In her paper the author undertakes to analyze one of John Paul II’s statements pertaining to literature and culture. This is a letter prepared and submitted on the occasion of a death anniversary of Jan Kochanowski (aka John of Czarnolas) (1530–1584). Since the beginning of his pontificate, John Paul II – by means of references to literature – would indicate what was valuable, common, essential for his compatriots. Therefore it can be assumed that his words have acquired a culture-creative dimension. The sociological and literary dimension of the message is definitely worth appreciation. The pope would address his words to anyone and everyone. The author defines and analyses the pope’s utterance as transgressive. Also in its structure the Pope’s utterance is transgressive, comprising a variety of different forms which are adroitly linked owing to the open mind of the sender who is a sender knowing that verba volant, scripta manent.
The subject of the paper is to observe a coincidence between description and performance in autobiographic narratives. As an example, this phenomenon is traced in autobiographic writings by the Slovak prose writer Alta Vášová (1939), produced between the years 1995 and 2019. Her prose works Úlety/Flights of Fancy, Ostrovy nepamäti/Islands of Non-memory, Sfarbenia/Colorations, Menoslov/Name List, Dolety a Odlety/Ranges and Departures feature a strange type of memoir writing, which points to a certain general semiotic property of autobiographic memoir narration. From the semiotic, referential and stylistic points of view, this type of writing is part of latent discussion on the nature of creative work with a literary text at the level of basic stylistic and composition techniques of epic: description, narration and performative perspective of narrative representations. The paper is an attempt at presenting their mutual coincidence, inseparability and poetological scaling in Alta Vášová´s memoir writing. It also raises the question of performative and descriptive modality of recollecting (as a substitute of culture and history) in memoir writing.
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