How much can a short narrative hold? (About miniatures of large narrative genres in the postwar Polish prose)

Abstract

Short narratives as a highly represented group in the postwar Polish literature demands researches, especially when the only work concerning the subject ‘Theoretical Problems of Small Literary Forms’ by J. Trzynadlowski was written thirty years ago and therefore is selective and most of its conclusions are simply out-of-date. In this article ‘short narrative’ is used as a descriptive category used to embrace all the short literary pieces characterized by minimalisms of material (a conceptby J. Barth). In this text appear references to the tradition of genres which I mean as a hermeneutic space following in this the postulates of architextuality, the theory created by G. Genette and popularized in Poland by S. Balbus, R. Nycz, P. Michałowski. Miniatures of large narrative genres – such as novel, diary, or epos – are unique among those. Icons and falsified indexes (which only pretend to be fragments of bigger forms) constitute ways of large genres’ appearance in short narratives. Functions of these references are not restricted to ludic ones, but raise problems ofmetatextuality, the cultural origins and restrictions of genres and even carry some criticism of social life and economic issues in socialistic countries. All this is proved by interpretations of works by M. Białoszewski, B. Czałczyńska, M. Głowiński, S. Mrożek, T. Parnicki, A. Stern.