DOCSLIB.ORG

PAJ71/No.05 Kuharski

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
PAJ71/No.05 Kuharski SECONDING GOMBROWICZ A Translator’s Introduction to Teatr Provisorium & Kompania Teatr’s Ferdydurke Allen J. Kuharski itold Gombrowicz’s first novel Ferdydurke, originally published in Warsaw in 1937, remains one of his most effective acts of literary Wprovocation, in a career devoted to calculated impetuousness and profound insouciance. That the mind of a playwright was also at work in the novel is clear in its first passages, which freely jump between narrative prose and the dialogue of a play script. But Gombrowicz’s histrionic and dramatic sensibility permeates Ferdydurke in more profound ways, as well. The motif that provides the inner logic to the novel’s fragmented and collage-like structure is that of the duel. Just as the characters challenge and provoke each other in ways both startling and revealing, the novel itself is designed to have the same effect on the reader. Like an impudent suitor, Gombrowicz demands attention, at times out of ardor and others out of mockery. To keep things interesting, he does not make it easy to judge his motives on this score. To respond to Gombrowicz’s attentions, whether to reject or to join him, is but the beginning of the game. To join forces with him is immediately to seek another quarry for either seduction or mockery—an object that can extend to society at large. Gombrowicz’s duels, however, are not dualistic in nature. Their objective is in fact to release both parties from a polarized relationship by pushing it to an inevitable extreme, and literally or figuratively to change or die in the process. Linked to the polarity of a duel, however, is a second motif of entropy, of a breaking down of existing structures, as creative rebellion, and ultimately as a means to more meaningful action and expression. Of course misdirected entropy can also be destructive, leading to a grave rather than a new beginning—so the stakes of Gombrowicz’s theatrical and existential gambits are not petty ones. Like Nietzsche before him, Gombrowicz’s ultimate objective was a more creative life for both the individual and the collective. The collective part of this equation always led him to the theatre and to questions of the innate theatricality of off-stage life. To adapt Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke for the stage is to become one of the playwright’s seconds in a duel with the world that began in Poland 1937. The novel began and remains his manifesto as a writer, an invitation to join what he himself dubbed the “Ferdydurkists.” The duel that the novel seeks to provoke both reflects a given time © 2002 Performing Arts Journal, Inc. PAJ 71 (2002), pp. 63–68. ᭿ 63 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152028102760049337 by guest on 26 September 2021 and culture (interwar Poland) and a more archetypal set of themes that have carried the work in both novelistic and theatrical forms across the barriers of time and culture. Gombrowicz’s gift for provocation and theatrical temperament, however, are inseparable from his talent and originality as a writer, as a master and innovator in the expressive use of the Polish language. His undiminished appeal and influence in Poland is in equal parts due to the spirit of his work and the extraordinary language in which he wrote. His contribution to the literary evolution of Polish in the twentieth century was no less profound than the country’s celebrated poets such as Czeslaw Milosz, Wislawa Szymborska, Zbigniew Herbert, or Adam Zagajewski. The wittiness of Gombrowicz’s language is among his most important attributes, which could be compared to that of Oscar Wilde or Joe Orton in English. Gombrowicz’s language in Ferdydurke looks both forward and backward, on the one hand generating neologisms and on the other mischievously mixing erudite literary allusions, quotations, and parody with schoolyard slang. One particular challenge to the translation of Gombrowicz into English is the fact that his linguistic play is often structural, involving gender, diminutives, and case constructions that have no counterpart in English grammar. That he was also a playwright makes his contribution distinct on another score. He considered his play The Marriage (1944) his most important work, and the heightened poetic language of the play in Polish is as original and daunting to translate as Ferdydurke or (perhaps most extraordinar- ily) the neo-baroque Polish of his second novel Trans-Atlantyk. Gombrowicz’s combination of sophisticated language, farcical action, and social critique in works such as Ivona, Princess of Burgundia or Ferdydurke places him in the tradition of high comedy that began with Aristophanes and Molière. With the significant exception of Ivona, Princess of Burgundia (which is available in an excellent translation by Krystyna Griffith-Jones and Catherine Robins), the greatest barrier to the successful theatrical production of Gombrowicz’s works in English to date may indeed be that of the translation. The theatricality of works such as Ferdydurke, The Marriage, and History, attracted