Between innovation and iteration : post-Joycean heteroglossia in Eimear McBride’s "A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing"

Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing (2013) is a prime specimen of post-Joycean heteroglossia in Irish fi ction. The novel exhibits a programmatic dialogical/intertextual orientation orchestrated with its own parodic and ironic modes, which makes McBride’s work uniquely capable of re-energizing Irish cultural tradition. Simultaneously, her novel contributes its own distinct voice to the impressive amplitude of artistic expressions which have emerged from Irish culture in the wake of Joyce’s writings. Mikhail Bahtin’s approach to the novel (as discussed in The Dialogic Imagination), in turn, is particularly relevant to McBride’s fi ction because of her incorporation (as well as adaptation) of a variety of voices and perspectives. As a consequence, in A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, the categories of heteroglossia and dialogism appear to be responsible for creating and sustaining a vital cultural dimension, a dimension which is subject to being perpetually rewritten in the present, even though it crucially depends upon ur-texts from the past

Demonic seduction : (a Nietzschean reading of Jan Potocki's "The manuscript found in Saragossa")

„Demoniczne uwodzenie” to interpretacja Rękopisu..., w której na plan pierwszy wysuwają się postaci kobiece. Emina i Zubeida - uwodzicielki w sensie dosłownym - ucieleśniają również kuszącą niejednoznaczność epistemologicznych kategorii prawdy i fałszu. Owa niejednoznaczność zasadza się na poglądach Fryderyka Nietzschego, który, odwołując się do „niewieściej” metaforyki, proponuje zrewidowanie tradycyjnego spojrzenia na wartość poznawczą prawdy i kłamstwa. Te dwa kluczowe pojęcia, tak istotne dla ontologii świata przedstawionego Rękopisu..., przenikają się wzajemnie do tego stopnia, iż możemy w ich przypadku mówić nawet o wymienności funkcji. Emina i Zubeida to siostry bliźniaczki, których uwodzicielski urok i uderzające podobieństwo mają zasadnicze znaczenie dla zrozumienia istoty relacji prawda/fałsz (fakt/fikcja, historia/ zmyślenie) w całym powieściowym Universum

Post-traumatic realism : representations of history in recent Irish novels

The aim of my essay is to describe major tendencies in contemporary Irish prose writing concerned with historical and political issues. The diversity of the themes and attitudes to the past necessitates a classification of the writings into several various groups of novels whereas my analysis of the modes of representing the intratextual universe paves the way for identifying a single literary convention (post-traumatic realism) which is typical of the works under discussion. Many of the quoted authors subscribe to historical revisionism which undermines the received historical narrative in Ireland and questions its aggressively nationalist model of patriotism. The novels by Sebastian Barry, Robert McLiam Wilson, Edna O’Brien or Julia O’Faolain, to name just a few, contest that model by demonstrating that it leads to violence, cultural stagnation and petrifying political divisions both in the Republic of Ireland and in Northern Ireland. In the age of the epistemological levelling of historiographic discourse and literary fiction the novels discussed in the essay meaningfully contribute to the debate over the Irish nation’s attitude to their own history and the need to conclude the painful chapters of the past connected with the Civil War as well as with the social and religious conflicts of the twentieth century

Doing justice to the troubles : imaginary reconciliations and restorative memory in post-agreement Northern Ireland

This article addresses avenues for reconciliation and the persistence of the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the interconnected contexts of politics, remembrance culture and public discourse during the peace process, with particular attention focused on the operations of transitional justice and restorative memory (a category I derive from restorative justice and restorative truth). I argue that the peace process realities in Northern Ireland actively invite a mode of social and political evasion of the past by consigning recent history to cultural discourses, to be explored and chronicled mostly by works of fi ction, rather than weighed on the scales of justice in the fi rst place. Post-Troubles fi ction off ers carefully selected patterns, scripts and templates of the past (preserved in ‘restorative memory’) which, rather unsurprisingly, tend to promote a mood of reconciliation over the idea of reckoning and retribution. Thereby fi ction as such (exemplifi ed here by David Park’s The Truth Commissioner, Five Minutes of Heaven directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel and Lucy Caldwell’s All the Beggars Riding) becomes a key player in the contemporary politics of memory

Half human, half velocipede : the bicycle-ridden world of "The Third Policeman" by Flann O'Brien

