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The Problem of Kitsch in the Context of Holocaust Fiction: Jonathan Littell and Bernhard Schlink

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Ghita R., Ghita C.

Jednak Książki. Gdańskie Czasopismo Humanistyczne

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2016

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issue 6 "The Holocaust and the Contemporary World"

107-124

EN

This paper aims to discuss the problem of kitsch within a broader framework encompassing the issues and limits of representation in the case of fictional works dealing with concentration camp trauma. Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader (Der Vorleser, 1995) and Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (Les Bienveillantes, 2006) have both achieved international acclaim yet also sparked a huge scandal mainly for their narrative choice of embracing the (controversial) point of view of the perpetrator. Some of the harshest critics in Germany have issued condemnations on grounds of kitsch, lack of aesthetic value and moral relativism; even the term ‘Holo-kitsch’ was coined. Yet the label ‘kitsch’ was attached by some voices even to The Hunger Angel (Schaukelatem, 2009), a totally different kind of novel depicting horrendous events in a Soviet concentration camp from the perspective of a Romanian German deported to Ukraine. This is a work of fiction belonging to a Nobel prize laureate famous for her difficult metaphoric style, Herta Müller, and rooted in the poetic prose of German Expressionism. We would like to outline the main points of the debate, drawing both on reception data and on scholarly papers, whilst investigating the various (and often fuzzy) assumptions which seem to be related to the kitsch-concept within the context of Holocaust/Gulag fiction, for example, the extent to which it implies a negative value judgement from an aesthetic perspective and/or an ethically grounded uneasiness about trespassing moral limits of representation.

2

Diplomats as Poets, Poets as Diplomats. Poetic Gifts and Literary Reflections on the Dutch Mediations between Poland-Lithuania and Sweden in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century

86%

Hulsenboom P.

Legatio: The Journal for Renaissance and Early Modern Diplomatic Studies

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2019

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issue 3

EN

This article examines two Dutch diplomatic missions, in 1627–28 and 1635, by which the United Provinces intervened in a Polish-Swedish armed conflict in Prussia. The focus is on ‘diplomatic poetics’: the ways in which literature functioned within diplomatic practice, and how that practice (or the ‘diplomatic moment’) was in turn envisioned in literature. The Polish-Swedish conflict was of great interest to the United Provinces, and was elaborately discussed in various Dutch media, as well as in the correspondences of merchants and politicians. The Dutch embassies to Polish territories themselves, meanwhile, inspired a number of literary works, published mostly in the Republic, but also in for example Danzig and Königsberg. These sources demonstrate how early modern literary and diplomatic practices in Europe overlapped and influenced each other. Firstly, German, French and Dutch poems by Johannes Plavius, Simon van Beaumont and Joost van den Vondel illustrate the blurring of the lines between the realms of diplomacy and literature. Poems could function as diplomatic gifts, enabling both personal, intellectual communication and the widespread transmission of political messages. Moreover, Latin and German plays by Johannes Narssius and Simon Dach, and more importantly Latin poems by Simon van Beaumont and Caspar Barlaeus, as well as an illustrated Dutch account of the first mission by Abraham Booth, reveal that the Dutch envoys featured in literary narratives as both wise peace bringers and travelling poets, and their missions to Poland as both arduous ordeals and epic adventures. Much like poetic gifts, these literary reflections on ‘the diplomatic moment’ had public diplomatic agency, simultaneously voicing political opinions and crafting artistic images of the diplomats themselves.

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„Okolica znana, oswojona”. Warszawa w „Cwaniarach” Sylwii Chutnik

86%

Sidoruk E.

Białostockie Studia Literaturoznawcze

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2018

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issue 13

133-148

EN

The articles analyzes the poetics in Sylwia Chutnik’s Cwaniary. It is the audacious parody of urban courtyard ballad about four Warsaw feminist scallywags (Polish: 'cwaniary') who fist-fight to take control in the city. The author of the article demonstrates thatWarsaw is not merely the novel’s background scenery but also its main character. By analyzing the poetics of the city in the context of Chutnik’s metatextual remarks and her city guide Warszawa Kobiet (Women’s Warsaw) the author concentrates on the function of description to evoke the Warsaw genius loci. It is in the descriptive parts of the book that the writer particularly demonstrates her fascination with the city, which she herself calls ‘sickness’. This picture of Warsaw results from Chutnik’s social activism and from the attempts to ‘tame’ the place whose traumatic past leaves traces in her literary works.

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Character as a Vanishing Point in American Experimental Fiction

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Karoui-Elounelli S.

American, British and Canadian Studies Journal

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2012

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vol. 19

56-76

EN

My paper discusses the construction of character in some American experimental narratives within the optical paradigm of the vanishing point. In a first part the investment of the pictorial notion of the vanishing point in Faulkner’s Light in August will be discussed as an instance of the occasional confrontation in Modernist fiction of the limits of literary representation, even if the pictorial category is adapted (and so limited) to the specific issue of biracial identity. In a second part, William Gass’s short story “Mrs. Mean” and Paul Auster’s The Locked Room will be examined as instances of a sustained critical recasting of the very concept of character. The trope of the vanishing point is consciously deployed in both texts to reinvent fictional character within the challenging scope of borderlines between presence and absence, the life-like (mimetic) and the purely verbal.

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1 American, British and Canadian Studies Journal

1 Białostockie Studia Literaturoznawcze

1 Jednak Książki. Gdańskie Czasopismo Humanistyczne

1 Legatio: The Journal for Renaissance and Early Modern Diplomatic Studies

1 Ghita C.

1 Ghita R.

1 Hulsenboom P.

1 Karoui-Elounelli S.

1 Sidoruk E.

1 2019

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The Problem of Kitsch in the Context of Holocaust Fiction: Jonathan Littell and Bernhard Schlink

Diplomats as Poets, Poets as Diplomats. Poetic Gifts and Literary Reflections on the Dutch Mediations between Poland-Lithuania and Sweden in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century

„Okolica znana, oswojona”. Warszawa w „Cwaniarach” Sylwii Chutnik

Character as a Vanishing Point in American Experimental Fiction