no less of an artist than Tadeusz Kantor, and indeed Ferdydurke was among the inspirations for Kantor’s most celebrated work, The Dead Class, first performed in 1975. The visual, musical, and choreographic brilliance of Kantor’s work, however, belied the complex verbal play of Gombrowicz’s theatre, no less for Polish than for foreign audiences. Within a year of the premiere of The Dead Class, Teatr Provisorium of Lublin presented their first stage adaptation of Ferdydurke, in their debut as one of the brightest stars in Poland’s vibrant student theatre movement in the 1970s. This first stage adaptation of the novel per se marked the beginning of a remarkable tradition of stage adaptations of the novel in Poland and elsewhere. Over two dozen stage adaptations of Ferdydurke have been produced in a half-dozen countries to date, in addition to Jerzy Skolimowski’s lavish but ill-fated British- Polish film version in 1991. Teatr Provisorium’s second adaptation of the text (produced after their merger with Kompania Teatr in 1996) premiered in Lublin in 1998, and to date has been performed in Polish more than 200 times in over a dozen 64 ᭿ PAJ 71 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152028102760049337 by guest on 26 September 2021 The sixteen-year-old Witold Gombrowicz in 1920. Taken just after his military service in the Polish-Russian War of 1920, in which the newly-independent Poland defeated the armies of Soviet Russia. Photo: Courtesy Archives of Rita Gombrowicz. Witold Gombrowicz’s passport photo, dated 1939. Gombrowicz turned thirty-five that year. Gombrowicz left Poland for Argentina in August, just before the Nazi invasion of Poland. He never returned before his death in 1969. Photo: Courtesy Archives of Rita Gombrowicz. KUHARSKI / Seconding Gombrowicz ᭿ 65 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152028102760049337 by guest on 26 September 2021 countries, winning numerous festival prizes along the way, as well as shown on Polish television. The English-language version of the text was first commissioned for performance at Swarthmore College in February, 2000, and has since been performed over fifty times in the United States, Scotland, Egypt, and Poland. In January 2001, the English-language version was nominated in Warsaw for the prestigious “Passport” Award in theatre, roughly Poland’s equivalent to the Pulitzer Prize. In August 2001, the English-language version was given a Fringe First Award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where it received wide coverage in the Scottish and British press. The production has just completed its third tour of the United States in as many years, including a three-week run at La MaMa in New York City in November, 2001. The company’s performances in the United States and Great Britain marked the first tour by a professional Polish company performing Gombrowicz in the English-speaking world. That the company was prepared to perform in both Polish and English has made the potential impact of this first contact all the greater. In fact, Teatr Provisorium & Kompania Teatr was the first Polish company to attempt such a bilingual tour in the United States since the days of Helena Modjeska’s celebrated bilingual performances of Shakespeare a century ago. Danuta Borchardt’s award-winning translation of the novel provided the foundation for our work on the English-language version of Teatr Provisorium & Kompania Teatr’s stage adaptation. The company and I worked for a period of almost six months on adapting Borchardt’s text to the specific needs of the project and rehearsing the four actors in English, whose knowledge of the language at the beginning ran the gamut from almost complete ignorance to complete fluency. The acting style of the production is extremely physical and rhythmically precise. The comic effect throughout is, as always in comedy or farce, dependent on split-second timing. Many of the changes we made in Borchardt’s text were done in the name of preserving the rhythmic integrity of the performance already established in the Polish version. The work on the text was ultimately a collective effort between the actors and myself, and I now strongly believe that such a bilingual “committee” provides the ideal circumstances for any theatrical or literary translation. The luxury of having four superb actors and two talented and erudite directors as “partners” in the translation process was a rare privilege and pleasure. The physical comedy is of course combined with Gombrowicz’s verbal playfulness, which for the adolescent schoolyard world of the play demands a very specific cultural-historical “voice” for the jokes to work. The truest test of achieving a native speaker’s knowledge of a second language may in fact be the mastery of the idioms of the grade school playground, which of course are also generational markers.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Aging and Maturity in Witold Gombrowicz's Pornografia