What would you say if a policeman approached you with the following confession: ‘“I will tell you a secret,’ he said very confidentially in a low voice. ‘My great-grandfather was eighty-three when he died. For a year before his death he was a horse.’”? The question may seem rather academic but at bottom it challenges our capacity for thinking beyond purely rational categories. A question like this impels you to make a choice: either you dismiss the policeman’s confession on logical and commonsensical grounds or you acquiesce and decide to play by his rules. In the latter case, you stand a chance of being introduced to an alternative world governed by different physical laws and populated by hitherto unheard-of species. It is the world of Flann O’Brien’s fiction, a meeting-place of the mundane, the absurd, the uncanny and the fantastic, where the grotesque and the macabre hold their clandestine convention. [fragm. tekstu

Theory's other : reintegrating the new pragmatism into literary studies

Perspektywa krytyczna, która pojawiła się w literaturoznawstwie amerykańskim na początku lat osiemdziesiątych dwudziestego wieku, kwestionuje potrzebę zajmowania się teorią jako taką, definiując jednak ową teorię w bardzo zawężony sposób. Neopragmatyzm, którego jaskrawym i bardzo spektakularnym przykładem jest esej Waltera Benna Michaelsa i Stevena Knappa Against Theory, stawia sobie za cel zdyskredytowanie teorii poprzez swoistą dekonstrukcję jej możliwości. Problem polega na tym, że teorię rozumianą jako „specyficzny zamysł krytyczny: próbę podporządkowania interpretacji poszczególnych tekstów jednej, ogólnej regule interpretacyjnej” zarzuciła w latach osiemdziesiątych większość literaturoznawców. Dlatego też, zdaniem autora eseju Teoria inaczej, wartość neopragmatystycznej krytyki teorii leży nie tyle w sile jej argumentów, ile raczej w retoryce wykorzystywanej przez Michaelsa, Knappa, Rorty’ego i Fisha. Taka „dysydencka” retoryka może wzbogacić nasz sposób postrzegania teorii i jej możliwości oraz ograniczeń; co więcej, neopragmatyzm amerykański można wykorzystać jako cenną perspektywę w dydaktyce literaturoznawstwa

Theory's other: reintegrating the new pragmatism into literary studies

The reasons for cherishing a particular academic text of one’s own making are usually connected with its value and role as a crowning achievement of one’s intellectual efforts. In my case, however, the essay reprinted below was more of a new begining than a terminus of an arduous journey. Above all else, it marked a momentous shift in my perspective on my professional commitments and priorities. Thereby, it carried significant personal and emotional overtones as well. Today I see it as a blueprint for what turned out to be an absorbing research interest which has continued to inspire and sustain me in my academic peregrinations ever since. Written in 2002, “Theory’s Other” was the first attempt to define my position on the New Pragmatism in literary studies. As such, it laid the foundations for what was to become a booklength project completed in collaboration with several prominent American scholars including Stanley Fish, Walter Benn Michaels and Gerald Graff. Subsequently, selected sections of this essay were incorporated into my 2007 book titled Disciplining the New Pragmatism: Theory, Rhetoric, and the Ends of Literary Study

Mnemofictions: Rewriting the past in "Ghost Light" by Joseph O’Connor

John Millington Synge's contributions to the development of modern Irish drama and to the Gaelic Revival (and, thereby, to Irish memory culture at large) are undeniable. Little is known, however, of his relationship with Miss Molly Allgood, who was an actress at the Abbey Theatre and his fiancée. In this essay I read Joseph O'Connor's 2010 novel, Ghost Light, as a specimen of posthumous ventriloquism – a work of fiction which seeks to give voice to an elderly, forgotten woman who, in 1952 and thenceforth, after her death, was shamefully deprived of her right to keep Synge company in the collective memory of her nation. O'Connor creates prosthetic memories (which I call mnemofictions) for Molly Allgood so that she may eventually claim her due place in Irish memory culture. Consequently, O'Connor's work of fiction effectively redeems a past whose records were originally censored and tampered with

Of wild(e)ness and carceral subjectivity

The final stage of Oscar Wilde’s life was marked by an accumulation of unexpected events which culminated in a most startling denouement. His attachment to Lord Alfred Douglas gave rise to a conflict between Wilde as a supposed corruptor of the youth and the Marquis of Queensbury, Douglas’s father. In an attempt to provoke litigation, Queensbury accused Wilde o f sodomy and the depravation of his son. The writer could not but stand his ground. He sued Queensbury for libel and lost the case. Subsequently, Wilde was charged with acts of gross indecency which had been brought up in the course of the Queensbury trial. And again the court found him to have been on the wrong side of the law. He was sentenced to two years of imprisonment with hard labour

Zaskakująco poprawny profesjonalista : “Professional correctness : literary studies and political change” / Stanley Fish. - Cambridge, 1999 [recenzja]

Recenzja książki “Professional correctness : literary studies and political change” / Stanley Fish. - Cambridge, 1999