Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
As the subject of ideological, aesthetic, and existential manipulations, the Polish home and its representation is an ever-changing phenomenon that absorbs new tendencies and, at the same time, retains its centrality to Polish literature, whether written in Poland or abroad. Framing the Polish Home is a pioneering work that explores the idea of home as fundamental to the question of cultural and national identity within Poland's recent history and its tradition.
In this inaugural volume of the Polish and Polish-American Studies Series, the Polish home emerges in its rich verbal and visual representations and multiple material embodiments, as the discussion moves from the loss of the home during wartime to the Sovietized politics of housing and from the exilic strategies of having a home to the the idyllic evocation of the abodes of the past.
Although, as Bożena Shallcross notes in her introduction, "few concepts seem to have such universal appeal as the notion of the home," this area of study is still seriously underdeveloped. In essays from sixteen scholars, Framing the Polish Home takes a significant step to correct that oversight, covering a broad range of issues pertinent to the discourse on the home and demonstrating the complexity of the home in Polish literature and culture.
Table of Contents
Home truths: toward a definition of the Polish home / Boçzena Shallcross -- "Every one of us is a stranger": patterns of identity in twentieth-century Polish literature / Ryszard Nycz -- Home as other in the work of Czes±aw Mi±osz / Kim Jastremski -- The homelessness of the other: the homoerotic experience in the prose of Julian Stryjkowski / Graçzyna Borkowska -- Home/lessness and the discourse of subjectivity in Gombrowicz's The marriage and Râoçzewicz's The card index / Tamara Trojanowska -- Home loss in wartime literature: a typology of images / Madeline G. Levine -- The archaeology of occupation: Stefan Chwin's writings on Danzig/Gdâansk / Boçzena Shallcross -- Homeland without a home: Tadeusz Konwicki's experience of home / Katarzyna Zechenter -- Place of estrangement: homelessness at home in the works of three postwar Polish writers / Henryk Dasko -- The destruction of the center / Jerzy Jarzñebski -- The best view is from the top: autobiographical snapshots, communist monuments, and (post)totalitarian homelessness / Magdalena J. Zaborowska -- At home with Sienkiewicz / Beth Holmgren -- Stawisko: the home of Jaros±aw Iwaszkiewicz / Anna Nasi±owska -- Between utopia and parody: the home for creative work / Marek Zaleski -- Home as desire: the popular pleasures of gender in Polish âemigrâe drama / Halina Filipowicz -- Gombrowicz's binoculars: the view from abroad / David Goldfarb -- Returns to the impossible: the search for home in the prose of Gustaw Herling / W±odzimierz Bolecki.