O „Poetyce doświadczenia” Ryszarda Nycza. Z komentarzem do jednego zdania. Wersja do użytku badaczy literatury popularnej

How do people read popular literature? Is it possible to connect reading popular literature with category of aesthetic experience (what kind?), or – eventually – what kind of theory could successfully describe this relation? All those questions create a context of the analysis of the book Poetyka doświadczenia (The Poetics of Experience) by Ryszard Nycz. Its author postulates that literature should be understood as a form of the enunciation of experience. He circumscribes here an experience as a specific kind of two-way interaction between readers and their cultural environment, society or nature. It seems that a wide definition, which includes – for example – testimonies of community memory and private, idiosyncratic expressions – describes popular literature, too. However, the author of the article, precisely focusing on the motifs in Nycz’s theory, which directly or indirectly relate to popular literature, doubts its ability to read popular culture. He argues that Nycz’s formula, in fact, is based on modernist conception of high literature with its sacralisation, which eliminates understanding aesthetic experience as a form of pleasure or ludic involvement.