Ponowoczesny regionalizm i badania komparatystyczne

Postmodern regionalism was one of the most important movements in Polish cultural and literary discourse in the 1990s. Its characteristic features are: reduction or rejection of the national metanarration, tension between centre and regions (from anticentralism to interactional relation), emphasis on difference rather than identity, experience of deterritoriality and dislocation of the regions, locality as a reaction to globalization. This new regionalism needs, however, a new point of view and new research methods. This article presents a proposal for a new approach to local narration in the comparative method, since, as Tadeusz Sławek claims, comparative literary studies are especially predestined to research on the space “between” and on crossing the boundaries. Comparative studies are understood as “placing” (concept of Siegbert Prawer), a comparison of different cultural geographies and their mutual explication. The subject of such comparative studies can be, firstly, Polish borderlands and different local narrations (national, ethnic, regional). Secondly, such regional literature can be considered from the point of view of interregional comparative studies which examine the relation between particular regions and the centre, the canon and the history of national literature.