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EN
The major role in contemporary sociology belongs to the issue of autobiography and the so-called biographical method, understood variously. There is a development of research on history of life based on both subjective and objective sources. Professor Szczepanski applies both these ways. The authoress focuses on his works on the course of life, based on scholarly research results, but also on his personal reflections, his own experience and common knowledge. This is what there is to be found in 'Sprawy ludzkie' (1978) (Human Issues) and 'O indywidualnosci' (1988) (On Individuality).
EN
The aim of study is to analyse essential poet logical aspect of Jan Francisci’s autobiography. Already published source materials and narratological and historiographical secondary literature were used in the process of composing the study. It is mainly focused on the problem of vague genre status of the text in which structure autobiographical and historiographical narrative strategies are alternating. The most substantial issue is the transformation process of historiographical techniques into the text with autographical frameworks and the technique of modification of historiographical perspective into subjective (autobiographical) form in this type of texts. Interpretations which explain subject matter and topic of this text result from the problem mentioned above. The second substantial problem is subjects capturing and its role in the text since it is one of the crucial categories with respect to genre. According to the analyses mentioned in the study the subject captured in Vlastný životopis (My Autobiography) appears peripheral, de-psychologized, without adequate individual attributes and thus as a subject without a concept of autonomous identity. Peripheral status of subject in Francisci’s Autobiography is closely related to predominant historical and social context which represents main story line of thinking. Considering this fact we would like to imply the question whether the structure of the text is not closer to memoirs than to autobiography. Besides these the study touches upon a category of narrator, his competency and position in relation to the reader.
EN
Alta Vášová returned to her literary roots in the mid-1990s. The paper deals with the expert reading, analysis of and comments on the proses that she included in her book titled Ostrovy nepamäti (The Islands of Non-Memory, 2008) overlapping with her later books Sfarbenia (Colorations, 2011) and Menoslov (The Name List, 2014). The paper is an attempt at identifying the particularity of the writer´s biographical writing, focus on detail and fragment as meaningful parts of the whole message in the original autobiographical writing. A part included in the paper is a reflection on stylistic possibilities of non-pragmatic narrative, which eliminates the borders between the author, the narrator and the genre in favour of new text strategies.
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EN
The paper studies the theoretical and literary-historical aspect of autobiographical writing, drawing from French theories. It attempts to define the character and content of the concept of autobiographical writing, deals with the problematic of authorial subject, touches upon the problem of historiography, genre characteristics and reception. It briefly describes the development of autobiography in the last two decades.
EN
This text proposes an analysis of wartime diaries using a concept whereby diary is approached on a broader basis than just as a text, namely, as a writing praxis of one's everyday life, having three essential dimensions to it: existential-pragmatic, material, and textual. In all those dimensions, war exerts a critical impact on what shape the practice of keeping a diary takes. The existential-pragmatic facet primarily includes the various motivations for one to write down his or her diary (be it existential, social, historical, or pragmatic). Whilst being testimonies to the times of violence, killing, and annihilation, wartime diaries simultaneously become existential acts keeping up the space of what is human, in the face of the inhuman. Seen from the material angle, wartime diaries disclose their specificity both as regards their carriers (such as using some utilitarian 'carriers' of the printed word, such as pieces of packaging, labels, forms) and their look or physical shape (mutilations, gaps, destroyed or lost diaries). The textual dimension of wartime diaries is only mentioned in this article, as part of polemic with Jacek Leociak's book titled 'Tekst wobec Zaglady'. In the final section, the author indicates the way in which a contact or clash occurs, in all the three dimensions of wartime diaries (i.e. pragmatics, text, and diary's materiality), between the common and the uncommon, the everyday and the unusual, the ordinary and the extraordinary, the human and the inhuman. This particular trait is treated as the decisive one in terms of wartime diary's singularity against the textual cultural world's space.
