Work in the light of contemporary literary accounts

Abstract

The article deals with work after the political transformation of 1989 in the light of contemporary literary accounts in the prose of Andrzej Stasiuk, Dawid Bieńkowski, Piotr Siemion, Daniel Odija, and others. The literary works are taken to contain records of personal and social problems, captured as objectivised experience of many individuals. An attempt is made to adapt the methodological proposals characteristic of the poetics of experience to selected approaches to work in contemporary literature. These approaches include: the shortage of work as the key element of social change, part-time work, physical work (often considered inferior and unfulfilling), work on a marketplace (as the release of subdued energy), the work of a small-business entrepreneur (along with bankruptcy as an inalienable element of the experience), and work connected with new forms of capitalist corporate context. The experience of work in the times of transformation, as it appears in literature, is presented in terms of failure, exclusion, exploitation, more than a mirage of careers – although the latter approach is also present, albeit often in the context of irony and parody. In the writers’ view, the Polish reality after the transformation reveals a deep social disintegration, while individuals, forced to become self-reliant, do not always win when confronted with the new, capitalist reality.