From Your Land to Poland ─ On the Commitment of Writers

The stormy history of Poland has made commitment a staple feature of much Polish writing. Awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980, Czeslaw Milosz is not only a good example of a Polish committed writer, he also illustrates the complexity of literary commitment in contemporary society. The centenary of his birth in 2011 offered the opportunity to tackle the question of writers’ commitment during the international conference «From Your Land to Poland: On the Commitment of the Writer in European and Polish Literature in the 20th and 21st Centuries», which took place on the 17th and the 18th November 2011 at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. The present volume offers selected contributions presented on that occasion and thus proposes an original confrontation between the points of view of scholars and artists about the notion of the contemporary commitment of writers.

Dorota Walczak-Delanois is Professor at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles and Chair of the Polish Language and Culture Department. She is a specialist of Polish avant-garde poetry and her research focuses on relations between image and poetry in Polish and European poetry in the 20th and the 21st century from a comparative perspective.
Katia Vandenborre is an FNRS Postdoctoral Researcher working in the Polish Language and Culture Department of the Universite Libre de Bruxelles. She investigates Polish literary fairy tales from the perspective of their intertextual, intermedial and intercultural dialogue with European traditions.
Petra James is the Chair of the Czech Language and Literature Department at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles where she also teaches classes on Central European Culture. Her two main research topics are comparative history of the avant-garde and cultural memory issues in the works of contemporary Central European authors.