Uncreative Writing: Polish Experimental Literature in the Digital Age

Uncreative writing is a technique of writing which employs strategies of appropriation, replication, piracy, plagiarism, djing and sampling. The term was put forward by Kenneth Goldsmith in his book Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (2011). The goal of the paper is the application of Goldsmith’s tools to uncreative form of writing in contemporary Polish literature in the Digital Age. Projects by authors such as Jarosław Lipszyc, Piotr Siwecki and Sławomir Shuty will be analyzed. The uncreative attitudes using digital tools should be viewed as strategies of “standing out” in the field of culture production, leading to a victory in the fight for dominance in the symbolic sphere. The subversive strategies are a very dynamic field in the battle between the avant-garde artists and the traditional methods of consecration. At stake here is not only a change of aesthetics and poetics, but attacking the basic indicators of the market, such as the quantity of circulation, a radical approach to copyright, objection to paper editions.

(Source: ELD 2015)