Canons and Their Questioning, Canons and Their Fading: Some Personal Remarks on the Development of the Teaching of Literary History

Canons and Their Questioning, Canons and Their Fading: Some Personal Remarks on the Development of the Teaching of Literary History Anna Artwińska — Matteo Colombi Universität Leipzig, Philologische Fakultät, Institut für Slavistik [email protected] Matteo Colombi Universität Leipzig, Philologische Fakultät, Institut für Slavistik [email protected] SYNOPSIS This article deals with the problem of teaching the history of literature, specifically with regard to Polish (and Czech) literary history in the context of foreign study, namely in Germany. The authors are concerned with the question of whether it is possible to teach the history of literature to foreign students according to the standards set for Polish (and Czech) students, i.e. through ahistorical and literary perspective, division into epochs and, above all, with regard to the canon. In view of the fact that undergraduate curricula in Germany provide only afew hours of instruction in literary history, and that German students are not taught the literary canon at school but rather learn to question the normative value of every author or text, the teaching of ‘traditional’ literary history in Germany is problematic. Drawing on their own biographical experience as part of the ‘twilight of the canon generation’, the authors argue that the didactic process requires an awareness both of the need for acanon— as akind of ‘map’ to navigate the territory of literature— and of its constant questioning, deconstruction, rewriting, and expansion. In the next part of the article, the authors discuss the ‘poststructuralist turn’ in literary historiography and examine selected poststructuralist textbooks on the history of national literatures, especially those that do not abandon the basic assumptions of literary synthesis in their ambition to give new order to the material. Another part of the article discusses the textbook Polnische Literatur im langen 19.Jahrhundert. Grundkonzepte— Author:innen— Textinterpretationen, created by the Leipzig Institute of Slavic Studies in cooperation with the Polish Academy of Sciences, atextbook that aims to present the history of Polish literature 1822–1939 as ahistory of Polish attitudes towards both cultivating and questioning the Polish canon. The handbook was conceived on the basis of the programs of the B.A. Polish literary courses in Leipzig and its preparation involved the participation of the students as translators and commentators on chapters written in Polish. The conclusion of the article is aplea for ahermeneutical consideration of the didactic relevance of canons as interpretationalcommunicational tools giving students and others the possibility to mediate between the orientation skills atradition can provide and its critical inquiring, as well as to make different point of views intelligible to one another. OPEN ACCESS 16 SLOVO A SMYSL 43 KLÍČOVÁ SLOVA / KEYWORDS Didaktika literární historie; kánon; slavistika vzahraničí; nové dějiny polské literatury; dekonstrukce; poststrukturalismus; hermeneutika / didactics of literary history; canon; foreign Slavic Studies; new history of Polish literature; deconstruction; poststructuralism; hermeneutics. DOI https://doi.org/10.14712/23366680.2023.2.1 BACKSTORIES We wrote this article as adouble personal positioning, combining our biographies, theoretical reflections, and praxis reports with regard to our experiences as both students and teachers of literary history and literary theory, and as scholars affiliated, over several years, at universities in various European countries. Our aim is to discuss, from the very first lines of our text, which features of our respective biographical backgrounds are relevant, and proceed to explain why we think reflecting upon personal backgrounds can be astimulating starting point for elaborating on the theory and praxis of literary didactics, and on the specific ways in which each teacher chooses to deal with them. Acomparison of our respective backstories as university teachers of literature reveals both convergent and divergent aspects. We were both born in the second half of the 1970s, but while one of us grew up and began school in Italy when it was still part of the pre-1989 ‘West’, the other did so in pre-1989 ‘Eastern’ socialist Poland. We both attended upper secondary school, going on to study at university in Italy and Poland respectively— this time, however, in the post-1989 context, when Poland was already on its way to joining (or re-joining) the West. Indeed, it is not long after we completed our studies that Poland, along with many other East-Central European countries, became part of the European Union (in the 2000s). Both of us have, furthermore, also studied in Germany, and both of us currently teach Western Slavic Literatures in the Department of Slavic Studies at Leipzig University, taking part in the same study programmes and teaching many of the same students. At times, we even teach the same courses, so that didactics of literature is arecurring topic of conversation and of our ongoing discussions. Having summed up the frame of our biographical backgrounds, we shall now explain why we consider them relevant to the topic of literature education. The first step to illustrate this point is to put this article in context, for it has been developed on the basis of acommon talk we had in Paris at the conference « Le Crépuscule des paradigmes? » Les canons culturels en Europe centrale: transgressions et réhabilitations depuis la fin du XXe siècle (‘The Twilight of Paradigms’? Cultural Canons in Central Europe: Transgressions & Rehabilitations Since the End of the 20th Century’), 23–25May 2022. Didactics of literature was not the primary topic of the conference, yet the title of the conference makes it quite evident that concepts like cultural or literary canons and paradigms (as well as transgression and rehabilitation) are very relevant issues in discussing possible didactic approaches to literature. We shall therefore briefly discuss how the conference’s call for papers has framed our reflections on the didactic role of canons and paradigms and established the basis for the present article. OPEN ACCESS ANNA ARTWIńSKA — MATTEO COLOMBI 17 The aim of the Crépuscule conference was to elaborate on interpretations, both scholarly and non-scholarly, of the (histories of) East-Central European literatures after 1989, starting from astatement by the influential Polish literary scholar Maria Janion (1926–2020) who, already at the beginning of the 1990s, characterized the postsocialist period as the twilight of fundamental paradigms that had structured views on East-Central European literature since the 19th century.1 Making open reference to Janion’s remarks, the call for papers elaborated on the fundamental paradigms that the conference aimed to address. The first of these was— and still is— ageneral and widespread ‘overparadigm’ common to all literatures of the region, namely ‘acommon notion of literature as acultural product of anational community’. Implicit in this paradigm is the assumption that every literary system must decide ‘who has the right to define this national community and the type of culture it should produce’, aquestion that in turn generates several literary ‘underparadigms’, possibly different for each national community but all generally characterized by an ‘oppositional’ structure that seeks to convey diverging ideas of the national culture: ‘urban vs. rural in Hungary, for example, highbrow vs. popular culture for Czech literature, Romanticism vs. Realism in Poland for instance’ (Galmiche— Royer— Siatkowska-Callebat 2021, pp.3–4). The conference addressed the question of whether the traditional national overparadigm and various oppositional underparadigms can still be said to offer systematic representation of the variety and conflictuality of East-Central European literatures, or if these paradigms have already passed, as Janion claims, into acrepuscular state, to be replaced by new paradigms (or indeed if they have already been replaced). Might we even speak, with regard to recent years, of atrend inversion or ‘new dawn’ of the pre-1989 paradigms ‘spurred by the political developments of the last two decades’, i.e. by ‘the rise of far-right populisms, the various economic crises, the challenges of the European project’ (ibid., pp.3–4)? The question posed by the call for papers of the Crépuscule conference compelled us to consider the literature education we received at secondary school in the 1980s and 1990s, and later at university (at the end of the 1990s until around 2000), and the extent to which, and manner in which, this education fit the paradigm of national literature. We wondered how much our understanding of literary canons and their transgressions (or rehabilitations) was structured by traditional oppositional paradigms— urban/rural, highbrow/lowbrow, Romanticism/Realism, etc.