Wojciech S. Wocław
Konteksty Kultury, Special Issue (2018), 2018, pp. 20 - 30
https://doi.org/10.4467/23531991KK.18.021.9723This article tries to characterize irony in Józef Wittlin’s The Salt of the Earth, also in reference to the author’s other texts. The author refers to the most important twentieth century methodology of the study of irony as well as to the scholars who study Wittlin’s work, including: D.S. Muecke, D. Sperber i D. Wilson, B. Alleman, W. Szturc, P. Łaguna oraz K. Jakowska, Z. Yurieff, and E. Wiegandt.
Here, irony is treated as the attitude of a worldview that formed in part due to the experience of World War I. Thanks to the ironic view of reality (which in the very text of The Salt of the Earth is evident, for example, at the stylistic level) the author succeeds in saving his own world of values, which in this way is subject to Bakhtinian carnivalization.
Wojciech S. Wocław
Konteksty Kultury, Vol. 7, 2011, pp. 22 - 34
The essay is devoted to an ironic construction of the protagonists in Sól ziemi (Salt of the Earth) by Józef Wittlin. The author discusses the method in which the main characters in the novel were created. He pays utmost attention to three of them: Piotr Niewiadomski, Rudolf Bachmatiukow and the emperor Franciszek Józef. According to Wocław, irony as a specific foundation of the texturing allows Wittlin to say more, write additional senses into the novel’s content. Their co-author is the reader, who – due to the presence of irony – constantly evaluates the characters and events from the world depicted. In such a way, the intensified moralistic dimension of Salt of the Earth is being created.