This book traces the development of the Polish theory of history, analysing how Jerzy Topolski, Krzysztof Pomian, and Olga Tokarczuk have both built upon and transgressed the metahistorical theories ...of American historian Hayden White. Poland’s reception of White’s work has gone through different phases, from distancing to a period of fascination and eventual critical analysis, beginning with Topolski's methodological school in the 1980s. Topolski played a major role in international debates on historical theory in the second half of the 20th century. The book’s second study is a rare opportunity for English-speaking audiences to engage with the thoughts of Pomian, a philosopher and historian of ideas who has both complemented and developed theories of historical cognition independently from White. In the final chapter, the book presents a study of the historical imagination in 21st-century Central and Eastern Europe through the work of novelist Tokarczuk, the winner of the 2018Nobel Prize in Literature. In considering the contributions of these three thinkers, the book explores the active process by which past becomes history and thus motivates contemporary actions and realities. By deconstructing and reconstructing contemporary theories of history, this research is a unique contribution to the fields of historiography and the philosophy of history.
Olga Tokarczuk's masterpiece Flights highlights one of the most profound metaphysical, moral and religious conundrums - a tension, but also an intimate bond, between stability and structuredness, on ...the one hand, and the power of change, movement and transgression on the other. The paper is devoted to unveiling what I dub the paradox of embodied agency. In simple terms, structuredness makes the known world organized and predictable; yet, at the same time, these very structures are vehicles of change, movement, sometimes even destruction. I make the case that this profound aspect of Flights deserves more recognition.
On February 24, 2022, we embarked on a war journey into the unknown, witnessing the war in Ukraine. Our contact with the war is mediated (mainly by the media), yet painful and saturated with extreme ...emotions. This article is an autoethnographic description of the experiences of this journey of three academics from Poland, a frontline country. The metaphor of the road is carried out by evocative autoethnography in terms of its symbolism of personal journey of each of us; nevertheless, it also unifies our experiences of war into one tender narrative. Embedded in the essence of our autoethnographic narrative of the war is a constant openness to new circumstances, the natural dynamics of action at the front and in the frontier country, and the constant search for and discovery of one’s own narrative identity. Each part of this path traveled is inscribed in the baggage of personal experience, a narrative of life in a frontier country, unification by the situation of witnessing the war, and the desire to express our resistance to it. It became a form of mental resistance, analysis, empathy, and concern which were our methods of struggle and a way of taking responsibility for the reality we witness. In the description, we used the “tender narrative” proposed in the texts of Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk.
The article demonstrates how Olga Tokarczuk inscribes diverse religious traditions in her novels and creates new theological ideas to offer readers literary tools for exercising their imagination. In ...this way, Tokarczuk's prose exposes the arbitrariness of religiously legitimized worldviews and destabilizes the existing cultural imaginary. An analysis of Tokarczuk's methods for constructing beliefs, rituals and metaphysical frameworks of the world that consolidate the communities she describes allows us to perceive her writing as postsecular. Each of her published works of fiction is briefly presented in chronological order, providing an insight into both the continuities and transformations of her approach to contemporary fiction. Juxtaposing these analyses with Tokarczuk's views on the social role of literature presented in her essays and self-commentaries and the concept of the "tender narrator" from her Nobel lecture, allow us to identify the political and ethical motivations for such a creative strategy.
Jacobs cites that Peter Handke was awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human ...experience. She also mentions that Handke's novel Short Letter, Long Farewell is an interesting postscript to her previous read, Flights by Olga Tokarczuk. Both works of fiction deal with travel, an interesting subject matter in light of the current pandemic that brings new social norms of social distancing, sheltering in place and a run on toilet paper. And just as this situation has produced wildly different points of view about how to handle all of this, these two authors also demonstrate wildly different points of view on travel given to the reader in two unique styles of writing.