—, or if it had already been shaped by the twilight of these oppositional structures. This led us to make connections between general history, i.e. the end of the socialist period and East/West opposition, and the history of theory and literary theory, connections 1 More than anything, Janion was concerned with the extinction of the romantic paradigm in Poland after the fall of the communist regime: ‘To put it in the most general terms, for almost two hundred years, from the post-partition period to martial law and its aftermath, afairly uniform style of culture prevailed in Poland, which Icall symbolic-romantic. It was Romanticism— as acertain all-encompassing style— that primarily built asense of national identity and defended the symbols of that identity. That is why it acquired the character of anational charisma […] The Romantic canon was handed down from generation to generation’ (Janion 2000, pp.22–23). All translations, if not otherwise indicated, are by the authors of the present article. OPEN ACCESS 18 SLOVO A SMYSL 43 that are all the more compelling given that several theories emerged in the 1950s in various parts of the world— for instance in Western Europe, North, Central, South America— to question both the validity of the national paradigm and inherent schematism of all binary oppositional structures (atrend even more pronounced in the 1960s until the end of the 1980s). The big theories that helped to establish the presuppositional basis for questioning traditional paradigms include, for example, deconstructionism and discourse analysis, postcolonial studies, gender studies, and anumber of other poststructuralist theories that tend generally to undermine canonstructuring paradigms. The reference to the development of such theories from the 1950s onwards is undoubtedly crucial for the general comprehension of the phenomenon of the twilight of paradigms and for the consequences this twilight has (had) on the didactics of literature. It indeed reminds us, on the one hand, that this twilight concerns many regions throughout the world, starting in the West and its colonies or ex-colonies already in the decades before 1989, and, on the other hand, that deconstructionism and poststructuralism were not entirely unknown in the socialist world, despite the Iron Curtain. The history of theory, moreover, is highly relevant to every discussion on literary didactics, insofar as one must always consider how the above mentioned ‘big’ cultural theories have influenced the teaching of literature in the recent past, and on which level (primary school, secondary school, university)— especially after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 and freer circulation of ideas in various regions of Europe and elsewhere. We have found it all the more interesting— concerning this theoretical aspect— to consider the similarities and differences between our personal experiences, as both students and teachers of literature, given our diverse backgrounds on either side of the historical East-West divide. What we aim to show in the pages that follow is the very fact that while our individual respective backgrounds did seem to determine the particular way we learned literature at school, the differences between them, in the final account, were not so decisive. We would express this as follows: each of us feels to be part of ageneration that grew up both learning and questioning literary canons, in the sense that the education we received included forms of literary didactics based on teaching the canon but also inspired by poststructuralist theories associated with the twilight of paradigms. The difference between our experiences has mainly to do with how early/long each of us was exposed to these theories: in Italy at secondary school, in Poland at university. This difference, in our opinion, is not so profound as may appear at afirst glance, since the canon that was taught in both cases served primarily as abasis for questioning paradigms, with the result of ashared understanding of the interpretation of literature and its history as adynamic relationship between the construction/reconstruction of patterns of traditions and their questioning. We also share in common an educational experience in which both the teaching of canons and their deconstructions involved acertain multidisciplinarity: literary canons were taught in parallel with canons from art history and philosophy, for example, and with more general historical knowledge, whereas the questioning of canons was based— as typical of poststructuralism— on the combination of different disciplinary perspectives or transdisciplinary theories, or intertwining of various approaches: Marxism and psychoanalysis, for example, which characterizes most of postcolonial and gender studies. We also share the experience OPEN ACCESS ANNA ARTWIńSKA — MATTEO COLOMBI 19 of having received our education at atime when the practice of questioning canons on the basis of the new poststructuralist theoretical conjunctions was felt throughout the scholarly world to represent afresh and creative approach. Both students and teachers perceived this practice de facto as the twilight before the dawning of anew educational and didactic paradigm, the beginning of anew approach to knowledge and new educational system able to deliver not only to scholarly experts but to everyone at school (albeit on different levels of complexity according to the educational profile) both structure/orientation tools (the studying of canons and paradigms) and deconstruction/criticism skills (their questioning). However— and here we come to the main preoccupation of our article—, this understanding of literature, this way of learning and teaching that we feel to have in common, is quite dissimilar to the understanding of literature among students today, who for the most part (to put it bluntly and with acertain degree of generalization) do not have aclear notion of any canon. This is because the didactics of literature to which they are exposed, in both the secondary school and university environment, does not significantly include the teaching of canons, or in any case does not implement it (not to mention the idea of an integrative didactics systematically teaching aplurality of disciplinary canons in parallel). Our students have, on the contrary, ageneral and even programmatic inclination to the twilight of paradigms, in the sense that they are quite sensitive to all sorts of theories stating that aparadigm, being acanon-structuring construct, determines mechanisms of inclusions and exclusions that often lead to discrimination, and should therefore be questioned or avoided altogether. One could say, in this way, that our students have deeply interiorized the fundamental suspicions of the poststructuralist thinkers towards every form of paradigm and canon. Yet it is this precisely (to put it once more in generalized terms) that accounts for the great difference between the theoreticians of the twilight of paradigms and our students: the former knew alot about the paradigms and canons they were criticizing while our students only have avague idea of them. We, the middle generation, are likely somewhere in-between: we know the canons but not as well as the poststructuralist scholars of the 1950s–1980s. It is this disappearance of canonical knowledge that makes up the core didactical question we wish to confront in this article: we too, belonging as we do to the ‘canon-questioning’ generation, subscribe to the notion that real understanding always implies looking critically at received and established knowledge. But is it ever really possible to question something in ameaningful way if one does not already have asystematically established notion of it— that is, if one does not work with paradigms and canons at all? How can one detect and highlight the cognitive potential, both gnoseological and epistemological, of the twilight of old perspectives and dawn of new (or resurgent) ones without knowing how former paradigms structured canonical visions of the world? This question is relevant not only to the context of literary studies at the university level but also that of literature education in secondary schools. This compels us to give some consideration in the present article to the latter, and to the lack of communication and cooperation between the two contexts— even if, for the most part, we concentrate on university literary teaching, where we have gained the bulk of our experience. We will also point out some of the specificities of the German education system, in which we have been teaching for anumber of years, OPEN ACCESS 20 SLOVO A SMYSL 43 