The Muffled Voice. On The Conventional Character of Literature

The Polish version of the article was published in “Roczniki Humanistyczne,” vol. 59 (2011), issue 1. In the article a reflection is proposed on literature’s inner problems concentrated around the concept of literary convention. It seems that in the postmodernist demands to give more attention to those voices in literature that up till now have been “muffled,” “passed over” and “oppressed,” the meaning of the concept of “convention” has been distorted. However, its proper understanding is as elementary for the existence and development of literature as treating a literary work as an artificially organized form, and not as the writer’s confession. The author of the article, on the basis of the definitions formulated by the formalist-structuralist school, discusses the inner, aesthetic laws of literature dictated and defined by literary convention and tradition, and he indicates that it is them – more than political, social or moral causes—that in the natural process of creation and development of literature cause that some voices, perhaps, cannot be fully heard