This book is a collection of new methodological proposals concerning twentieth- and (mostly) twenty-first-century Polish literature. The title refers to the long history of philological thinking in terms of surface and depth, a history which the book continues on an even higher level. The important discussion concerning surface reading shows that the model of reading as hermeneutics of suspicions is now in crisis, yet new alliances of “deep” reading formulate convincing arguments situated in current philological studies. Both perspectives appear to spring from the recent “return to philology”, but each determines a different research direction, as demonstrated by the authors of the monograph. Both perspectives also inform us that Polish literature has its unique and equally significant history of changing relations between surface and depth. The book proposes a mapping of inventive proposals set forth by Polish writers in terms of thinking within the two categories: negating, reestablishing, and reconfiguring them. Thus the title New Surfaces, New Depths signals an original approach to a highly significant problem in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Polish literature.

Cover design: Lucyna Talejko-Kwiatkowska