Jakieś dziwne przeczucie, jak przed świata końcem. Argumenty za nową cezurą

A Weird Inkling, As If the World Was Ending. Arguments for a New Periodisation The article examines the idea of year 2008 – the beginning of the so-called Great Recession – as a potential turning point in contemporary Polish poetry. Most of the authors commonly associated with the so-called “new Polish political poetry” have published their first books around 2008, and it was also around that year that the work of certain important young authors seems to have shifted from a relatively traditional form to a more experimental one, allowing them to accurately grasp the anxiety and precariousness inherently tied to the social experience of the young generation. I link these shifts to the issue of reference and dereferentialisation of sign/language under financial capitalism. Whereas pre-2008, the dereferentialisation of language might have seemed like an ongoing and somewhat ambivalent process, for the young generation it constitutes the very foundation of their everyday existence.