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Family Album, Memory and Autobiography: Doris Lessing’s "Under My Skin" and "Walking in the Shade"

100%
Cichoń A. I.
Anglica Wratislaviensia
|
2015
|
issue 53
35 - 43
EN
Under My Skin and Walking in the Shade, the two volumes of Doris Lessing’s autobiography, contain photographs from the author’s collection. The images, about thirty in each of the books, may be viewed as her family albums, which she inspects in the acts of remembering and reinterpreting the past. In retrospect, Lessing sees her crucial life-choices and her artistic, intellectual and political positions as shaped both by major historical processes occurring during her life-time (colonialism, the world wars, Communism) and by her ambivalent emotional attitudes to her immediate environment (her family and personal relationships). Whereas individual photographs, which accord with middle class aesthetics and ethics (Bourdieu), communicate stories of family integration, the memoirs challenge such an interpretation of the images and reflect the author’s striving to liberate herself from her family and the values they cultivated. This paper seeks to explore Lessing’s articulations and visualizations of her multiple identities, her relatedness to her significant others and her use of photographs as a narrative strategy and as a means of interrogating her cultural situatedness.
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Auto/biografia kontrfaktyczna Doris Lessing

89%
Gajewska A.
Autobiografia. Literatura. Kultura. Media
|
2014
|
issue 1(2)
39–49
PL
W artykule zinterpretowano ostatnią publikację Doris Lessing Alfred i Emily – patchworkowy utwór, na który składają się fragmenty definicji słownikowych i encyklopedycznych, wybrane cytaty z utworów literackich, a także wspomnienie o bracie pisarki. Zasadniczo książka ta dzieli się na dwie części. Pierwszą tworzy zmyślona biografia rodziców, drugą – wspomnienia o nich i o życiu w buszu, które uzupełniają część pierwszą o fakty historyczne i momenty przełomowe dla całej rodziny. Budując alternatywną opowieść o rodzicach, Lessing tworzy auto/biografię kontrfaktyczną, ponieważ eliminuje z życia rodziców jeden fakt historyczny, który znacząco wpłynął na ich życie i naznaczył ich los bolesnymi stratami. Skupiając się właśnie na roku 1914, Lessing testuje tym samym pomysły Nialla Fergusona, czołowego brytyjskiego twórcy historii wirtualnej, który przeciwstawia się marksistowskiemu widzeniu historiozofii i wskazuje na przypadkowość dziejów świata.
EN
The article presents an interpretation of Doris Lessing’s last novel Alfred and Emily – a patchwork created from fragments of dictionary definitions and encyclopaedic entries, a selection of literary quotes and a memoir about the writer’s brother. Broadly, the book is divided into two parts: the first part is a fictitious biography of the author’s parents, whereas the second part contains memories about them and their life in the bush. The second one supplements the first part with historical facts and critical moments from the family’s life. By constructing an alternative story about her parents, Lessing creates a counterfactual auto/biography by eliminating one historical fact which had impact on their lives and brought painful losses. By focusing precisely on the year 1914, Lessing tests ideas put forward by the British virtual history champion Niall Ferguson, who, contrary to Marxist historiosophy, postulates that the history of the world is contingent.
3
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Anthropogenic Worlds of Transformation and Destruction: Doris Lessing’s Climate Fiction Duology

88%
Baysal K.
Jednak Książki. Gdańskie Czasopismo Humanistyczne
|
2022
|
issue 15
31-50
EN
Depicting a world stricken with an ice age in the North and drought in the South, Doris Lessing’s Mara and Dann: An Adventure (1999) recounts the survival story of two siblings, Mara and Dann, amidst un/natural and societal havoc. The sequel, The Story of General Dann, Mara’s Daughter, Griot, and the Snow Dog (2005) pictures the dramatic transformations both in the nonhuman nature and the protagonists’ lives after the devastating disasters in the first novel. Migrating among thousands of people from the south towards northern Ifrik and passing through desolate lands scorched with drought, 4re, 3ood, and diseases in Mara and Dann, the protagonists mature as they learn to live in a perilous and erratic world populated with survivalists solely focused on personal gain. Through the horrendous picture of an Ifrik parched with drought in the South and frosted with a solid layer of ice at the top north, the novel pictures the helplessness of humankind through Mara and Dann’s quest for life in the face of unstoppable and inevitable environmental calamities. With the melting of the ice in the Northern Yerrup and the flooding in the Northern Ifrik, General Dann delivers Dann’s struggle to cope with his personal loss as the world changes once again, and the climate gets cooler. Obsessed with knowledge and set on to save a library, he races against time, human beings, and the hostile nonhuman environment. In this light, this study aims to analyse Doris Lessing’s climate fiction (cli-fi) duology, Mara and Dann: An Adventure and General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot, and the Snow Dog as climate fiction novels reflecting the destructive impact of climate change on humans and nonhuman nature in the anthropogenic conditions of the fictional world, which is not a far cry from our world in the twenty-first century.
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Beyond the Breakdown of Communication: Exploring Obstacles to Communicating in the Novels of Doris Lessing

