Metonimie Zagłady : o polskiej prozie lat 1987-2012

Abstract

The book discusses the relations of the modern Polish prose with the extermination of Jews. The author puts forward a hypothesis that the relations are only supposed as a worrying background of the events other than the Holocaust. She calls these types of relations a “metonymy of extermination” by which she understands both rhetoric linguistic solutions and broader semantic figures making it easier to present the “unpresentable”, namely echoes, chips and aberrations of Auschwitz. The publication thoroughly discusses prose by Ewa Kuryluk, Magdalena Tulli, Olga Tokarczuk, Stefan Chwin, Paweł Huelle, Mikołaj Łoziński, Agnieszka Kłos, Janusz Głowacki and many other writers that took a standpoint on the role of the extermination in the modern culture, and Polish‑Jewish relations between 1987 and 2012. Though their works (on this topic) are not a part of mainstream, but the off voice, the voice of “secondary” writers. The very book supplements a critical and literary literature on the topic being the first broad interpretation of a new prose created as an answer to publications by Jan Tomasz Gross and social excitement, sealed by films by Agnieszka Holland and Władysław Pasikowski. Thus, it contains remarks on the Polish movie, art and popculture. Metonymies of extermination… is an attempt to discuss styles of disclosing and exposing extermination in the Polish prose after 1987, them being a language far from rhetoric and historiography. It is also an attempt to check if extermination can be a subject‑matter of a critical and literary book.