EN
Texts from the field of autopathography are close to the professional discourse of the medical sciences and offer alternative ways of conceptualizing and thinking about illness. The recent autopathographic works that are analysed in this article describe illnesses that are no longer evaluated as consequences of social developments, as was usually the case in the “new interiority”; rather, pathologies are interpreted as part of an individual life. Since the associated experiences and the consequences of the disease are serious for the individual life, the question of personal identity is often raised. The question of self is always relevant when people who express this question do not know or no longer know who they are (or have become), or when they no longer have a sense of unity. This concerns not only external orders (i.e. uprooting of any kind), but also internal disruption. These insecurities are thus the trigger for questions about identity that are posed in the analysed texts.
EN
Approximately 16,000 people left Estonia during 1924-1938. Among the new destinations, the most important ones were South American countries, especially Argentina and Brazil. At the time, Argentina was an attractive destination for immigrants. In the first half of the 20th century, Argentina surpassed the majority of European countries with regard to the income per capita, health care and education. The first larger group of Estonians (30-50 people) arrived in Argentina in 1924. In each following year, the number of Estonian immigrants fluctuated between 40 and 60, so that by 1930, about 300-350 Estonians lived in Argentina, mostly in the capital Buenos Aires. The current article examines, on one hand, the relationship between (external) environmental conditions of migration and (internal) personal migration related decisions. On the other hand, the micro level of migration is analysed through a biographical narrative, particularly focusing on the impact of personal migration and the adaptation story on the retrospective autobiography. The micro level of migration is observed mainly on the basis of an autobiographical novel by Raimund Podder. His earlier written travelogue, and the letters and surveys of other Estonian settlers in Argentina offer opportunities for substantial comparisons. Text examples from the writings of R. Podder, presented in this article, are inclined to give evidence of a typical voluntary labour migrant: young, unmarried man, whose first phases of adaptation pass without obstacles. However, some background information allows the conclusion that the orientation phase of the adaptation was not without conflicting moments which could leave a nostalgic stamp on the retrospective analysis of his personal life.
World Literature Studies
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2023
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vol. 15
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issue 4
67 – 82
EN
The article examines the Czech author Ota Filip’s auto-fictional texts Sedmý životopis (The seventh autobiography, 2000) and Osmý čili nedokončený životopis (The eighth or unfinished autobiography, 2007) in the intersection of several contexts. Based on archival research of Filip’s estate, it reconstructs their complex genesis and examines the factors that influenced their final edition, as well as the differences between the Czech and German versions of Sedmý životopis. The study analyses the narrative as well as broader textual and paratextual strategies that create the hybrid status of the two “autobiographies” and provide the reader with contradictory instructions: to read the texts as autobiography and/or as fiction. This tension is also investigated with regard to the reception of Filip’s texts. The study further exposes some of Filip’s mystifications and reveals how he uses the porous boundary between fact and fiction to come to terms with his traumas and media scandals, and to create a socially acceptable image of himself. Both autobiographies are also placed in the broader context of Filip’s literary works and contemporary Czech literature.
EN
A theoretical commentary to the famous definition of 'self-fiction' (also referred to as 'auto-fiction'). The author analyses his own novel 'Fils', drawing our attention to the point at which the autobiographical project collapses whilst the subject spinning out a narrative about himself gets transferred into a self-fiction register, under the pressure of language.
