Visions of Normality. On How the Beginning of the Story about the 30 Years of Contemporary Literature Determines Its End

Abstract

In this article, Marta Koronkiewicz discusses the category and concept of normality as central to the literary-critical discourses of the 1990s and the early 2000s. She documents the functions and meanings of this concept while presenting it in a broader socio-political perspective by regarding it as crucial for the transformation of the whole area of Central and Eastern Europe (Alexander Kiossev, Magda Szcześniak, Ivan Krastew–Stephen Holmes). The article focuses on the specificity of the concept itself, which seems to be devoid of concrete content and which denotes a desire or an expectation rather a desired or an expected object. Understood in this way, the category of normality can be used to extinguish discussions and to create false agreements. Koronkiewicz examines the consequence of the popularity of this category for the narrative about the most recent literature. She shows that, in the history of Polish literary criticism after 1989, normality initially took on the function of a general term used to describe the desired literary reality / literary life (oriented mainly on diversity, multiplicity, horizontality), and that around 2000 its meaning changed and it began being used to refer to facts: the marginalization of literature, the lack of a platform for criticism, the commodification of the book.