A Poetics of Shifting Borders. Patterns of Children's Literature and Cultural Identity in Polish Literature since 1989

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The research project examines functions and meaning of cross-writing in Polish literature from 1989 up to the present. It thus uncovers an access to questions of cultural identity in Polish contemporary literature that to date has not received any attention in Polish literary studies. At the same time the project opens up research into cross-writing for Slavic studies, an area so far dominated by Western cultural and literary studies. Cross-writing is to be understood as a way of writing, which deliberately blurs the borders between categories of children`s literature and literature for adults. According to my main thesis cross-writing in Polish literature after 1989 is a means by which writers communicate with the adult reader about central questions of cultural identity. For Polish literature the potential of patterns of children`s literature as a means to communicate with the adult reader depends on specific cultural contexts and social discourses, which need to be addressed in their own right. Therefore, Polish cross-writing cannot simply be subsumed under the phenomenon of cross-writing, which, since the 1990s, has been examined almost exclusively from a Western point of view and has hardly taken into account any non-Western literature. In my analysis I will take into consideration these specific contexts of Polish cross-writing and examine the phenomenon in its tension between trans-cultural symptomatics and cultural specificity. The examination of cross-writing in Polish literature after 1989 sheds a new light on issues, forms of communication as well as historical and cultural foundations of cultural identity in Poland from the time of political and social transformation at the end of the 1980s to the present. At the same time the project provides a basis for further research into cross-writing in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. It thus contributes to differentiated scientific research on the phenomenon of cross-writing that changes the Western oriented perspective in this research area. By introducing new textual categories and developing its own categories of analysis the project makes a contribution to the theory of cross-writing.