75%
Kamińska P.
Anglica. An International Journal of English Studies
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2012
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issue 21/1
95-105
EN
This paper aims to explore the breakdown of communication in the novels written by Doris Lessing, and investigate into the nature of experience that is conveyed despite the failure of language. Lessing’s fiction is abundant with the symptoms of breakdown, and the heroines’ experience is often rendered by means of fragmentation of the narrative form. Anna Wulf, the heroine of The Golden Notebook, can only deal with her experience by writing about it in separate notebooks; the protagonist of Memoirs of a Survivor delivers a most confusing memoir in which facts and events intertwine with dreams and visions. According to Lacan’s theory of the three registers of human experience, the real, the symbolic and the imaginary, language fails in the face of the real. Nevertheless, the twentieth-century trauma theory allows for investigating into the realm of the real. Critics such as Cathy Caruth and Geoffrey Hartman emphasise the importance of reaching for what is without words, reading despite the silence and fragmentation. By applying their approach to Doris Lessing’s fiction one can truly appreciate her recognition of the human condition in the modern world, and read beyond the breakdown of communication.
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Humanity Scripts in Doris Lessing’s The Marriages between Zones Three, Four, and Five and The Cleft

75%
Marecki M.
Anglica Wratislaviensia
|
2014
|
issue 52
19 - 30
EN
Despite a span of thirty-seven years stretching the dates of their publication, Lessing’s The Marriages between Zones Three, Four, and Five (1980) and The Cleft (2007) share a common theme and genre (space fiction). Set in an unspecified past in imaginary universes, they both chronicle how two geographically separate and culturally divergent communities join forces in a collective struggle to subvert the effects of an inscrutable power enveloping their respective lands. This paper argues that, through their foregrounding of utopian longing, The Marriages and The Cleft present a coherent vision of humanity and thus can be seen as instruments to “cultivate humanity” (Nussbaum 1997). Employing the cognitive tools of schemas and scripts (Schank and Abelson 1977), the paper explores the ways Lessing enforces her social project and, simultaneously, attempts to modify the reader’s cognitive schema of humanity through cognitive scripting. It arrives at two main conclusions. First, Lessing’s five-component humanity script not only closely corresponds to M. Scott Peck’s (1987) well-established model of community building, but it outweighs the latter in its scope. Second, in her formulation of the concept of ideal society, Lessing, rather than resorting to radical approaches and ideologies, opts for “reforming society in movement and change” (Greene 1994: 188).
6
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W pułapce plaas. Postkolonialne reinterpretacje południowoafrykańskiej powieści farmerskiej.

71%
Schiller N.
Zagadnienia Rodzajów Literackich
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2014
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vol. 57/113 z. 1
43-57
PL
Artykuł omawia genologiczne aspekty południowoafrykańskiej powieści farmerskiej (plaasroman), ze wskazaniem na aktualne odczytania tego gatunku w nurcie współczesnej prozy postkolonialnej. Tradycyjna plaasroman realizowała wartości typowe dla nacjonalizmu, rasizmu i patriarchalizmu, które z jednej strony ukonstytuowały poczucie przynależności narodowej Burów, z drugiej zaś legły u podstaw usankcjonowanego później systemu segregacji rasowej. Z tego powodu podstawowy schemat fabularny plaasroman stał się obiektem ironicznych reinterpretacji pisarzy kontestujących system kolonialny, jak ma to miejsce w omówionych w pracy powieściach: Życie i czasy Michaela K. J. M. Coetzeego, Trawa śpiewa Doris Lessing oraz Zachować swój świat Nadine Gordimer.
EN
The article contains a generic analysis of a traditional South African farm novel (plaasroman) including current reception of this genre within contemporary post-colonial fiction. A classic plaasroman was based on social values such as nationalism, racism and patriarchalism, which constituted a sense of national identity of the Boers, but also became the basis of the institutionalized racial discrimination. For this reason, the main narrative theme of plaasroman has been critically rewritten by the writers who contested colonial authority. These reinterpretations are being discussed based on three examples — Life and Times of Michael K. by J. M. Coetzee, The grass is singing by Doris Lessing and The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer.
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Szczeliny i Tryskacze. Rekonstrukcja literackich mechanizmów wytwarzania potworności w powieści Doris Lessing Szczelina

63%
Popławski B.
Przegląd Humanistyczny
|
2015
|
vol. 59(3 (450))
25-34
PL
The aim of the article is to characterize discursive mechanisms of creating monstrosity in the best-selling book The Cleft by Doris Lessing. The introduction describes sources of social teratology. It presents the biography of the author of the novel and the reception of the analyzed work. Then the author discusses who are Monsters in The Cleft as well as the function they fulfill and what symbolize.
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