New, yet old, or the term in the context of modernity

The term convergence in the field of literary studies is applied to phenome-na which have long been discussed within other categories in the human-ities, such as hybridisation or homogenisation, especially in reference to the mass media (Horkheimer, Adorno 1969; Macdonald 1959; Eco 1968; Kłoskowska 1983). The very term is not new, either, as convergence has been well established in the realm of biology, medicine, linguistics, histo-riography, anthropology, political science, and media studies.

As a matter of fact, the emergence of convergence within humanistic discourse and, more specifically, in literary studies, defines and actualises the phenomenon covered by the term: assimilation, or the occurrence of analogous processes in diverse fields and at times distant domains. The assimilation of texts, their structures, and genres, results in the similarity of terminology.

The wandering of categories and the application of terms from cer-tain disciplines to others are phenomena discussed by theoreticians com-ing from diverse schools and fields of cultural studies, such as Roman Jakobson (Jakobson 1971; 1989), Mieke Bal (Bal 2002), or Clifford Geertz (Geertz 1983). These phenomena reflect what is happening in textuality it-self and in the space of cultural discourses, which organise social life and – as Michel Foucault would have said – exercise power over it (Foucault 2002). After Geertzian blurred genres and mixed ways of speaking, come blurred discourses.