Authors:Maciej Michalski Pages: 10 - 30 Abstract: The article discusses various forms and aspects of the conceptualization of war as a tension between the individual and the total. The starting point is the philosophical reflection of B. Miciński, E. Levinas and G.W. Hegel, and then the conception of war as a form of totalizing, e.g. by subordinating it to ideology, nationality and other forms of collective identity, and reducing man to a material or numerical dimension, are presented. War is often described as an autonomous and inhuman force depriving man of subjectivity and agency. On the other hand, the literature analyzed in the article, mainly non-fictional, often focuses on saving individuality through the description of individual stories. Such conceptualizations also appear in reportages about the war in Ukraine. PubDate: 2023-11-20 DOI: 10.26881/jk.2023.16.01
Authors:Aleksandra Hołubowicz Pages: 31 - 48 Abstract: The protagonist-narrator of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel, as he often repeats, is a person of two minds. As the child of a Vietnamese woman and a French Catholic priest, he becomes a „hybrid” on the genetic level and later also in the cultural sphere. His upbringing has not only been influenced by the Catholic religion, communist indoctrination but also by the American literary canon, as he has graduated from a literary studies program in the US. He is a communist spy in the South Vietnamese Army during the war, and after the fall of South Vietnam he escapes to the United States as one of the few refugees. Loyal to the communist revolution in the US, he continues his intelligence activities going to any lengths and using any means considered necessary. The nameless narrator is not only a character that reminds a hero from a Hollywood action movie, but also a hybrid – a man who, through diversity or perhaps the merging of mutually exclusive identities, inhabits the sphere in between. This phenomenon, called nepantlerismo by Gloria Anzaldúa, means consciously navigating the gaps between the binary oppositions of those who belong to neither of the two sides. In the article, I look at the phenomenon of hybridity and consider to what measure it can be seen as an antidote to national chauvinism, imperialism and violence. I also examine what Viet Thanh Nguyen in his scholarly work calls the „industrialization of memory,” viewing Hollywood as a tool for producing memories of the Vietnam War operating within the US military-industrial complex. PubDate: 2023-11-20 DOI: 10.26881/jk.2023.16.02
Authors:Paulina Sokólska Pages: 49 - 58 Abstract: This article is an attempt of a lecture of Tadeusz Nowak’s novel Such a Greater Wedding in an anthropological key. The author examines a testimonial value of Nowak’s writing, interpreting a relationship between characters of different ethnicity: Polish peasants in a role of bystanders next to Jewish and Romani victims of Holocaust, through the concept of Andrzej Leder’s slept-through revolution. The paper also gives an insight in the Nowak’s use of grotesque, which serves to express dynamics of ressentiment and violence. PubDate: 2023-11-20 DOI: 10.26881/jk.2023.16.03
Authors:Christina Howes Pages: 59 - 71 Abstract: This article examines a sub-genre of postmemoirs which have been published since the mid1980s, written by children and grandchildren of veteran combatants of the Allied Forces. These British and American generational texts both preserve and unveil hidden historical memory of these men’s participation in what is often referred to as the deadliest war in human history. The silent suffering of these veterans and their families had not been widely disclosed until Stephen Spielberg’s film Saving Private Ryan opened a Pandora’s box. And yet, it remains an enigmatic memory in the collective consciousness of the post-war period. These writers recount the experiences not only of their fathers’ wars, but of homecoming and the subsequent psychological impact of the war on family life, whilst also attempting to understand and come to terms with their own traumatic resonances rooted in these veterans’ Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I discuss some examples of these texts, which include writers such as Germaine Greer, Lucinda Franks, Leila Levinson, Cole Moreton, or Carol Schultz Vento, who have written within this postmemoir sub-genre. I discuss some common approaches to these postmemorial narratives, which interweave tropes of archival romance, confessional literature, and historiographic metafiction. These family postmemoirs challenge the oft mythologized cultural memory of the ‘Good War’, question the meaning of heroism, and reveal the unspoken traumas of post-war familial life, and ultimately contribute not only to disclosing an unknown history but to broadening the thematic horizons of postmemory to the post-generations of Allied ex-servicemen. PubDate: 2023-11-20 DOI: 10.26881/jk.2023.16.04
Authors:Wiktoria Kulak Pages: 72 - 82 Abstract: The main aim of the article is to examine the human’s attitude towards the other’s death. The field of research was limited to the death testimony of a parent in Polish literature after 1989, based on Mikołaj Łoziński’s Book (2011) and Marcin Wicha’s Things, I didn’t Throw Away (2017). The analysis was focused on the way in which the biographies of the deceased can be created by memories of them in the different phases of grief, and on the creation of intergenerational connections between the orphaned subjects and the material remains corresponding to the life of the dead. PubDate: 2023-11-20 DOI: 10.26881/jk.2023.16.05
