Few writers paid as much attention to dust as W. G. Sebald. The author of Austerlitz saw in it „the lowest sign of annihilation” and a “boundary between being and nothingness,” an elegiac way of ...making the dead present in the text. For Sebald, all the ways of reading the past were “reading (in) dust,” making this particular way close to prophesying. The author of the essay follows Sebald’s opinion, tracing various forms and manifestations of the “prophetic epistemological paradigm.” Reading the irregular, reading „what has never been written,” has also its political aspect of (re)thinking the past from the remains of destruction. This is how dust becomes critical and subversive matter.
This article is concerned with literature created in Spain in the minority anguage of Catalan, examining the question of whether this literature could ever overcome its stereotypical reputation as ...peripheral. The article is also concerned with the reception of this literature, both from synchronic perspective – contemporaneous with Catalan playwright Àngel Guimerà, in Catalonia, Spain and abroad – and the diachronic perspective of the turn of the 20th century. The impetus to address this topic has come from renewed and ultimately unsuccessful attempts by Àngel Guimerà’s compatriots to nominate him for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
In this article, the term “minor literatures”, coined by Deleuze and Guattari, finds its application in studies of contemporary Mediterranean writing. The author of the article combines this term ...with the notion of transculture. On the basis of examples from texts by authors such as Juan Goytisolo, Driss Chraïbi, Edmond Amran El Maleh, Najat El Hachmi, and Fouad Laroui, the author shows how literature created by migrating minorities introduces a dimension of synergy to a world marked by intercultural tensions, creating a new sense of community in individuals who radically deconstruct their identities.
Schulz w Paryżu Rosiek, Stanisław
Schulz Forum,
2021
17-18
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The text includes a possibly complete reconstruction of 27 days spent by Schulz in Paris in 1938. The reconstruction provides the basis of a theoretical commentary which compares the advantages and ...traps of narrativized biographical discourses on Schulz with the order of the calendar. All that is known about Schulz in Paris has been found in about a dozen documents and several dozens of references in his correspondence, which is not too bad for a biography of a “writer without archive.” The documentation of other episodes of his life is much scarcer. We know when and where he stayed in Paris, sometimes even his hotel room number. However, of the 27 days spent by Schulz in Paris only about one third can be reconstructed in fragments. All the rest remains nebulous and impenetrable. Schulz often disappears into thin air and in fact we do not know what he was doing all days long. He neither talked nor wrote about it much. The opinions and remarks which he formulated, e.g., that Paris is a „riotous Babylon,” were quickly picked up by his exegetes and reconstructors of his biography. The surviving documents set boundaries which – while the reconstruction of episodes is still at stake – can be crossed only by conjectures and speculation. There is nothing wrong in these risky procedures. They are not bad as such, but those who move too far from the documents letter can be easily led astray. Not that everything is legitimate – in the world without the god of biography some rules are still valid. Conjectures and speculation must not reach beyond the „material truth.”
The 2016 referendum in the UK and then Brexit itself, formally introduced in 2020 and finalized – upon the conclusion of the transition period – at the beginning of 2021, have significantly affected ...the status of the border on the island of Ireland. Once the UK left the European Union, the border that separates the Republic of Ireland from Northern Ireland became an EU border as well. Although overnight the lives of the Irish people crossing the border did not change that much, gradual, and far-reaching, transformations have been taking place in the minds of the Irish and the British and in the overall economic, social and political circumstances on both sides of the old/new border. This essay seeks to address the Irish border’s history as well as its cultural and geopolitical contexts, based on the most useful insights of border studies. That perspective is enriched by elements of cultural memory studies to develop a position sensitive to the needs and aspirations of the border communities and individual borderlanders, who look for support and inspiration to their own local cultures and literary discourses. The aim of this essay is to explore various facets of the Irish border in light of the 2016 referendum’s results and ramifications. What is characteristic of the Tory neoimperialist vision and rhetoric in the UK is its disregard for the local, minority and regional issues on the island of Ireland. In consequence, the status of the 56 per cent of the inhabitants of Northern Ireland who voted “Remain” in the 2016 referendum may be described as that of a marginalized minority in their own country.
This article discusses narrative strategies of resistance in postcolonial literature in the context of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s work on minor literature. The predominant question is ...whether there is an affinity between Deleuzian thought and the problems of post-colonial theory. Some answers can be found in the book Deleuze and the Postcolonial, edited by Simone Bignall and Paul Patton. The use of language by minor literature has also been discussed in relation to Jacques Derrida’s reflections on the appropriation of foreign languages and monolingualism. The aim of this article is to ponder first, why post-colonial literature has been regarded as “minor” in the sense proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and second, how it uses the many potentialities offered by language to express subaltern experiences and identities.
