Efekt przełomu, czyli czy rozmowy o kanonie mają sens

The article discusses the existence and functioning of the notion of canon in the social consciousness after 1989 in the context of Polish prose of the last twenty years. It points to two semantic circles connected with this notion: the first circle refers to literature and culture of the nation deeply rooted in tradition and confined in the past. The second circle is of polysemous character and refers to the contemporary literature and culture. The deliberations concentrate on the second semantic circle as the notion of national literature, the necessity of its existence in the nation and passing it to the next generations are undisputable. In the Polish culture after 1989, the notion of canons appears more often than the notion of a canon. The notion refers to phenomena that frequently exist on the border of literature, culture, and social life. For those phenomena, it builds canonical sets of texts defined and perceived as important and constitutive for their authors, and obligatory for their recipients. It becomes the vehicle for new literary qualities at the level of formal, thematic and problematic transformations. It is also a phenomenon that functions in the space of a particular culture and tradition with which it evolves.