1st Edition
Family and Artistic Relations in Polish Women’s Autobiographical Literature
Family and Artistic Relations in Polish Women’s Autobiographical Literature examines women’s autobiographical works published in Poland after the year 2000 in a broader cultural context. This volume focuses on the writers’ representation of their relationships with their mothers – many of them traumatized survivors of historical cataclysms, many of them professional artists, many of them struggling to reconcile their creative work with their role as wife and mother. Grzemska sheds light not only on the literary strategies used by the memoirists, but she also helps us understand women’s struggles for an independent voice, for new models of commemoration, for healing. This book will interest readers in literary and cultural studies, as well as anyone who wishes to better understand Poland’s cultural transformations in the post-Communist era.
INTRODUCTION: Being in Charge of Autobiography
Blended stories and family archives
Phantoms of genealogy
The framework of duty and obligation
CHAPTER 1: Glorification and Reckoning
Daughterhood as an emotional concept
Ancestors and inheritors
Egocentric or altruistic?
Uprooted from everyday life
CHAPTER 2: Artistic Practices in the Autobiographical Field
Aesthetic, ethical and performative potential
Confrontations and alliances
The logic of the transcryptum and the power of self-fragilization
“Yellow was my mother’s code”
“Mom used to say that onions save lives”
CHAPTER 3: Blood Ties, Blood Bonds
Entangled in relationships
Literary genograms
“[Mother] acquired the habit of erecting defensive walls wherever she could”
“I’ve taken your story, Mama, your apocalypse”
“[Mother] talked, she talked only to be talking”
(Bio)heredity of (in)experience
CHAPTER 4: Mothers, Daughters and Their Shame
Shame, guilt and empathy
Shame in the family and politics
Shame, disgust and the body
CHAPTER 5: Topologies of Illness
Excerpts from the medical record
Laboratory of private configurations
The family as a malady
EPILOGUE: Aesthetics of Autobiographical Hybrids
Writing up the family
Family (auto)pathographies
Biography
Aleksandra Grzemska is Assistant Professor in Polish Literature at the University of Szczecin (Poland). Her research focuses on life writing and contemporary Polish women’s literature and art. She is an editor at the academic journal Autobiografia. Literatura. Kultura. Media [Autobiography. Literature. Culture. Media] and a critic for various academic and non-academic literary magazines.
Tul’si (Tuesday) Bhambry received her PhD in Polish literature at University College London in 2013 and has since been working as a literary and academic translator from Polish and German. She won the Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize in 2015. Among her book-length translations in the humanities are Ryszard Nycz’s The Language of Polish Modernism (Peter Lang, 2017) and Lena Magnone’s Freud’s Emissaries (sdvig, 2023).
