From Her Point of View : Woman's Anti-World in the Poetry of Anna Świrszczyńska

• This book is a monograph about Anna Świrszczyńska’s poetry. It may be described as one woman’s attempt to read another woman’s literary work by taking into account established canons as well as the tools of feminist literary analysis. Part One begins with a discussion of Świrszczyńska’s biography (Chapter One). It then moves on to an overview of critical (mainly male) reactions to Świrszczyńska’s work (Chapter Two), with special regard to Czesław Miłosz’s contribution to its interpretation and popularization (Chapter Three). In Part Two there are three principal discussions: 1) of Anna Świrszczyńska’s early work Wiersze i proza [Poems and Prose] (1936), in which the poet develops her specific female view of European art and culture as disintegrated into incongruent fragments. Her premonition of the apocalypse, which is soon to be fulfilled in the events of World War II, finds its expression in the poet’s desperate attempts to unite the fragments of a shattered culture into individualized versions of myths (Chapter Four); 2) of the collection Budowałam barykadę [Building the Barricade] (1974), in which what is most crucial to the poet (biographically and poetically) is expressed – the encounter with human suffering in an inhuman world. Following this, her poetic view of the mortal body exposed to suffering under an empty sky becomes a well established motif in her work (Chapter Five); 3) of the collection Jestem baba (1972), in which Świrszczyńska introduces into poetry, by making the non-poetical “baba” her lyric heroine, the “outlawed feminine” and, as a result, revolutionizes the language of poetry and poetic representation, which leads in turn to liberating herself from the hegemony of the totalizing male gaze. In this way her anti-world is created (Chapter Six). The “world” is understood here as a male term – one might say that Świrszczyńska creates a “woman’s anti-world” as a place where the woman herself has to regain the right to name things according to her own terms.

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Studier av enskilda språk (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- Specific Languages (hsv//eng)

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Litteraturvetenskap (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- General Literary Studies (hsv//eng)

Keyword

the grotesque

ekphrastic poetry

the Warsaw Uprising

poetry of witness

the city lament

studium and punctum

the abject/abjection

body-soul dualism

Świrszczyńska/Swir

Miłosz

Slavic languages

Slaviska språk

slaviska språk

Slavic Languages

Publication and Content Type

vet (subject category)

dok (subject category)