Slavica Slovaca
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2016
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vol. 51
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issue 3
3 - 93
EN
The preacher and musician P. Paulinus Bajan OFM (1721–1792) was a prominent figure of eighteenth-century Slovakia. Having received his primary and secondary education from the Jesuits in his native town of Skalica, Bajan decided to join the Franciscan Order in 1740. He did his novitiate in Pruské, than he studied philosophy in Eger and moral theology in Vác, following which he was ordained priest in 1746. Father Paulinus spent his life in various convents of the Salvatorian province. After a few initial years spent in present-day Hungary (Eger, Széchény, Vác), he was, upon his own request, transferred to Slovakia where he remained permanently, being active as an organ player, instructing young friars in singing and organ-playing , and finally becoming an eminent preacher. The places of his abode in Slovakia included Prešov, Hlohovec, Beckov, and Skalica. His extant works consist of fourteen music collections, which contain also his own compositions, as well as four thick volumes of sermons written in Slovak. It is at the end of the fourth volume of the said sermons that Bajan inserted his Latin autobiography which he wrote in the period 1772–1775, that is, after he had finished his preaching career. This autobiography is now being presented to scholars in our critical edition together with a Slovak translation, with the hope that it will serve as a basis for further research. Father Paulinus’s autobiography is quite special in that it contains a great number of his childhood memories, partly reported to him by his relatives, as well as memories of hi school years, including his musical education, and a lively account of his time spent in Hungarian convents where he among other things experienced repeated bullying from his superiors on account of his being Slovak. These are all authentic memories, though sometimes they may not precisely match the actual facts due to Father Paulinus’s expressive way of putting things and occasional mistakes in dates. He recorded his life as he remembered it, in an enthralling style, using the kind of informal, conversational Latin he spoke with his co-brethren. Like the Slovak language of his sermons, the Latin of his autobiography is charged with emotion, which makes him a typical product of the Baroque era. Symbolically enough, Father Bajan ended his autobiography in the middle of a sentence when referring to the ascension to the throne of Joseph II whose church reforms had a most distressing impact on his religious congregation.
EN
The research into spatial categories is enjoying a lot of attention in contemporary literary theory as well as in interdisciplinary research. In the introduction the author of the paper offers an overview of certain theoretical and practical approaches to the phenomenon of town in Central Europe. Then he deals with the autobiographical proses written by Ján Rozner (1922 – 2006), especially the books Noc po fronte (The Night after the Front, 2010) and Výlet na Devín (The Trip to the Devín Castle, 2011). The attention is mainly paid to the analysis of the relationships between: 1.) the literary representation of the urban space 2.) the autobiographical genre and 3.) the writer´s personality. He arrives at the conclusion that in case of J. Rozner´s prosaic work the three theoretical issues are inseparably connected. „Rozner´s“ Bratislava is not only the background in his proses, the space effectively contributes to the way the writer artistically captures the basic subject, which is the relationship between the Central European intellectual and the complicated cultural and political history of the region in the 20th century. J. Rozner uses retrospective narration in order to come to terms with his own problematic past and the literary representation of Bratislava serves as part of the process of intellectual „reanimation“ of the writer in contemporary Slovak culture.
EN
The paper interprets “Obyčejný život”, a work by Karel Čapek in the context of the late 20th century autobiography theories. Previous interpretations are more or less dominated by the so called noetic aspects, however, the autobiographical difficulties raised by the work, the impossibility of imagining life as narration, and facing the multifacetedness of the self-raise the possibility of employing autobiographical considerations. An interesting feature of the analysed work is that it includes an embedded story, an autobiographical text, which has a double structure: the first part includes a traditional autobiography; the second part consists of the dismantlement, rethinking and re-evaluation of the first part. The aim of this anti-autobiography is to liberate the autobiographer from his illusions about the working of an autobiography and to point at the failure of idealized preconceptions about life story narration. An anti-autobiography works as meta-autobiography and rewrites the relationship of the autobiography and the autobiographer. It intends to riddle the autobiographer ś myth about his/her own autobiographer: it points at the fact that the autobiographer works with a distorting memory instead of a precise one and employs metaphorical narration instead of metonymical, presents only life fragments instead of a whole life story and instead of a homogeneous self it presents multiple, heterogeneous subject.
EN
The article analyses the function of intra- and intertextual references in Ivana Dobrakovová’s first book “Prvá smrť v rodine” (First death in the family, 2009), taking the principle of disintegration as the basic principle of Dobrakovová’s writing. As a result of author’s intra-textual work, the texts transgress the genre of short story and foreground the mono-perspectival narrative consciousness. This in turn leads to a pronounced relativisation of the position of the narrative category of character and to situationally constituted narrative forms as related to the “theme-problem” horizon of the work. Intertextual work, on the other hand, contaminates the mono-perspectival narrative consciousness and in this way disqualifies it. The principle of disintegration leads to an accentuation of the presence of the implied author which in turn makes the text seems more autobiographical. The figure of the implied author (which can never be identified with the empirical writer) is aesthetically productive: although it is fully governed by the poetics of the text, it also allows the readers to evoke the empirical author. The poetics thus creates conditions for ambivalence – the analysed texts can be read both as a fiction and as an autobiography.