The author of the article searches for an answer to the question whether the stories might have been written by Bruno Schulz from Drogobych, the one who wrote The Cinnamon Shops. Given that the query ...has not yet been concluded beyond doubt, she tries to find alternative methods of analyzing these texts. She assumes that young Schulz’s style pattern should not be established by analyzing only his mature texts. Schulz wrote many short stories that could not be found, therefore, the question of his literary identity is still relevant. An account of his literary style can be found in the analysis carried out in the 1970s by Piotr Wróblewski. It allows for finding the most common features that distinguish Schulz from other writers. The distinction is crucial for either confirmation or rejection of authorship. The author conducts an experiment to evaluate the stylistic features in German stories and the result is surprising. In reference to The Cinnamon Shops as well as Schulz’s other well-known other works and his early story “Undula,” his authorship proves certain. However, in the German stories examination yields slightly more than half of the positive responses. The author assumes that in each text there are traces of someone’s individual, unique style, calling them metaphorically “text signatures,” the “fingerprints” of the text. In her research, she also uses methods such as forensic linguistics and stylometry. The author deals with the stereotype of Schulz’s literary debut facilitated by the support of Zofia Nałkowska. In the article, she tries to reconstruct Schulz’s first literary steps and wonders what he might have written between the publication of ”Undula” and “The Birds” (and later The Cinnamon Shops), and whether he included his first literary samples in letters to his friends or during the Kalleia’s meetings in Drogobych. The author lists his lost works and ends the article with the question of Schulz’s identity.
The starting point of this paper was a research presentation at an academic conference about Schulz’s “antimodern modernism,” organized by Marek Tomaszewski, Małgorzata Smorąg-Goldberg, and Paweł ...Rodak in Paris on June 9th, 2017. At the crossroads of literature and art history, the author aims at showing how formlessness, as defined in 1929 by Georges Bataille, haunts Bruno Schulz’ fiction (in Polish “bezkształtność” or “bezformie”). His literary works have already been associated with various trends of the Central European modernism, but it should also be linked to the early development of the Informal Arts in this area, before it revolutionized post-war painting. Given Schulz’s taste for old printed books, and the nature of his own drawings and engravings (in the cliché-verre or glass print technique), a survey of all the traces of the idea of formlessness in his literary works leads to a conclusion that there is an anachronism between texts and images. Such a gap between universal form dissolution in fiction and its static graphic counterpart remains to be interpreted: how can Schulz’s works both look back to the nostalgic pre-war realities and anticipate post-war artistic, if not philosophical, tendencies?
In an interesting and in some ways innovative essay, “Two Romantic Worlds. On Bruno Schulz and Witold Gombrowicz” Dwa światy romantyczne. O Brunonie Schulzu i Witoldzie Gombrowiczu, published in 1938 ...in Skamander, Henryk Vogler called Schulz „the most genuine – perhaps even the only – representative of femininity in our literature.” This intuitive claim certainly deserves to be remembered not only because Vogler as the only critic of the inter-war period and one of very few at that time made an attempt to turn gender into an aesthetic category applicable to Schulz’s fiction, but also because he recognized its “femininity” as a value. Such an approach was by no means obvious. Along with the development of feminist movements and the crisis of masculinity which surfaced in literature and art after the Great War, opposite trends were still present in the inter-war decades. They were trying not only to conserve, but to strengthen the hegemonic fascist model of masculinity also in Poland of the 1930s. If, however, Schulz’s fiction has some features of the feminine writing – if such comparison can shed some light on his stories – he came close not so much to the styles which were radically opposite, i.e. dependent on the masculine idiom, but to those which worked through “delicate deviations” as if from the inside, destabilizing and opening it to new contexts. In this case, “delicate” is
not a synonym of „insignificant,” but points at hardly comprehensible, ambiguous rhythms of the écriture feminine. Asking questions about the ties which connect gender and modes of expression, we keep moving along delicate boundaries separating existence, aesthetics, ethics, and politics. This, suggests Elaine Showalter, „makes us obliged to answer with equal delicacy and precision.” I believe that in the case of Schulz instead of strong oppositions one should rather emphasize movement – a continuous, endless process of differentiating instead of a polar opposition of the masculine and feminine.
In 2019, an obscure Paris press PhB éditions published a small (86 pages) book titled À Paris, égaré. Bruno Schulz, août 1938. The author is Dominique Hérody, known before mainly as a draughtsman and ...author of comic books, as well as founder of the journal Le Paresseux and designer of some books. Fascinated with Schulz’s fiction or perhaps even more with his graphic works, Hérody, referring to scarce and enigmatic information about the Paris visit of the author of Cinnamon Shops – decided to reconstruct that episode in his life, supplementing his knowledge drawn from the French and English language sources with his own conjectures and pure phantasy.
