żukowski
Ph.D., assistant professor Katarzyna Chmielewska

Retired scholars who participate in the activities of the Department:
Professor Maryla Hopfinger-Amsterdamska
Professor Anna Sobolewska
Associate Professor Zygmunt Ziątek

The Department office hours: Tuesdays 1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.

About the Department:
In the new century, the Department continues its work on characterizing the sources and studying genre and thematic changes, especially within poetry and fictional and documentary prose. It also conducts research on essay writing and criticism. All these subjects are considered from the perspective of long lasting modernism and through the creative output and reflection of postmodernism.
The work is carried out in edited volumes such as dictionaries and textbooks (for example, in Słownik literatury polskiej XX wieku [A Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Polish Literature], in the compendium Literatura polska (1918-1975) [Polish Literature, 1918-1975], in four books by singular authors in the series "Mała historia literatury polskiej" [A Little History of Polish Literature], and in the subsequent volumes of the cycle "Sporne postaci polskiej literatury współczesnej" [The Disputed Figures of Contemporary Polish Literature]). Concurrently, the members of the Department conduct studies focusing, among other things, on (1) the forms of "reconstruction" (repetition) of past events (and places of loss) in literary narratives; (2) the figures of memory and imagination; (3) the role of myth creation and unmaking of heros in the works and projects of the avant-gardes and arrière-gardes; and (4) the analyses of literary attempts to express meanings coming to light in everyday life. One can also detect a clear trend of studies concerning the ways of textualizing the modern subjectivity in poetry and personal documents, as well as studies of documentary inspirations and problems of local identity both in recent prose and in the prose of the entire century. An essential component of our research includes studies that situate literary texts amid other contemporary media.