EN
In the recent decades of the 20th century, little interest about empirical authors within modern literary science, has been problematical mainly in Polish literary practice. The author has been returning into Polish literary scholarly reflection by several ways: as a result of an incursion into the literature of paraliterary genres; as bringing the auto-consciousness of the author to present time, which starts the mechanism of mimesis; as a part of meta-fiction. The conception of a biographical triangle by Czerminska (evidence, profession, challenge) is presented on the background of a discussion on functions and conceptions of genealogical studying of literature (Balcerzan, Bartoszynski, Balbus). A characteristic tendency in Polish literature to mark the work of art by the person of the author, which is treated in the conception of presence of the author in a work as a process (not an artefact), has been approached by Zieniewicz as a style of behaving and style of realness, and, for example, presented by Nycz in a more widely conceived biographical discourse. For the authors of the youngest generation the auto/biographical methods of older generations become biographical figures, which are possible to use in diversely conceived situations of narration and metafiction. In the end of the study it is stated that in the Polish literary scholarly reflection different tendencies are present: studying literature in the framework of genealogical systems as well as discursive approach, in which genealogical notions are suppressed.
EN
This article draws attention to the autobiographical remembrance of East German authors in their texts from the new millennium, viewing their autobiographical work through the lens of generational belonging. Using exemplary autobiographical texts, it demonstrates how they (re)construct memories of the East German past, what narrative strategies the authors use, and what their autobiographical texts bring to non-literary discourses. Generational differences are exposed mainly in the use of meta-autobiographical procedures to differing degrees or the integration of documentary media into the process of literary remembrance, as well as in the nature of auto-fiction. Generational affiliation is mainly thematised in the strongly factual texts of the youngest GDR-born authors, often associated with marketable self-staging practices. In contrast to the Aufbaugeneration (literally “build-up generation”) which constructed the new East German society from the ruins of the post-war period, as represented by the deeply self-reflexive, fictional meta-autobiography of Christa Wolf, the autobiographies of young authors rarely reflect the complexity of the processes of remembering. By dealing with one’s own origins and linking one’s individual life story to larger socio-historical and political contexts, the most recent texts of the post-reunification generation in particular come close to autosociobiographies.
EN
The present paper deals with the specific poetics of literary critical writings which were published in Slovak literary samizdat in the late 1980s. They are writings which were published in selected samizdat editions of magazine Fragment K in 1987-89. The set of values of the Slovak dissident community in the area of literary criticism in the period of time in question was mainly formed by Ivan Kadlečík, Milan Šimečka a Martin M. Šimečka. The reviews, glosses, feuilletons feature strong autobiographic elements. The magazine Fragment K also paid attention to the official literary periodicals (especially Literárny týždenník) and reviewed the Soviet film production strongly influenced by Gorbachev´s Perestroika. The scope and character of the magazine, especially the volumes mentioned above, became more and more similar to the standard literary periodical. In spite of the difficult conditions its editors and publishers permanently faced (repressive activities of the State police), the magazine cultivated the space of free literary production.
World Literature Studies
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2023
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vol. 15
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issue 4
96 – 109
EN
Texts that attempt to mediate the author’s own experience with death illuminate the basic problem of autobiographical writing: the impossibility of fully verbalizing an authentic experience and the limits of relatability of such an experience through language. The article focuses on two works by contemporary Hungarian writers that thematise the specificity of an autobiography written at the final point of a life’s journey. Saját halál (2004; Eng. trans. Own death, 2006) by Péter Nádas (b. 1942) relates the experience with clinical death, while Hasnyálmirigynapló (2016; „Pancreatic Diary (Excerpts)“, 2017) by the late Péter Esterházy (1950–2016) documents the author’s process of dying. Based on the idea that autobiography not only restores the face and the experience of the author but also transforms it (Paul de Man), the article investigates how autobiographical text restores and deprives/disfigures the author’s own experience with death. Simultaneously it considers the interdiscursive meaning of these (autobiographical) testimonies.
