Description: |
This course is a survey of Polish modern culture, with special focus on literature and cinema, from two perspectives. On the one hand, it examines the notion of Polish culture as a closed one, inward-oriented, focused on its particular topics and issues, and therefore inaccessible and not easily understood from the outside. On the other hand, it shows Polish culture that is (or tries to be) present in the global market, aspiring towards universality, aiming to transcend the restrictions imposed by a difficult language, little understood and spoken outside the Polish communities, and history, thwarting the accumulation of cultural capital and the efforts to reach an important place in the global cultural market. In this approach, Polish culture might be thought of as a ‘minor’ one (Deleuze & Guattari), or an element of a global perspective (Casanova; Damrosch). |