Niemożliwa, ale niezbędna
Impossible but indispensable

Summary/Abstract: Markiewicz discusses Ryszard Nycz’s article Możliwa historia literatury [‘A Possible History of Literature’] (Teksty Drugie, 5/2010). He argues that Nycz overlooked the positivist and post-positivist model of literary history, which actually took into account the concepts of contextual conditions Nycz was calling for. Moreover, at a later stage this model focused on literary phenomena on a functional basis rather than on a national one, because it posed the fewest difficulties. It remains unclear, however, how a history of literature would be constructed on the basis of what is linguistically diverse, ethnically mixed, and deterritorialised. Considering such a literary-historical project in terms of the relations of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ does not lead to a literary-historical synthesis. Finally, Markiewicz notes that Nycz at first advocates an aspectual and perspective-oriented method of literary history, while later he proposes to describe the history of literature ‘as it really was’, i.e. by taking into account the true conditions of its development. Markiewicz welcomes this departure from the dominant doctrine of relativism.

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