This article deals with issues related to ways of comprehending nature and the character of reality in modern literature. The author reminds us of the primary convictions and assumptions with respect to relations between language and reality, as characteristic for a mature phase of the critical current o modernist literature. The New-Wave project (A. Zagajewski, J. Kornhauser) is described as an essential, albeit often unknowing point of reference for authors making their debuts in 1980s and 1990s, who ostentatiously manifested their unbelief in social-political forms of defining their own identity, social obligations of literature and the idea of non-ideologised social reality waiting for being adequately represented. In this way, the newest literature has taken up - in a changed form, though - some key modernistic issues, which has borne fruit of a substantial change in perception of the function and role of literature in the social space after 1989 and of the necessity to alter the language of its critical description.