    Available online at www.sciencedirect.com Russian Literature 116 (2020) 17–39 www.elsevier.com/locate/ruslit THE DIFFICULT CHILDHOOD OF AN ADULT: AGING AND MATURITY IN WITOLD GOMBROWICZ’S PORNOGRAFIA DANIEL JUST [email protected] Bilkent University Abstract Maturity and immaturity are the hallmarks of Witold Gombrowicz’s literary texts. They were introduced in his first novel, Ferdydurke, and an early collection of short stories, Memoirs from a Time of Immaturity, and continued to play a central role in his fiction and nonfiction works, including the Diary, A Kind of Testament, and the penultimate novel, Pornografia. Although Gombrowicz has been widely regarded as a staunch critic of maturity and defender of immature spontaneity, playfulness, and formlessness, this view is largely based on his earlier writings. Later works offer a more complex image of Gombrowicz. Pornografia, in parti- cular, no longer pits immaturity against maturity with the goal of discrediting the latter through humor and irony. Instead, it experiments with the possibility of a new relationship between the two, a relationship which would ameliorate the discontents that often come with aging. Keywords: Witold Gombrowicz; Maturity; Aging; Polish Modernism; Trans- gression https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ruslit.2020.09.002 0304-3479/© 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 18 Daniel Just Maturity and Immaturity in Gombrowicz’s Writings If it were possible to reverse development, to achieve some sort of roundabout way back to childhood, to have once again its fullness and limitlessness. My ideal is to “mature” into childhood [“dojrzeć” do dzieciństwa]. Only that would be true maturity.
    [Show full text]
  • UC San Diego UC San Diego Electronic Theses and Dissertations
    UC San Diego UC San Diego Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Witold Gombrowicz and Virgilio Piñera, the Argentine Experience Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9n14r0b5 Author Žilinskaitė, Milda Publication Date 2014 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO Witold Gombrowicz and Virgilio Piñera, the Argentine Experience A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Literature by Milda Žilinskaitė Committee in charge: Professor Jaime Concha, Chair Professor Amelia Glaser Professor Luis Martin-Cabrera Professor Michael Monteón Professor William Arctander O’Brien 2014 The Dissertation of Milda Žilinskaitė is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication on microfilm and electronically: Chair University of California, San Diego 2014 iii EPIGRAPH I speak of exile not as a privilege, but as an alternative to the mass institutions that dominate modern life. Exile is not, after all, a matter of choice: you are born into it, or it happens to you. But, provided that the exile refuses to sit on the sidelines nursing a wound, there are things to be learned: he or she must cultivate a scrupulous (not indulgent or sulky) subjectivity. Edward W. Said iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Signature Page ...……………………………………………………………………...iii Epigraph .......................................................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • Witold Gombrowicz and Virgilio Piñera, the Argentine Experience
    Electronic Theses and Dissertations UC San Diego Peer Reviewed Title: Witold Gombrowicz and Virgilio Piñera, the Argentine Experience Author: Žilinskaitė, Milda Acceptance Date: 2014 Series: UC San Diego Electronic Theses and Dissertations Degree: Ph. D., LiteratureUC San Diego Permalink: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/9n14r0b5 Local Identifier: b8163821 Abstract: This dissertation is a comparative study of lives and works of two émigré writers : the Polish Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969) and Cuban Virgilio Piñera (1912-1979). The two met in 1946 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where they developed a lifelong friendship grounded in intellectual compatibility and fueled by literary collaboration. My study focuses mainly on the body of work that the two authors produced during the twenty- three-year span of time between their initial meeting and the death of Gombrowicz. I argue that the writers shared a strong desire to renovate the world of literature in their home countries, including their host culture, Argentina. This desire in turn allowed them to develop in their writings a unique mode of cultural criticism which sought to build a bridge between the literary worlds of two geographically distant and, at least at first sight, culturally remote regions: Latin America and East-Central Europe. There are five chapters that comprise this dissertation. The introductory chapter conceptualizes the theoretical framework for analyzing Gombrowicz and Piñera's works in relation to their historical and biographical contexts. Chapter One focuses specifically on the year 1947 and the writers' collaboration on six critical texts which target the most prominent Argentine literary and intellectual figures of the time. The subsequent two chapters examine the novels La carne de René by Piñera and Trans-Atlantyk by Gombrowicz, both written in the early 1950s, when the exchange of ideas between the two writers was still at its peak.
