Kulturowe taksonomie literatury niemimetycznej

Abstract

The article undertakes the problem connected with the taxonomy of non-mimetic literature in the context of complex relationship between literature and culture. At the beginning, it briefly discusses what appears to be the main reasons behind the terminological confusion, obscuring the field, namely the polysemy of the word "fantasy", when used as a generic marker, as well as different cultural functions of the very term "literary genre”, which are applied in the contemporary discourse on non-mimetic literature. Assuming the literary-theoretical perspective, the article explains how the prevailing concepts of the taxonomy of the literature in question (especially the popular division into "fantasy” and science-fiction” assumed and accepted by most of the literary criticism) are affected by its purely cultural or civilizational perceptions. While acknowledging the import of cultural and civilizational mechanisms and their influence on the creation and evolution of genres of popular non-mimetic literature such as science fiction or fantasy, the article argues for a more precise terminological debate and emphasizes the need for a serious genological discussion of the contemporary non-mimetic literature.