Authors:Maria G. Moschou Pages: 83 - 104 Abstract: In the paper, I critically discuss the commemorative exhibition “Asia Minor Hellenism: Heyday-Catastrophe-Displacement-Rebirth” (Athens, Benaki Museum, 2022–2023), examining the role of postmemory in the shaping of national identity in contemporary Greece. Building my analysis on Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, I draw attention to commemorative exhibition practices and the intergenerational transmission of collective traumatic experiences related to dark events of national significance. Touching upon issues concerning the civilianization of war, I interrogate commemorative exhibitions as prefabricated events, bringing to the fore the selective management of collective memory through exhibition design. PubDate: 2023-11-20 DOI: 10.26881/jk.2023.16.06
Authors:Szlukovényi Katalin Pages: 105 - 114 Abstract: The Hungarian-born English contemporary poet George Szirtes has written several times about two traumas of his family history: the Holocaust, which both his parents survived, while several of their relatives perished, and the Revolution of 1956, which forced them into exile. My paper focuses on two major narratives about Szirtes’s mother: a cycle of poems “Metro” (1988) and a biography in prose The Photographer at Sixteen (2019). Exploring the differences in perspective and form as well as the similarities in themes and structure, I seek the answer to the questions how one’s own memories are intertwined with the past of the communities where one belongs; how these controversial sets of memories might lead to internal conflicts; and how the memory of one’s predecessors are being transformed by the process of the speaker’s own transformation in the time span of three decades. Investigating these aspects, I argue that Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory not only proves to be instrumental in understanding several books by Szirtes better but also that Szirtes goes one step further than Hirsch by revealing how individual memory not only is embedded into and influenced by communal memory, but also is constructed in the form of family memories passed on from one generation to the next. PubDate: 2023-11-20 DOI: 10.26881/jk.2023.16.07
Authors:Elena Ogliari Pages: 115 - 128 Abstract: Drawing on recent scholarship on transcultural memory and its role in peacebuilding, this paper explores the implications of entangling memories that belong to different pasts, places, and cultural groups in Joseph O’Connor’s Redemption Falls (2007) and Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic (2013). Both novels, written by authors interested in the notions of oppression and suppression of stories, are polyphonic texts that disrupt any single linear narrative by interweaving multiple storylines through constant movements across time and space. McCann’s focus shifts from the aftermath of WWI to the 1998 Belfast Agreement, while O’Connor’s novel deals with the American Civil War and Irish nationalism; both recount episodes of the Great Famine, the ensuing emigration, and the history of Abolitionism. Hence, painful memories of the Irish mingle with the mnemonic repertoires of those who suffered the abominations of slavery or internecine conflict in an attempt to give voice to the marginalised and highlight bonds between (apparently unrelated) groups of people. Moreover, this convergence of inherited memories binds the past with the present and the future, as the recollections have echoes of contemporary conflicts and global phenomena involving Ireland, whose role in them is implicitly interrogated. By fusing significant cultural memories across generations and spaces, these novels assert the ‘historical duty’ to remember to promote negotiation and mutual understanding between different cultural groups today. This paper, therefore, will first offer an overview of contemporary Irish fiction, characterised by an original world-facing, rather than nation-focused, outlook. Second, it will undertake the analysis of the selected novels to contribute to the ongoing discussion about the potential of literature to build sound knowledge of diverse human experiences and, as a consequence, promote peace. PubDate: 2023-11-20 DOI: 10.26881/jk.2023.16.08
Authors:Martyna Wielewska-Baka Pages: 129 - 141 Abstract: One of the most discussed TV series of recent years is Fauda (directed by A. Issaharoff and L. Raz). In the article, I discuss the reception of the film in the Israeli and Western media, as well as the ways of representing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the series in the context of the so-called war on terrorism and forms of violence. In my work, I am particularly interested in the following questions: in what form did the idea of conflict return to the screens and to the public debate' How has the Palestinian issue been marginalized in the Israeli public consciousness' Under what conditions does the violence intensify' Taking into account the forms of violence presented in the series, I am inclined to the thesis that the creators of “Fauda” are trying, sometimes with greater, sometimes less success, to look critically at the reality dictated by the laws of war. PubDate: 2023-11-20 DOI: 10.26881/jk.2023.16.09
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