though we each started our own educations elsewhere. We think in fact that cultural and regional specificities have to be taken into consideration in this case, which also happens to be agood example of the way national paradigms may still play arole even in aglobalized world and integrated European Union. Indeed, it is our common experience that the German education system differs from its counterparts in both Italy and Poland to agreater degree— in terms of didactics in general and didactics of literature in particular— than Italian and Polish education systems from one another, and this despite the markedly divergent historical trajectory of the latter during the Cold War. This is because the teaching of paradigms and canons has continued to play arole in the literary didactics of Italian and Polish schools and universities in the time of the twilight of paradigms, notwithstanding the diminishing importance of canonical knowledge in these countries (for reasons we shall discuss later). The German system, by contrast, began abandoning aliterary didactics based on asystematic learning of the canon some decades earlier. (We take into account here the distinction between the former East and West Germany— it is atopic, however, that exceeds the scope of the present article, and we only wish to point out, since we are publishing this article in aCzech review, that the Czech educational system strikes us as closer to the Italian and Polish than German model). Each of these models has its advantages and disadvantages. The Italian/Polish model provides students and scholars with amore systematically structured notions-based knowledge; not infrequently, however, this may devolve into akind of rote learning, one that does not engage astudent’s critical thinking or ability to question the material. The German model, by contrast, exercises astudent’s capacity to put received knowledge under scrutiny, reinforcing and even shaping the anti-canonical and anti-paradigmatic attitude of new generations (as we describe above); however, this does not provide students with systematic instruction in the canonical notions they (may) question, resulting in acritical attitude that, however justified, is sometimes characterized by arbitrariness and lack of information. To conclude the central claim with which we began this introduction, we feel committed, because of our personal backstories as literary learners in Italy and Poland during the 1980s through the early 2000s, to adidactics based at the same time on asystematic learning of canons and their founding oppositional paradigms and on their questioning. We feel, moreover, greatly challenged by the fact that canonical knowledge is being neglected or gradually dismissed by the educational systems today in Italy and Poland, and even more so in Germany. We shall dedicate the rest of our article to elucidating, by means of concrete examples, the double didactics of literature— combining canon-based with canon-deconstructing approaches— that we were exposed to as learners. We will also point out some of the difficulties we have in our teaching praxis when we present our students with scholarly and didactic material that simultaneously implies paradigms/canons and their twilight. In our students’ experience, this material is ‘too complex’ and ‘overwhelms readers with too many notions’, or else ‘presumes that readers have more knowledge than they actually have’. In this article, we offer our own answer to this problem: ahandbook on the history of Polish literature that is being prepared by our Department, and which seeks to mediate between canonical knowledge and its questioning. We shall conclude with some general reflections on our position: namely, that the personal challenges we face with OPEN ACCESS ANNA ARTWIńSKA — MATTEO COLOMBI 21 the decline of canonical knowledge in the field of literature (and in general) is related not only to the gnoseological and epistemological problem of how to deconstruct without recourse to agiven structure as starting point, but— all the more troubling— to an existential concern, insofar as we believe that forms of teaching which do not effectively manage abalance between atradition (paradigms and canons) and its questioning give up their most fundamental mandate to help people how to learn to find orientating patterns in their lives and in the world they live in. THE CANON-GUESTIONING GENERATION (AND EVER-PRESENT CANON) The word twilight defines an intermediate state between light and darkness, and this is exactly how the canon was presented to us by our teachers. Yes, we were told, there is acultural canon in the sense of acore of ideas, authors, and works that belong to different areas of activity, knowledge, time, and space, and that are representative for each of these areas. Yes, it is important to know about them in order to structure our vision of the world and its history, to give it ashape and to see it in light. We were also told, however, that this canon or core is not untouchable, that it changes both in history and according to the perspective of the observer. This is why it is important to question the canon and to inquire about what the canon leaves out, that is, about dark areas. We were taught, for example, to ask why there were so few women authors represented in the literary canons of both the East and the West, why there were so few émigré or exiled authors in the official education programmes of the Socialist East, and why, conversely, Socialist Realist literature was almost completely absent in that of the West. We were asked to raise the question, moreover, of why Balzac and Thomas Mann were more significant than Zola and Kafka, if you consider them from the point of view of Lukács’ socialist hermeneutics (Lukács 1952, 1957), while Kafka must be considered as the highest order of genius— much higher, according to Deleuze and Guattari’s deconstructionist-poststructuralist perspective in Kafka: Toward aMinor Literature (Deleuze and Guattari 1975), than any Brod, Meyrink, Werfel, or other Prague German-language author. For us, asking such questions meant challenging the various oppositions around which individual canons are structured. Lukács, for example, as aMarxist theoretician, takes the side of Realism in opposition to Modernism (according to his well known oppositional paradigm); but even Lukács has something to say about the Romanticism-Realism contraposition, one that is, as we mention above, very important for Polish culture (see Lukács 1950, where he also discusses his preference for Realism). Meanwhile, one of the fundamental structuring oppositions for Deleuze and Guattari, writing on literature and other aspects of cultural production in the 1960s and 1970s, is between modernity and postmodernity; Kafka’s radically sceptical Weltanschauung and style, they argue, is more congenial to the postmodern mentality than the very modern writing of Brod, Meyrink, and Werfel still longing for universal principles of salvation or— not finding them— away of thinking and writing that Deleuze and Guattari consider escapist (Deleuze— Guattari 1975, p.19). We are, indeed, thankful to all the teachers who explained to both of us what Romanticism, Realism, Modernity, and Postmodernity are as canonical cultural epochs, and who introduced us not only to particular oppositions that tend to OPEN ACCESS 22 SLOVO A SMYSL 43 structure the differences among these epochs, but also to the various perspectives produced by taking different theoretical approaches— Lukács, for example, in contrast to Deleuze and Guattari.2 We would now like to focus on the conceptualization of the cultural canon as acore of ideas, authors, and works which are considered representative for different areas of activity, knowledge, time, and space— aconceptualization we received and worked with in our education—, and define it in relation to literature. This will help us to better understand criticism of the canon from the poststructuralist perspective in recent decades, as discussed above, and the related debate on the canon itself. The word ‘canon’, from the Greek κανών (kan’ōn, meaning ‘rod’ or ‘bar’, and therefore ‘line of measure’, ‘rule’, and ‘standard’), is connected in Jewish-Christian culture to religion, referring to agroup of texts de rigueur considered holy, and canonized insofar as they represent the standard and rule of acertain religious culture. The mandatory aspect of acanon has partly disappeared in the context of contemporary literary studies, which see the canon as acertain selection of literary authors and texts considered by certain cultural actors and according to specific criteria as worthy to be passed on to the next generations (Winko 1997). The criteria of literary canonization may aim to have normative function, yet they are variable and subject to ongoing negotiation