Travelling in Time and Space: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll and In Wonderland by Sylwia Chutnik

• Authors: Włodarczyk Anna
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The paper offers a reading of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Sylwia Chutnik’s collection of short stories W krainie czarów [In wonderland], addressing the protagonists’ journey into self. Chutnik’s stories are interpreted in terms of some key motifs drawn from a reading of Carroll’s novel, which constitute the touch points of the two authorial designs: dream, imagination, metamorphosis, change, language, auto-thematicity, the demiurgic role of the narrator, and an open ending. Juxtaposed, these concepts shed light on the problem of travelling in time and space understood as a return to the world of childhood imagination. The analysis of Chutnik’s eleven short stories reveals a literary creation of signifying space, in particular the images of Warsaw and Silesia as sites appropriated by history as well as by the protagonists. In every case (be it cities, people’s experiences or post-traumatic stories), an attempted interpretation of particular places and times is shown as a process of discovering the mythology of space – a return to a personal Wonderland. The reflections are brought together by referring to the problem of “bad memory”, a literary means of presenting the reader with alternative testimonies of postmemory.

Keywords

EN

dream; imagination; metamorphosis; change; language; autothematism; the demiurge-narrator; an open ending

• Publisher: Oficyna Wydawnicza ATUT – Wrocławskie Wydawnictwo Oświatowe
• Journal: Filoteknos
• Year: 2022
• Issue: 12
• Pages: 83-100

Dates

published

2023-01-26

Contributors

author

Włodarczyk Anna

• Jagiellonian University in Kraków

References

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• Nowak, K. (2014). Sylwia Chutnik w krainie czarów. Polish Radio Channel 2. Download from: http://www.polskieradio.pl/8/378/Artykul/1151403/.
• Włodarczyk, A. (2019). Powrót do Krainy Czarów. Podróż w czasie i przestrzeni w prozie Sylwii Chutnik. In: D. Hejda. A. Jakubowska-Ożóg (eds.), Przestrzeń i czas w lekturze – lektura przestrzeni i czasu (260–278). Rzeszów: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Rzeszowskiego.

Identifiers

DOI

10.23817/filotek.12-5