Niewspółczesność. O możliwej historii literatury polskiej po 1989 roku

Temporal and historical frames usually applied to the description of recent Polish literature gradually lose their potential. “Postmodernism,” “late modernism,” and other terms do not reveal the complicated and local temporal landscape of this literature. Processes like the traumatic return of past events (WWII, the Holocaust, Stalinist terror), the simultaneous activity of Polish language writers in countries around the world, immigrant writings, etc., preclude the use of the term “contemporaneity,” since they do not create any shared temporal horizon and belong to processes of different temporal dynamics with separate time rhythms. Rather, they belong to the dimension of “noncontemporaneity” or “asynchrony.” “Noncontemporaneity” is both the general perspective of the latest literature and the experience of the main characters presented by the literary works.