among different cultural actors of the same or different epochs, prominent among which are educational and other cultural institutions: university departments, for example, with their reading lists and publishing houses. From this point of view, aliterary author or text is not worthy in itself but needs to be related to astandard according to which its value can be determined (ibid., p.585). The relative nature of criteria used to define the canon has been strongly stressed by postmodern culture, and tends to reflect ahigh awareness of its own heterogeneous and at the same time globalizing or globalized nature. The US-American canon debate, for example, which started in 1981 with the publication of English Literature: Opening Up the Canon by Houston A.Baker and Leslie Fiedler, has to be situated in the context of the liberation or emancipation movements of black Americans, women, LGBTIQ+ and other underrepresented groups (not only in the context of literary history). One of the results of the debate was the extension and new perspectivization of the canon in the US university (Fludernik 2007, p.51), and expansion of the debate to other cultural areas of the world, including East-Central Europe. An interesting overview on the canon debate can be found, for example, in the 2007 Czech publication Lite ratura akánon, edited by Jan Wiendl, which features essays by Petr A.Bílek, Pavel Janoušek, Hana Šmahelová, Vladimír Papoušek, and Dalibor Tureček. Bílek’s opening text examines the development of the canon debate in the West and proposes anon-essentialist, situational concept of the canon that matches the one proposed above (cf. Bílek 2007). The other contributions all stress in different ways the necessity of historicizing the 2 Theories and cultural epochs are, moreover, mutually connected in complex ways, as we see with Lukács’ Marxist attitude on Romanticism, Realism, and Modernism (Marxism being aWeltanschauung developing through all these epochs) and Deleuze and Guattari’s connection to (deconstructionist) postmodern thinking. On the relationship between cultural epochs and theories and the necessity in both cases to historicize, see Zima 1992, pp.1–14. OPEN ACCESS ANNA ARTWIńSKA — MATTEO COLOMBI 23 canon to demonstrate its changeable nature (Papoušek, Tureček), or else the necessity of defining the canon in relatively clear terms while stressing its non-essential nature (Janoušek), with other essays expressing views between these two positions (Šmahelová). These perspectives make evident certain conceptual outlines that have shaped the field of the canon debate from its very beginning.3 Issues raised in the debate on the literary canon and the conceptualization of it as aconstructed, biased, and changeable selection of authors and texts was also at the core of our education. Yet this approach to relativizing the canon was not presented to us by any means as areason for dismissing canonical structures. On the contrary, the canon, as alist of authors and texts of reference for world literature or aparticular national literature (according to perspective) was taught to us as a‘primary (multiple) source’, one that provides everyone interested in literature and its connections to culture in general, in the first place, with an orientation and platform of shared knowledge on which to build an interpersonal dialogue— adialogue that provides ashared starting point for integrating and/or criticizing the canon, productively combining the various perspectives of literary history, literary theory, and literary criticism. It is an approach, in other words, that allows students of literature precisely to carry on the practice of questioning the canon. The most important function of the canon, from this perspective, is therefore as aform of interpretation and communication, which is why acanon should be known in its historicity and shifting movements. It is not only relevant what one may think of it from the present perspective and at acertain place, but also what others may think of it in other places and epochs, and the ability to read and speak in relation to the canons of others is strongly related to the possibilities we have to relate to their way of orienting themselves in the world. (We find aspects of this perspective in Šmahelová’s contribution to Literatura akánon, which concludes with aquotation by Hegel on the capability of understanding the other’s point of view /Šmahelová 2007, p.51/. This position on the canon has aclear hermeneutical inspiration, and it is not by chance that Šmahelová draws on Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricœur in her argument. We shall return later to the hermeneutic perspective on the canon in the last section of this article.) 3 We cannot here discuss the question whether there was also in East-Central Europe, as in the United States, astrong revision of the canon following the debate on it (aquestion which would also imply asking whether there was any notable shift in Western Europe). One can, as amatter of fact, notice relevant changes in the canon as aconsequence of the political turning point in 1989. We limit our brief considerations here to Poland, where works by women authors— in the early 1990s this was still disrespectfully defined as literatura menstruacyjna (menstruation literature)— and the literature of hitherto overlooked ethno-cultural minorities like the Kashubian, became gradually more prominent. The poststructuralist approach in cultural studies also led to new readings and interpretations of canonical texts and authors, and the Polish literary canon, after 1989, was extended to popular literature. One may, however, consider all these interventions on the canon as an integration of it, and not as its radical questioning. Scepticism towards afundamental rejection and reshaping of the canon can be explained as historical caution: Polish culture had in fact already experienced aradical (as much as instrumental) questioning of the canon during Socialism and the Cold War. OPEN ACCESS 30 SLOVO A SMYSL 43 edited by Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza, Anxo Abuín González, César Domínguez, and Ellen Sapega; as well as comparative works on single epochs, such as the Renaissance (L’Époque de la Renaissance (1400–1600), edited by ateam under the direction of Eva Kushner (4vol., 1988–2017), or on specific literary trends (the whole series was inaugurated in 1973 by the survey Expressionism as an International Literary Phenomenon: Twenty-One Essays and aBibliography edited by Ulrich Weisstein).12 Cornis-Pope and Neubauer’s handbook has, moreover, been born as aparallel project to Literary Cultures of Latin America: AComparative History, whose 3 volumes edited by Mario J.Valdés and Djelal Kadir were all published in 2004. In his preface for The History of the Literary Culture of East-Central Europe, Valdés concludes with some considerations that encapsulate the way this handbook coincides with our idea of paradigms and canons as questioned presence: The history of literary culture is both continuous and discontinuous. Continuous in the sense that an internally interconnected collective of people pass through time, and discontinuous in that neither collective nor historical experience is homogenous. […] Lest we loose sight of this historiographical process, let us be reminded that just as universal historical theory does not exist, absolute singularities do not either. The historical process includes social forces, ideas that become acollective will, but we must never forget that great poets in every age create unique and rare works that approach singularity […]. (Valdés 2004, p. XVI) This attention for both continuities and discontinuities in history, as well as social forces and ideas collective and singular, is what motivates us to use The History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe in our comparative literary courses, as for instance the undergraduate course ‘Introduction to comparative literature’ for students of the 6th semester (degree coursework for the B.A. in Western Slavic Studies), or in several graduate courses (for the M.A. in Slavic Studies) with amore specific and research-oriented profile (on the theory of the history of literature, for instance). Our experience, however, is that our students do not find it easy to work with such poststructuralist surveys as the one by Cornis-Pope and Neubauer, or with other poststructuralist overview studies specifically devoted exclusively, for example, to Czech or Polish culture. Our students have in fact the same difficulties working with The History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe and with the surveys written by Dalibor Tureček and his research team on the Czech literary history of the (long) 19th century (see Tureček 2018 for asummary of the project)— or, to give some