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Zagajewski’s Reflections on the Interior

Publication date: 14.07.2023

Konteksty Kultury, 2023, Volume 20 Issue 1, pp. 10 - 15

https://doi.org/10.4467/23531991KK.23.003.17906

Authors

Bożena Shallcross
University of Chicago, USA
, United States of America
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Titles

Zagajewski’s Reflections on the Interior

Abstract

The text asks the question about Adam Zagajewski’s understanding of the interior space of one’s home. Guided by his post-memory, Zagajewski describes a coping mechanism based on withdrawal into one’s place and its interiority that was construed by the Poles resettled from former Polish territories in the East as an etui, a cover protecting the traumatized selves and their memorabilia from the new, unacceptable reality. Such a protective etui created by the four walls of one’s room was during communism a site of collecting and even hoarding broken things. Obsessive collecting lead to the destruction of even a modicum of comfort and the optic perspective in the over-crowded rooms. The consequence of these two processes of interiorization allows the author to refute the notion that Zagajewski was an aesthete.

References

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Nycz R., “‘Every One of Us Is a Stranger’: Patterns of Identity in Twentieth-Century Polish Literature” [in:] Framing the Polish Home: Postwar Cultural Constructions of Hearth, Nation, and Self, ed. B. Shallcross, Athens 2002.

Poe E.A., “Philosophy of Furniture” [in:] The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, New York 1903, vol. 5.

Zagajewski A., Two Cities: On Exile, History, and the Imagination, trans. L. Vallee, New York 1995.

Zagajewski A., Another Beauty, trans. C. Cavanagh, New York 2000.

Information

Information: Konteksty Kultury, 2023, Volume 20 Issue 1, pp. 10 - 15

Article type: Original article

Titles:

English:

Zagajewski’s Reflections on the Interior

Authors

University of Chicago, USA
United States of America

Published at: 14.07.2023

Article status: Open

Licence: CC BY  licence icon

Percentage share of authors:

Bożena Shallcross (Author) - 100%

Article corrections:

-

Publication languages:

English

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<p>Zagajewski’s Reflections on the Interior</p>