Abstrakt: | 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. |