more examples: the multivolume work Dějny nové moderny (2010–2017), edited by Vladimír Papoušek and his research team; the new accounts of Polish literature after 1989, e.g. Literatura polska po 1989 roku wświetle teorii Pierre’aBourdieu. Podręcznik (2015) (‘Polish Literature after 1989 in the light of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory: Ahandbook’) by Grzegorz Jankowicz, Piotr Marecki, and Michał Sowiński; or Literatura polska XX wieku 12 Ceserani examines the development and discussion on (the theory of) literary history carried on by the above mentioned AILC/ICLA sponsored works as well as by other scholarly projects which take into account poststructuralist positions in an article partly devoted to Cornis-Pope and Neubauer’s handbook: Ceserani 2013. OPEN ACCESS ANNA ARTWIńSKA — MATTEO COLOMBI 31 (‘Polish Literature of the 20th century’) by Bogumiła Kaniewska, Anna Legeżyńska, and Piotr Śliwiński (2005). We would really like to use these surveys with our students in courses like ‘Czech (or Polish) literature from the Middle Ages to the 18th century’ or ‘Polish (or Czech) literature from the 19th (or 20th–21st) century’, since they focus each in its own way on the discursivity of literary history— that is they all show from apoststructuralist point of view (that can be related according to the scholars’ orientation to discourse analysis, New Historicism, or the concepts and theories by such scholars as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault) that literary epochs can be defined from plural perspectives, both because actors define their own time in different ways, and because later interpreters and scholars look at them from varying points of view that may be related to different theoretical backgrounds. Even though we would like indeed to use these works, we cannot or can only use them in very limited manner, because our students find them too difficult to understand, not having the basic knowledge these works presuppose (the ‘too many notions’ argument we have already mentioned in the previous section). Let us be clear: we do not mean, directly or indirectly, to criticize the fact that these texts by Cornis-Pope and Neubauer, Tureček and Papoušek, or Jankowicz and Kaniewska etc. are too challenging for our students, and we understand that they are written as survey works primarily for a scholarly community of experts. Their goal is to propose new scholarly narratives on the phenomena they analyse, and their methods for this reason often have an experimental character. We understand this and we value these scholarly works for these reasons. Our aim, in relation to didactics, is simply to raise the question of how to use such works in our teaching. On the one hand, they represent significant contributions to the theory and practice of literary history that all students of Czech and Polish studies should know, yet they require, on the other hand, acertain knowledge of the canon that our students do not have and that they expect us to deliver in our classes before presenting them with such complex scholarly overviews. Our students might be right in their expectations, but it is adifficult task to transmit both the basics on the canon and the capacity to master new narratives experimenting on it in the short time of the B.A. programme, or even the B.A. followed by M.A. graduate studies. We are therefore learning to accept that working with our student on literature from the perspective of canons as questioned presences poses adidactic challenge, even if this is the very perspective we got in our own education, which we believe to be the fundamental innovation that all the surveys mentioned above share in common. Our students are overwhelmed by such aperspective, because they have no specific or substantially defined idea of canons— or, in Valdés’ world, of atime progression of continuities and discontinuities encompassing the material and imaginary aspects of cultural collectives, as well as the culture of each single individual. This is aresult of the fact that they do not share the time of our own secondary school and university education, the 1990s until the beginning of the 2000s, or the space of our education— that is, the Italian and the Polish context—, which are, as we discovered in the years of our common work in Leipzig, quite different from the German education system. We have already hinted to this problem in the first section and shall focus on it in more detail in the section that follows. OPEN ACCESS 32 SLOVO A SMYSL 43 COLD SHOWER, OR DO GERMANS REALLY COME FROM GOETHE’S WILHELM MEISTER?13 Let us begin this section with aquestion: Who studies Slavic literatures and cultures in Germany? On the one hand, there are young people who speak aSlavic language at home, and others who come into contact with Slavic cultures during their secondary school years and take an interest in it. Both groups usually have the German Abitur, which means that they have been shaped by adistinctly German school system. In the context of the study of literature, this means that most of them have acquired an aptitude for discussing literary and cultural problems— they have learned, very early in school, to think critically and question received knowledge. They are also highly sensitive in identifying any ambivalence of content in what they read. These skills make them attentive and pleasant interlocutors. The problems start when they are asked to talk not only about what they consider ‘important’ or ‘interesting’ in relation to their contemporaneity and their own life, that is, not only about aparticular author or literary text they find engaging, but also about other subjects and issues that they have not chosen themselves. Starting from the principle of absolute selectivity, our students often question the idea of the kind of systematic study of literature we describe above, in which one must first become familiar with the literature in question, epoch by epoch— preferably still in the context of world literature and other humanistic discourses— in order to be able to draw on it selectively or question its traditional order and presentation. We spend alot of time explaining to our students the relevance of the canon and why, for example, knowledge of the Middle Ages is an absolute prerequisite for understanding the texts of the Polish or Czech Romantics. Sometimes we turn into those literary historians whom Roman Jakobson compared to policemen who, with the aim of catching asingle criminal, arrest everyone they meet in the house or on the street.14 At the same time, as has already been said, we are not dogmatic or even enthusiastic followers of the idea of the canon! Never having needed to learn the canon at school, our students, as we quote them above, feel overwhelmed by all the knowledge that survey-style handbooks like that of Cornis-Pope and Neubauer presuppose from their readers. For this reason, they do not really grasp the poststructuralist innovations in methodology deployed by these works, struggling merely to understand the basic canonical references that these books assume to be well known by their readers— and which they want to modify or deconstruct. It is therefore easier for us to use (at least in our courses on Czech and Polish literature) 13 This sentence, atravesty of Dostojevskij’s statement ‘We all come from Gogol’s The Overcoat’, was written by the German writer from the GDR Max Walter Schutz. See Leistner 1978, p.33. 14 ‘The object of the science of literature is not literature, but literariness— that is, that which makes agiven work awork of literature. Until now, literary historians has proffered to act like apoliceman, who, intending to arrest acertain person, would, at any opportunities, seize any and all persons, who chances into the apartment, as well as those who passed along the street. The literary historian uses everything— anthropology, psychology, politics, philosophy. Instead of science of literature, they created aconglomeration of homespun disciplines’ (Eichenbaum 2001, p.1066). OPEN ACCESS ANNA ARTWIńSKA — MATTEO COLOMBI 33 more traditional handbooks, such as Czesław Miłosz’ The History of Polish Literature (1969), Walter Schamschula’s Geschichte der tschechischen Literatur (1990–2004), or Jan Lehár, Alexandr Stich, Jaroslava Janáčková, and Jiří Holý’s Česká literatura od počátků kdnešku (1998). These books introduce their readers to the canon in amore chronological and less pluralistically structured manner (adiscussion of how exactly they do this and the differences between them lies beyond the scope of the present article). Even here, however, our students find the didactic manner in which this material is presented to be achallenge, since they do not always quite understand why they should learn to master canonical knowledge with all its continuities and discontinuities