Vol. 17 No. 12 (2022): Genres – The Signs of (Their?) Times

The theme of the 2022 issue of “Tematy i Konteksty” is genre studies. This subdiscipline of poetics has, for the past hundred years, been accompanied by numerous question marks. Sometimes rightly accused of dogmatism and a rigid, normative character, it has been rejected, rebuilt, modernized, and "postmodernized" — and yet, despite predictions of its demise at the end of the previous century, it continues to endure. How? Suspended between reconstructing the past and describing the present, between envisioning a Catalogue of Forms in a literary Scriptorium and observing, listening to, and describing in real time what is currently being created in the "textual world" and beyond, where the text is but a part of a larger multimodal project. Genre studies, after all, is as fluid as literature itself — its boundaries seemingly nonexistent, yet its territory shifting with each era. It continues to fascinate through the multitude of forms and conventions it recalls and discovers, and through its expansiveness in annexing ever-new areas. It offers satisfaction both to literary scholars — collectors and antiquarians — and to theorists of various orientations, as well as to explorers of nonstandard research "finds" in the form of one-off, "authorial" creations — unique and vibrant with new, unknown life. As long as literature exists, so too will reflection on its genological or "agenological" modes of being — that is, on the ways in which streams of experience and reflection, words and images, are organized into larger, more or less complete wholes.