The horizon of modernity: The antihero as a notion in literary anthropology

Authors:

• Michał Piotr Januszkiewicz

Abstract

This article is the first attempt in Poland to introduce the notion of antihero into literary studies. Although quite familiar in Russian or English-language scholarship, the notion functions in a colloquial and non-systematised way in Polish. This article proposes a systematisation - in literary history (the phenomenon dates back to early carnivalesque literature, or even to antiquity), as well as in literary theory, philosophy, and anthropology. And yet, the notion of the antihero relates to the dilemmas of modernity. As to its origins and source, the term was coined by Fyodor Dostoyevsky who first used it in his novel Notes from Underground (1864) which gathered all the attributes of such a literary character, i.e.: passiveness, formlessness, acute self-awareness, the whimsical sense of freedom, or, a peculiar mental masochism (fondness of suffering).