Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights as an example of genre transformation in the contemporary novel – a linguistic and literary view

Abstract

Drawing from both German and Polish linguistic and literary perspectives, the article attempts to examine genre changes within the genre pattern of the novel and decide whether Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, described by the author herself as a novel, should be attributed to this genre. We assume that linguistic and literary tools will allow us to determine the most characteristic features of contemporary novel productions to decide on the nature of changes taking place within the studied genre. Looking at Tokarczuk’s work not through the prism of a single genre but, following Maria Wojtak, Kirsten Adamzik or Ulla Fix, from the perspective of inter-genre relations, allows not only to conclude that the analyzed material is located on the fringes of the genre pattern of the novel but also to see other inter-textual dependencies and consider the text under study as a genre in the form of a collection.