when they might instead focus on specific topics that directly interest them. When we speak of German students, we are speaking of students who, unlike their Italian or Polish (or Czech) counterparts, have often not learned the periodization of literary history before leaving secondary school, and who have at least arough idea of the canonical authors of their national literature in the European context. Most German students have not read asingle work of Slavic literature before beginning their studies with the exception of those few students who have spent time abroad or come into contact with Slavic languages and literatures. In German Romance or especially English studies, by contrast, it can be assumed that students have already been acquainted with the respective languages and have at least avery rough orientation in the respective literatures and cultures— that is, they know that there is such athing as aGerman canon, but they do not know its contents, or they know them only superficially because they are taught German literature selectively and subjectively at school. German students studying Slavic studies may therefore have arough idea about German canonical authors but they are equally unable to apply the concept of the canon to German literary history and cannot rely on this competence studying Slavic literatures. It is interesting to watch our colleagues from Polish and Czech universities, who occasionally teach at our university as part of exchange programmes, as they make allusions to German literature in the hope that this will help them to reach our German students— Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, for example, as away of explaining the role of family novels in European Modernism, or ballads of the Sturm und Drang period as an important impulse for Polish Romanticism—, and their surprise when it does not work. Most German students are completely unfamiliar with these titles and topics. On the other hand, what they do know is that the idea of acanon has been much criticized in recent decades. They have heard, for example, that it includes too few female authors and is too influenced by national paradigms, and is therefore no longer current. Students know it already as students at school, and they may use these arguments to challenge every remnant of canon-based didactics that may arise in the classroom. This problem— that school curricula no longer include or consider relevant classical works of German literary heritage— is portrayed in the comedy film Fack ju Göhte (2013, film-maker Bora Dagtekin), which quickly became the most successful German film release of the year. In fact the film, which has been hailed as adisruptive take on the ‘school comedy’ genre that subverts mainstream German school and integration narratives, is not primarily preoccupied with classic literature. Rather, the figure of Goethe, along with the name of the school where the film is set, functions merely as asynecdoche of the dusty and incomprehensible literature that one is OPEN ACCESS 34 SLOVO A SMYSL 43 nevertheless compelled to read before graduating from secondary school. The pupils have problems writing the name of the national poet correctly and blame the cultural icon for their own frustrations at school. Even the class teacher, Zeki Müller, who is not actually ateacher, finds it hard to get enthusiastic about Goethe (he hasn’t even read Faust). Dagtekin thus deals provocatively with certain themes— as astrategy of shocking the so called Bildungsbürger— that would have been politically incorrect and ultimately impossible to deal with in normal life. The conviction that there is agap between students and the great poets, and that classics must be served to students in asimplified version, seems timeless. ‘School reading is always hated. It is considered boring per se, smacks of work and is devoid of pleasure,’ wrote Matthias Wulff in a2008 newspaper article entitled ‘Why Too Much Goethe in School Hurts’ (Wulff 2008). In order to overcome this alleged gap, various strategies of ‘appropriation’, ‘dissemination’, and ‘visualization’ of the literary tradition are now being developed in the education sector. In one of the most important scenes of the second part of the comedy, the students come up with the idea of explaining the content of Faust Ito Mr. Müller so that he does not have to give up his job as ateacher. Although the class is on aschool trip to Thailand, the pupils naturally reach for the Reclam edition of Faust Iand begin to handwrite their own interpretations of the text. Afterwards, they bring them to their teacher as agift and start aconversation about how to understand the classic today. One of the students (Chantal) writes the following interpretation: Anyway, this Faust… which is the first joke, because Faust is just his name. He’s in abad mood. And then they don’t say why he’s in abad mood. Did his wife break up with him by text? Did something get stuck? It could be anything, but you’ll have to find out for yourself. Anyway, here comes the devil. But he isn’t cool, he just talks all the time. And then Ihad to turn afew pages because Ihad to go to the toilet and catch up. And then the devil buys his soul or something? Because it’s not written how it’s supposed to look, you can’t really draw the pictures yourself in the book, so you can see them in front of you, like in the cinema. Then he fucks his wife, Ithink. Then they have achild— how cute. Then he kills it! Iswear, man, such apsycho, eh, such avictim, Ihate that, really, he could have just aborted it. No sense in that. In my opinion: just hash it out for effect. And the devil thing is also totally unrealistic! That he speaks human language !15 This scene, comical in itself, clearly illustrates what is important in the German school system when it comes to the canon: the updating of aclassic. It is striking that the students are not taught the historical and aesthetic contexts of the period in which Faust was written, nor are they taught the concept of the national poet. Instead, they are trained to interpret the text as such and to relate it by drawing from their own present context. This skill is of course very important, but it should not be taught in isolation. The abandonment of literary-historical classification leads to acomplete loss of the temporal dimension of (literary) history. 15 Charlotte’s performance, which is available on youtube, was commented on by auser with the nick Jo Xi as follows: ‘Thanks! the summary saves my next German exam’; https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=JXvJaY8-kkE [15.05.2023]. OPEN ACCESS ANNA ARTWIńSKA — MATTEO COLOMBI 35 The selective approach to literary history is not only aproblem at secondary schools. It is perpetuated in most philological departments by the teaching of our German colleagues. In Slavic Studies, for example, it can happen that astudent will take only one survey course on literary periods, that is, just one course in which they are advised to read works on literary history, during their studies. This course, however well designed, is never sufficient: it consists of only about 15 class-sessions in which knowledge is presented frontally— in some institutes even comparatively. Students are, moreover, not encouraged by the course’s teacher to actively engage with the whole of the texts and authors discussed, let alone with problems of literary historiography. This can easily give students the impression that the study of literary history and knowledge of the canon are an important orientation tool (given that they are covered at the beginning of the studies), but that actual study must be based on the principle of selection: students should not, in other words, strive to master canonical knowledge but aim to learn how to focus on specialized scholarly questions. It is therefore no coincidence that the content of most of the other seminars on offer depend on the research priorities of the teachers. To put it more concretely, in Germany it is possible to graduate in Slavic Studies with aspecialization in Polish or Czech, for example, without having taken aseminar on the general development of literature in the 19th century, let alone the Middle Ages or the Baroque period. The lecturers teach what they are interested in and what they are currently researching. Most of them do this very well— one cannot complain about the level of study in Germany from the point of view of case study research. Students learn to analyse literary texts in awellfounded way, they know the role of single aesthetics and literary devices and how to work with single methodological and theoretical approaches (the ones on which they happened to have courses). This, together with agood command of rhetorical skills, forms asolid cultural capital base. On the other hand, their knowledge is very