    [Show full text]
  • Witold Gombrowicz Diary of a Playwright
    The Polish Review, Vol. 60, No. 2, 2015 © The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois Allen J. Kuharski Witold Gombrowicz Diary of a Playwright I am a saint. Yes, I am a saint . and an ascetic. —Witold Gombrowicz, Diary (1967)1 The state of [Witold Gombrowicz’s] oeuvre in 1989 was still imbalanced: in his own words, a “half- cooked steak.” Gombrowicz was certainly known, and above all as a playwright. His plays were staged in the larg- est theaters in Europe. Nevertheless, in most countries (excluding France, Germany, and the Netherlands) only a small part of his work was known, and the most overlooked and poorly- handled text was his Diary. —Rita Gombrowicz, Introduction to Kronos2 Gombrowicz Contra Theater Witold Gombrowicz’s Diary does not fulfill any of the obvious expectations of such a work by a major playwright. Gombrowicz never attended the performance of his works or collaborated in any way with producers, directors, actors, designers, or composers. As a result, there is a complete dearth of theatrical anecdote in the text, though he expresses profound vindication at the positive critical response in Paris and Stockholm to Ivona, Princess of Burgundia. References to other contem- porary playwrights such as Beckett, Brecht, or Weiss are fleeting and superficial. This is a revised version of an article published in Norwegian as “En dramatikers dagbok,” in Witold Gombrowicz: Dagboken 1959–1969 (Oslo: Flamme, Oslo, 2013), ix–xxxii; translated by Ina Vassbotn Steinman. 1. Witold Gombrowicz, Diary, trans. Lillian Vallee (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 714. 2. Rita Gombrowicz, “Na wypadek pożaru,” introduction to Witold Gombrowicz, Kronos (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2013), 12.
    [Show full text]
  • Fictional Reality in Gombrowicz's Pomografia
    The Pyrotechnics of an Infernal Machine: Fictional Reality in Gombrowicz's Pomografia PETER PETRO, University of British Columbia The novels of Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969), Ferdydurke (1937), The Trans- Atlantic (1952), Pomografia (1960), and Cosmos (1965), show their author's special sensibility, his very original seeing of the world. The particular characteristic of this original seeing of the world is the oscillation between an ordinary and an extraordinary vision of reality that prompted Sartre to com­ pare Gombrowicz's novels to "infernal machines."1 This comparison is especially apt when applied to Pomografia,2 for in it Gombrowicz provides us with a record of the genesis, practice, and consequence of a particular vision of the world, of its explosive aftermath. Before an infernal machine finally explodes, it gathers force, it "ripens" as if by regular, almost imperceptible, ticking. Because it is this ripening process that brings about the explosion, the ticking, which is the manifestation of this process, will be analyzed in this paper. In order to show how the violent explosion, the climactic murder, comes about, for what reason, and with what result, I shall, therefore investigate the "changes in fictional reality" in Gombrowicz's Pomografia as presented to us by the narrator Witold. In order to investigate these changes adequately, a somewhat artificial division of the fictional reality, into the "given" reality and the "transformed" reality, is required. The author first "gives" us, through description, a piece of his fictional world in a conventional manner, and when we accept it, he changes its value by "transforming" it. But how does he do it? All the information available to the reader comes from the narrator who, at the same time, is an important character of the novel.
