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.