fragmentary, and not sufficient for going beyond aspecific question they have learned to deal with, or for working on the kinds of structured vision of the world and its history that we discuss in the first part of this article. Furthermore, German students’ distrust of canons is somewhat arbitrary, because they have asuperficial overview of them, nor may they dispose of an overview on the theories and approaches that could be used to modify or deconstruct canons. We would like to conclude this ‘cold shower report’ on the state of literary education in Germany with an appeal. We believe that canons, in the sense of the questioned presence we have been discussing, have to be saved and made available to our German students as well as all other students. The reason for this, in anutshell, is that everyone has the right to create his or her own vision of history, philosophy of history, or narration of the paths of human history— to be able to interact with other past and present visions, philosophies, and narrations of history, and of course to question them whenever necessary. For us, this is one of the central aims of culture, research, and education, but it cannot be achieved in astate of exclusive and permanent fragmentation of knowledge. We also do not think, we would like to repeat, that it is sufficient for students simply to overcome this state of constant fragmentation in order to create their new perspectives or even canons. On the one hand, such an achievement is surely welcome, and it is true that it could be all the more stimulating and innovative in the case of foreign (not only German) students who propose new OPEN ACCESS 36 SLOVO A SMYSL 43 points of view on Czech or Polish culture, since their perspective may be less influenced by the existing, well established canonical structures. We think however that every new point of view on the Czech, Polish, or any other national canon, becomes all the more relevant if it is well aware of other existing canonical views, and if it is capable of engaging in dialogue with them, eventually questioning their biases but also acknowledging them and their origins. The point is— as we have already discussed and shall discuss again in the final section of this article— that canons, in our opinion, are above all interpretative-communication tools allowing people to understand one another. That is why we also try in various ways to provide our students with amore systematic education about existing canons and some of the trends questioning them. One of these ways is the literary history project ‘Polish Literature Without Borders’. THE HISTORY OF POLISH LITERATURES (OR THE TWILIGHT OF THE ROMANTIC PARADIGM, AGAIN) The Polish-German project ‘Polish Literature Without Borders’ arose in the context of our reflections on the role of the canon in the study of Slavic literatures in Germany. It was also motivated by the conviction that there is an urgent need for anew book on the history of Polish literature for foreign students. This need has been expressed several times in professional circles, and existing German-language histories of Polish literature have also been discussed in detail with regard to their conception and applicability in the classroom.16 The two most recent publications, Being Poland: ANew History of Polish Literature and Culture since 1918 edited by Tamara Trojanowska, Joanna Niżyńska and Przemysław Czapliński (2019) and Literatura polska jako literatura światowa (‘Polish literature as world literature’) edited by Magdalena Popiel, Tomasz Bilczewski and Stanley Bill (2021) are evidence that the idea of anew literary history is considered important by many other Polish scholars, and that atrend is emerging in the field of Polish literary historiography that can also be found in other philologies in general, namely the search for alternative models of presentation and problematization of literary material that seek to meet the challenges of the globalized humanities. There is aproblem, however, with these new literary histories: they are either accessible only to linguistically and culturally advanced students (as, for example, with the Wielka Historia Literatury Polskiej, standard of the genre we discuss in the second section), or that they require agreat deal of prior knowledge (as with poststructuralist surveys in the style of Literatura polska po 1989 roku wświetle teorii Pierre’a Bourdieu. Podręcznik and Literatura polska XXwieku). This is why Czesław Miłosz’s 1969 History of Polish Literature, written by the Nobel laureate for his American audience, is still the standard work in Slavic studies departments in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. The book has been trans16 Witold Kośny (2014) reviews the most important works on the history of Polish literature of the 20th century, including books by Aleksander Brückner (1901), Karel Krejčí (1958), Czesław Miłosz (1969; german editions 1981/2013), and the collective monograph Polnische Literatur. Annäherungen (1999 and 2011), edited by Wacław Walecki. OPEN ACCESS ANNA ARTWIńSKA — MATTEO COLOMBI 37 lated into German twice (1981 and 2013). Afurther problem concerning outland or foreign Polish studies is that one cannot count on the fact that students have already read Polish literature at secondary school, whether in acanonical or non-canonical way. The question of the canon is, of course, aparticularly intense one, not only in German-language Slavic studies, but in the context of Polish studies abroad in general. The many discussions of recent years reveal acertain perplexity on the part of lecturers, combined with the question of which texts should be discussed with students abroad, and how realistic it is to impart to them acanonical knowledge of Polish literature that they did not receive at secondary school and that they are often reading for the first time at university— not infrequently only in translation (cf.Shalcross 2014; Wilczek 2020). These issues led Anna to consider the idea of anew book on the history of Polish literature in German, which would be inspired by poststructuralist approaches on the one hand, but which would not, on the other hand, completely abandon the systematic, epoch-based mediation of literature and concept of the canon. The work would accommodate atransnational perspective— raising the question, for example, of whether Polish literature really only includes works written in Polish, and what role intercultural, Polish-Jewish, Polish-Ukrainian, or Polish-Belarusian relations played in the development of Polish literature. The aim, in short, was aliterary history that understood itself as ahistory of entanglements. Moreover, this book would serve to fill the gaps in knowledge on the part of our German students that we encounter on adaily basis. First and foremost, it would aim to cover basic phenomena of Polish intellectual history that are especially relevant on the longue durée, such as Sarmatism and the weak presence of the Bürgertum in the Polish social structure. It also seemed important to explain the peculiarities of the literary process itself: for example, where modernity begins in Polish culture, and why the significance of Romanticism in Poland goes beyond the context of literature. In addition, Polish literary history should be discussed in relation to the literary texts really studied at our institute (and not referring to an abstract corpus students do not read), as well as being short, compact, and simply written. Individual chapters should make extensive use of quotations from the primary texts, so that the book could also be used by students who had not read the primary texts. The intended reader of this work would be astudent of our Slavic Department who had graduated from the German secondary school system. The book was intended to accompany courses on Polish literature covering the period from Romanticism to World War II, so its focus would be literary texts from roughly 182217 to 1939 (some earlier authors, epochs, and problems were to be discussed as well, on aselective basis, whenever this seemed essential for understanding the dynamics of Polish literary history). The survey would furthermore mediate between the necessity to transmit to non-Polish students basic knowledge, on the one hand, regarding authors who belong to the national canon and are considered ‘important’ in the common understanding, and to follow, on the other hand, 17 Romanticism in Polish culture began around 1820, coinciding with the publication of Adam Mickiewicz’s first volume of poetry, Ballady iromanse, in 1822. It ended with the suppression of the January 1863 uprising against the Russian Empire in 1864. OPEN ACCESS 38 SLOVO A SMYSL 43 a problem-oriented structure: indeed, its main purpose was to explain the history of the mentality of the Polish cultural elite as it is made interpretable