„Detronizacja powagi”. Szkic o obecności campu w polskiej prozie

Abstract

‘To dethrone the serious’. A sketch on ‘Camp’ in Polish prose

The author describes a mode of sensibility called ‘Camp’. She concentrates on the most characteristic features of it, especially on the ambivalence of any assessments, specific playful type of seriousness, theatricalization, artificiality, superior role of inverted commas and emphasis. While analyzing connections between Camp and homosexual subculture, the author stresses the role of the artists’ deepened self-consciousness and their deceitful distance towards their own works of art. Those features are especially noticeable in their playing with the conventions and with the principles of good taste. While describing the presence of Camp in the Polish literature, the author emphasises the roles of relativity, both aesthetical and moral. The elements of Camp are distinguished in the ‘banalistic’ literature and in the prose of Grzegorz Musiał, but the main part of the text is devoted to the prose of Michał Witkowski, in which we can find an intriguing combination of the sublimity and mockery, gloss and trumpery, spirituality and hedonism. Those features, inseparably connected with the stylistic of Camp, are constantly present in the prose of Witkowski. It makes him the most important representative of the discussed mode of sensibility in Poland.