The article tries to map the perspectives of the post-communist East on its own communist past, as envisioned by four writers and their relevant novels: the Michal Ajvaz (The Other City, 1993), ...Mircea Cărtărescu (Blinding, 1996), the David Albahari (Leeches, 2006), the Olga Tokarczuk (Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, 2009). I argue that these novels – which take the form of mysteries and/or draw on conspiracy theories – resort to specific genre tropes in their attempt to render in an allegorical code the deficits in the cognitive mapping of the post-communist period. This blank spot concerns the project of post-communism as an evasive totality which the East has been constantly trying to grasp, after being confined in the cognitive labyrinth of the neoliberal capitalism that has predominated since the demise of communism in central Europe in 1989. My study relies on Fredric Jameson’s view that conspiracy theories are indicative of deficiencies of cognitive mappings. Subsequently, I analyse the four novels in a World Literature frame. These terms help in interpreting the ways in which the literatures of the former Eastern Bloc relate to their own past, but also to the new planetary conscience pushed forward by neoliberal capitalism.
Proszę pozwolić, że zacznę od oczywistości. Olga Tokarczuk jest jedną z najwybitniejszych, a także najbardziej cenionych, znanych i popularnych polskich pisarek i pisarzy w Polsce i na świecie. Wedle ...przeważającej opinii w osobie autorki "Ksiąg Jakubowych" mamy do czynienia przede wszystkim z mistrzynią literackiej sztuki opowiadania.
Olga Tokarczuk, laureatka Nagrody Nobla w dziedzinie literatury za rok 2018, której powieści, opowiadania i eseje przetłumaczone zostały na ponad trzydzieści języków i podbiły serca milionów ...czytelników na całym świecie, 7 października 2021 dołączyła do grona doktorów "honoris causa" Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego.
Symbols of the past influence the present, very often dependent on the will of those who currently “weave the story,” to use the expression coined by Olga Tokarczuk.1 This applies in particular to ...national symbols, burdened by historical trauma, whose rank and protection may become handy tools for controlling social and public narratives. In this context, it is the law itself, with its special category of memory laws, that very often turns out to be instrumentally used by the state apparatus to strengthen such narratives. In times of social peace, this kind of state-governed manner of how we remember and perceive symbols remains imperceptible. However, in times of turmoil, symbols can serve as legal weapons against rights and freedoms. Then, the protection of the national anthem or emblem, monuments or graphics may be turned into the de facto protection of the state against its critics. Labelling themselves as the guardians of “historical truth,” the authorities tend to secure the orthodox vision of the past. Importantly, this vision very often remains distant from the official findings of historians. It was exactly in such an ideologically and nationalistically burdened social atmosphere in Poland when Jaś Kapela, Polish poet and activist, decided to perform publicly his protest song. He did so by changing the official wording of the Polish national anthem into a pro-refugee appeal and broadcast it on YouTube, which eventually brought him before Polish courts, including the Supreme Court.
This article argues that the museum is a significant trope in contemporary literature that engages with the climate crisis. With its destabilisation of relations between human communities and the ...nonhuman world, the Anthropocene - Paul Crutzen's influential (if controversial) name for the current geological period - troubles conceptual binaries and epistemological categories that are central to Western modernity. Through two case studies, Flights (2007), by Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, and The Octopus Museum (2019), by American poet Brenda Shaughnessy, I explore how these works use the space of the museum to chart the intellectual, affective, and ethical tensions that underlie our climate-changed times. In these literary figurations of the museum, the things on display - whether they are anatomical parts (in Flights) or textual fragments (in The Octopus Museum) - become the site of radical uncertainty, as well as a probe into the agential efficacy of the nonhuman world. This approach destabilises anthropocentric hierarchies and pushes back against a widespread perception of the post-Enlightenment museum as an institution imparting stable, taxonomically organised knowledge. A comparison with the Museum of Civilisation featured in Emily St. John Mandel's postapocalyptic novel Station Eleven (2014) allows me to bring into view the originality of Tokarczuk's and Shaughnessy's experimentations.