through literature to readers who have not been socialized in Polish culture— not least to the extent that this would help them understand why this culture canonized some of its elements and ignored or repressed others. In other words, the book would approach the Polish canon as aquestioned presence. The focus on the canon of high culture and the conviction that this can provide information about the collective Polish identity does not mean, by the way, that the role of texts and media outside high culture is not treated here at all. It is not aquestion of the exclusivity of high culture, but of its role in the formation of the collective mentality of the Polish cultural elite and those various cultural shifts that have had asignificant impact on the whole of Polish culture, legitimizing some parts of it and ignoring or discrediting others. Some of the cultural segments excluded by elite culture, however, are taken into consideration in their attempt to gain the attention and acknowledgment of the high culture of the cultural elite. Another important feature of the projected handbook is that it should not seek to replace achronological, ‘classical’ literary history but was meant, on the contrary, to be read together with other standard works. The point is mainly that canonical authors and works are not necessarily discussed in the handbook in the context of the epoch from which they come. Moreover, the handbook does deliberately not aim to be exhaustive, and as such covers only part of the Polish history of literature from 1822 to 1939. This is not to say, however, that the selection of authors, texts, and topics is arbitrary. Readers of this volume should gain insight into the canon of Polish literature from Romanticism to Modernism as well as interpretations of works by such classic authors as Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki, and Stanisław Wyspiański. In addition, such topics and problems as the specificity of Polish social structure and emergence of the Polish narrative of sacrifice in the 19th century have also been taken into account. Multicultural aspects of Polish cultural past also play an important role, and while the object of study is texts written in Polish, some attention must also be paid to cultural relations between different nations that lived together on Polish territory in the course of history. The invitation by Agata Roćko of the Polish Academy of Sciences to take part in abinational literary project in 2021 was taken as an opportunity to test the idea of such anew literary history, especially since funding was to be spent on this topic.18 This is how the project ‘Polish Literature Without Borders’ came into being. The project would be carried out in the following steps: 1.Scholars of the Polish Academy of Sciences and scholars of the Slavic Department in Leipzig would write essays on selected topics and problems from the history of Polish literature, formulated from the point of view of the specific needs that German students might have when studying Polish literature; 2.Students of Slavic Studies in Leipzig would translate these texts into German and check whether everything was understandable and whether there was any need for clarification; 3.Results would first be presented orally in the form of lectures in Leipzig; 4.Areader containing the texts would be published and tested for one year. 18 The project was funded by Narodowa Agencja Wymiany Akademickiej. OPEN ACCESS ANNA ARTWIńSKA — MATTEO COLOMBI 39 All planned steps of the project were carried out. After countless discussions and corrections with students and colleagues, the idea of the following handbook also emerged. It now bears the title Polnische Literatur im langen 19.Jahrhunderts. Grundbegriffe— Autor:innen— Textinterpretationen (‘Polish literature in the long 19th century: Basic concepts— authors— interpretations’) and will be published by Narr France Attempto at the end of 2023. The 16 essays do not aim, as per project parameters, to present the material in chronological order, but attempt akind of cartography of Polish literature in which cross-references and connections between works, authors, motifs, themes, and problems play akey role.19 The handbook does not provide asynthetic overview on the Polish literary history of the period, but rather collects the interpretations of selected literary texts and their contextualization. It is therefore not sensu stricto aliterary history, and understands itself as astudy book dealing with Polish literature from ahermeneutic perspective focusing on the history of attitudes and perspectives. It could be defined according to the classification proposed by Joanna Maj as anew essayistic literary history (Maj 2021).20 The essayistic character of the handbook is evident in its structure as acollective monograph, in which individual chapters are diverse and vary in length, as well as in their respective approaches to topics and questions. The handbook does not completely fulfil the paradigm of a‘literary history as an intertwining history’ (Werberger 2012) but it considers itself to be astep in that direction. The title itself brings us back to Maria Janion and her considerations on Romanticism, or rather to its long history in Polish culture. The structure of the volume and its thematic preoccupations confirm not only the relevance of this epoch in Polish literary history, but above all its phantasmatic impact and long duration, even if the notion that the Romantic paradigm ended in 1989 is never questioned as such in the handbook. In the first part, 19 Literary texts are the primary object of study in the handbook, even though other arts and media play an increasingly important role in our post-postmodern society. The decision against art and media plurality is pragmatic, not ideological: while students of Polish literature should learn about avariety of formats, including film or graphic novels, their starting point, as literary students, should be literature. An important position on the situation of literature in the face of the expansion of media, audiovisual narratives (auteur films, television series, fictional computer games), and transformation of printed literature is presented by the book Literatura imedia po 1989 roku (‘Literature and the media after 1989’) by Maryla Hopfinger (2010). 20 In her study Nowe Historie Literatury (‘New literary histories’) Maj divides recent essayistic publications in Polish literary history into three main groups by format: formy enumeracyjne (‘listing formats’), formy podmiotowe (‘subject based formats’) und formy performatywne (‘performative formats’) (Maj 2021). The first group relies on lists in alphabetical order to present its history of literature, whereas the second makes use of essays, ‘ego documents’ such as diaries and interviews, which shape aliterary history narration from asubjective perspective. The third group includes works that consider literary history as aperformative negotiation or communicative game, as for instance in the case of aliterary travel guide in its relation to the geography it covers. The Polnische Literatur im langen 19.Jahrhunderts seems to belong to the second group (‘subject based formats’). Although the authors followed the curriculum of the Leipzig Polish Studies, they approached the literary texts from an individual point of view. OPEN ACCESS 46 SLOVO A SMYSL 43 LITERATURE Adamczyk, Maria et al. (eds.): Starożytność— oświecenie. Podręcznik do nauki języka polskiego dla klasy pierwszej szkoły średniej. WSiP, Warszawa 1988. Artwińska, Anna— Roćko, Agata (eds.): Polnische Literatur im langen 19.Jahrhundert. Grundbegriffe— Autor:innen— Textinterpretationen. Narr Franck Attempto Verlag, Tübingen 2023 (forthcoming). Aseguinolaza, Fernando Cabo et al. (eds.): AComparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula. 2 vol. Benjamins, Amsterdam 2010–2016. Bieńczyk, Marek (ed.): Nasze pojedynki oromantyzm. Instytut Badań Literackich, Warszawa 1995. Bílek, Petr A.: Kánon, kanoničnost akanonizace jako literárněhistorické konstrukty. In: Jan Wiendl (ed.): Literatura akánon. Univerzita Karlova, Praha 2007, pp.7–18. Brückner, Aleksander: Geschichte der polnischen Literatur. C. F. Amelangs Verlag, Leipzig 1901. Ceserani, Remo— De Federicis, Lidia (ed.): Ilmateriale el’immaginario. Laboratorio di analisi dei testi edi lavoro critico. 10 vols. Loescher, Torino 1979–1988. Ceserani, Remo— De Federicis, Lidia (ed.): La società industriale avanzata. Conflitti sociali edifferenze di cultura. Vol.8.1 and 8.2 of Il materiale el’immaginario. Laboratorio di analisi dei testi edi lavoro critico. Loescher, Torino 1982–1983. Ceserani, Remo: Nuove storie letterarie sovranazionali sulla scena mondiale. Between 3, 2013, no.6 <http://www.between-journal. it/> [19.07.2023]. 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