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This book debunks the myth of Polish Modernist literature as rooted in rash, immediate expression. The author compares programmatic statements on language by turn-of-the-century writers such as Waclaw Berent, Boleslaw Lesmian, Stanislaw Brzozowski or Karol Irzykowski with notions deduced from their literary works. He demonstrates that these writers'linguistic self-consciousness informs their implicitly self-reflexive texts and sheds light on their values and characteristic qualities. The author treats Modernist literature itself as a sort of «language» – a distinct entity that emerged through systematic differentiation within the general literary discourse. The book enhances the understanding of the transformations behind this important philosophical and artistic movement.

This book is a study of twentieth century Polish literature in the contexts of queer theory, psychoanalysis and modernism studies. It presents readings of well-known authors such as Witold Gombrowicz or of authors gaining international fame such as Miron Bialoszewski, as well as essays on other important, but less known Polish writers. The book also offers theoretical ideas relevant outside the Polish context: the idea of «homoinfluence», the «enigmatic signifier» and its role in «paranoid cultures», the overlapping of Jewishness and queer, the discussion of queer fables for children, or the new approach to the idea of «camp» and its relation to commodity fetishism.

Le livre de Piotr Sniedziewski (1976) est tout à fait central pour étudier l'évolution de la poésie à la fin du XIX° siècle. Il permet de mieux comprendre la rupture avec une tradition (poésie romantique et parnassienne) qui rattache la poésie à l'ordre de la représentation et du discours. Mallarmé et Norwid (poète polonais) sont situés dans le contexte littéraire d'une recherche poétique qui fonde un nouveau type de langage et programme un nouveau mode de lecture. Le silence relève d'une conception poétique qui privilégie la matérialité et les relations internes entre les mots plutôt que les relations des mots au référent et l'organisation d'un discours.