EN
The object of the study is a novella 'Prutene kresla' (Basket Chairs, 1963) written by Dominik Tatarka. This novella was published altogether with his other prose 'Demon suhlasu' (Demon of Permission). The Basket Chairs signalised the new and later also characteristic features of Tatarka's auctorial idiolect. After existentially surrealistic beginning and ideologically incorrect continuance Tatarka's prose had been since the end of 50-tieth (from his bi-novella 'Rozhovory bez konca' (Endless Conversations, 1959) influenced by his effort to find his own strategy in creating his message about the contemporary ethic and aesthetic problems. A theme of existence for other person became for him a medium of such message. It meant a voluntary but also spontaneous fellowship, personal involvement in a life and destiny of a neighbour. Since the end of 50-tieth Tatarka's literary works pursued 'hand by hand' with his essays and reportages. In spite of the author's as well as period's limits the novella 'Prutene kresla' connects all mentioned above influences in a good way. Modernity in that text bears a character of self-discovery and self-identification in the existentially vulnerable historical period and as well as in cosmopolite space of later taboo 'western' world. Except of that in a very interesting way the author worked with traditional cliche of a courteousness love epic. In that text Tatarka discovered his typical autobiographic protagonist who became a narrator. It makes the novella quite important in the context of his proses. Tatarka's narrator's stylisation is based on a connection between reminiscent story telling and evocation with exemplary didactic effects.
EN
The ambiguousness of the genre structure of Bunin's Nobel Prize novel 'The Life of Arsenyev' (1927-1933) is determined by the complexity of its intratextual composition which developed against the background of Russian and West-European modernism as a variant of self-reconstruction and self-representation of the autobiographical subject. Up till now it has remained an open and discussed phenomenon in literary science evoking the creativity of methodological approaches and textual interpretations, which enable the work to be designated as a lyrical-autobiographical confession, phenomenological novel, autobiographical metatext, modern existential autobiography, auto-fiction, auto-reflection, self-identification, as well as 'poema' in prose, fictional autobiography, auto-reminiscence and memoir-novel. The problem of the genre identification of Bunin's text, which is perceived at the boundary between a traditional autobiography and a modern novel, is determined by the central lines of the author's conception of the work. Their basic feature is the ambivalence of the internal text organisation in the sense of: 1.- past – present, 2.- domestic - foreign, 3.- lyrical – epic, 4. - classical - modern, 5.- reality (documentarity) - fiction, which can be analysed in the discourse of the Russian emigrant literature of the first half of the 20th century, when the genre of the artistic autobiography reached a dominant status.
EN
The study deals with the autobiographical writings by the Slovak prose writer Vincent Šikula. It tracks the development and the contemporary transformations of the author´s self-image from the beginning of his career as a writer in the 1960s until the end of his life in 2001. It builds on widely available sources, i.e. Šikula´s non-fiction writings of memoir nature, such as reflections on him and the others, biographical sketches, essays, the answers in interviews, articles and surveys and so on. The author approaches them as a Modern subjective and therefore biased representation. The individual phases of his creative life show that Šikula saw his past and present in different ways. The form of his self-presentation was defined by the inner, in the course of time changing motivations and ambitions that is the efforts to take a certain place in the contemporary literary and public cultural environment, as well as the outer conditions and constraints, which underwent changes, too. Šikula began to create his own „portrait of the artist“ meant for the public as early as he embarked on his career as a writer in the mid-1960s, then in the following two decades he presented his modified version adjusted to the times, and in the period of time after the year 1990 the image became somehow completed and after his death definite. However, none of the depictions of his life in any of the periods of time mentioned contradicts what he had said about himself previously or would say later, the individual versions of him did not rule out the others, although in each of them he placed weight on a different aspect of his writer life.
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