    [Show full text]
  • To Download the Lecture
    Crossing the River from One’s Native to an Acquired Language when Translating Witold Gombrowicz’s Fiction I assume not many of you are native speakers of your own language translating into English. I am therefore offering an expanded presentation of translating Gombrowicz in general. Western literature turned, in the early 1900s, from character-driven story telling into a so called “difficult,” intellectual, idea-driven writing. In Norway, Knut Hamsun was one of the first such writers who disapproved of his contemporaries’ approach, and expressed a preference for writing about a changeable and divided mind. In Poland, in the early 1930s, Witold Gombrowicz became an exponent of this art, and included not only the mind but also humanity’s universal issues. And this from John Updike: “A master of verbal burlesque, a connoisseur of psychological blackmail, Gombrowicz is one of the profoundest of late moderns, with the lightest of touches… includes some of the truest and funniest literary satire in print.” Translations of his novels into English were published in the early 1960s by such avant-garde presses as Marion Boyars in Great Britain and Grove Press in the USA. Towards the end of my career as a psychiatrist and retirement in 1993, I began writing short stories in a similar vein, in English, and Andrei Codrescu published them in his “Exquisite Corpse.” When I tried to approach other small literary magazines with similar stories, they were rejected and one of the answers was “please resubmit your work after you have learnt how to create three-dimensional characters.” I did not 1 know that this is what Annie Dillard had written in her 1982 book Living by Fiction: “In Garcia Márquez, as in Pynchon, we see characters from a great distance, colorful and extraordinary objects… characters tend to be less human simulacra, less rounded complexities of deep-seated ties and wishes, than focal points for action or idea… Traditional characters are “rounded,” or “modeled,” or “drawn in depth”… Characters’ role in this fiction is formal and structural.
    [Show full text]
  • Witold Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke As an Anti-Bildungsroman
    SEFAD, 2017 (38): 393-406 e-ISSN: 2458-908X An Apprenticeship in Immaturity: Witold Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke as an Anti-Bildungsroman∗ Yrd. Doç. Dr. Selin Ever Doğuş Üniversitesi Fen-Edebiyat Fakültesi İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı Bölümü [email protected] Abstract This article argues that Ferdydurke, Witold Gombrowicz’s novel published in 1937 in Poland, formally and thematically subverts the classical Bildungsroman. The seminal novel that has propagated the Bildungsroman genre is Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795). Bildungsroman, commonly understood as a narrative of self-formation, was conceived in Germany in the late eighteenth century in the age of humanism and emphasizes the harmonious integration of the individual with society. This social mission also carries over to aesthetic idealism’s notion of form, which is modeled on the organic unity of parts and the whole. Comparing Gombrowicz’s Ferydurke with Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, the article contends that Ferdydurke displaces Bildungroman’s notion of “beautiful totality” by a grotesque aesthetics of parts that alludes to the collapse of harmonious social relations in the aftermath of the First World War, and on the threshold of the Second. Gombrowicz’s unique articulation of Form as the sedimentation of interpersonal antagonism is embodied in Ferdydurke, which, much like its protagonist, sabotages its own formal maturation through manifestoes, theoretical reflections, narrative digressions, and prefaces to the digressions thrown between the chapters. If the classical Bildungsroman presents us with the image of man in the process of becoming as Bakhtin has argued, Ferdydurke enacts the dissolution of that process in its very form.
    [Show full text]
  • IN the SPHERE of MODERNISM Włodzimierz Bolecki (Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences)
    IN THE SPHERE OF MODERNISM Włodzimierz Bolecki (Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences) Three modernists: Witkacy – Schulz – Gombrowicz (similarities and differences)1 Translated by David Malcolm Just as winged words exist in the common discourse, so too do winged names in literary history. In the history of twentieth century Polish literature these names are without a doubt Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy), Witold Gombrowicz, and Bruno Schulz. Interestingly, these three names are surely linked even more so than the names of birth brothers. Nobody writing about Thomas Mann has ever felt compelled to men- tion Heinrich or Golo Mann; however, the names Gombrowicz, Witkacy, and Schulz are associated almost automatically – almost as if they are not individual writers, but as if they are a literary Marx Brothers. Why then are Witkacy, Schulz, and Gombrowicz mentioned together? What do Nienasycenie (Insatiability), Ferdydurke, Szewcy and Sklepy cynamonowe (The Street of Crocodiles) have in common? What do Albertynka (Operetka ((Operetta)) and Adela (Sklepy cynamonowe), and Atanazy Bazakbal (Pożegnanie jesieni ((Farewell to Autumn)) and Józef Kowalski (Ferdydurke) have in common? Witkacy (1885–1939), Schulz (1892–1942), and Gombrowicz (1904–1969) were, without doubt, the greatest individualists of Polish literature in the interwar period. Today, their names are uttered in terms of literary legends, of which there are two dimensions. This fi rst stems from the fact that the fi rst two authors wrote about and to one another–these texts are immeasurably valuable to literary history today. Witkacy wrote about Schulz, while Schulz did not write so much about Witkacy as he did to Witkacy2.
    [Show full text]
  • Agnieszka Wnuk
    Agnieszka Wnuk Playing with Form: Possessed by Witold Gombrowicz Translated by Bartosz Lutostański Possessed by Witold Gombrowicz was published in two instalments in the summer of 1939 in two popular Polish dailies. Gombrowicz wrote the novel under the pseu- donym of Zdzisław Niewieski and did not acknowledge its authorship until thirty years later1. The novel in full book format was fi rst published posthumously in 1973, altho- ugh the fi nal three instalments were added much later and the complete edition was published in 1990. According to Gombrowicz, the novel was consciously written as “a bad novel” for “a common consumer of printed pages”2. “I started writing a new novel in the second year of law school. … With Tadeusz Kępiński, my former high school friend, we decided to write a detective novel to earn loads of money. Extra- ordinarily intelligent as we were, we didn’t expect to have any problems to carry out such an easy but riveting shenanigan. Soon enough however we discarded all we’d written, shocked by the awkwardness of our writerly endeavors. “To write a bad novel is as diffi cult to write as a good one”, I then told Kępiński. I was perfectly intrigued by this conundrum. To create a good novel for ten or even a hundred thousand intelligent people, well, that can be done by anyone, it’s banal and boring; but to write a good novel for that inferior, lowbrow reader who isn’t so much into what we call ‘good literature‘”3. After many trials and errors Possessed was conceived.
    [Show full text]
  • POLISHNESS in the WORKS of WITOLD GOMBROWICZ by JON
    FORM AND FORMLESS: POLISHNESS IN THE WORKS OF WITOLD GOMBROWICZ by JON TOBIAS GALUCKI (Under Direction the of Katarzyna Jerzak) ABSTRACT Witold Gombrowicz spent his entire life struggling to reconcile his innately formed Polishness with his insatiable desire to be free from all restricting Forms whether they are literary, cultural, political, or sexual. Through an examination of Gombrowicz’s biographical texts, his fictional writing, and secondary source materials, one can discern his ongoing battle with Form. In addition, a comparison between Gombrowicz and James Joyce will elucidate their striking literary similarities. Krzysztof Kieślowski’s film “White” also demonstrates the arduous attempt at reconciliation between nationality and Form. Finally, Andrzej Wajda’s historic film “Man of Marble” accurately presents the fallacy of an imposed Form during the early stages of the Solidarity movement in Poland. These three Polish artists strive to define Polishness, to reinvent Polishness, and to confront the difficulties that ensue with such an attempt. INDEX WORDS: Form, Exile, Polishness, Gombrowicz, Kieślowski, Wajda, Joyce, Campbell FORM AND FORMLESSNESS: POLISHNESS IN THE WORKS OF WITOLD GOMBROWICZ by JON TOBIAS GALUCKI B.A. University of Georgia, 1996 A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS ATHENS, GEORGIA 2005 © 2005 Jon Tobias Galucki All Rights Reserved FORM AND FORMLESSNESS: POLISHNESS IN THE WORKS OF WITOLD GOMBROWICZ by JON TOBIAS GALUCKI Major Professor: Katarzyna Jerzak Committee: Thomas Cerbu Katharina Wilson Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia May 2005 DEDICATION To the loving memory of my grandmother Dorothy T.
    [Show full text]
  • UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO Witold Gombrowicz and Virgilio Piñera, the Argentine Experience a Dissertation Submitted In
    UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO Witold Gombrowicz and Virgilio Piñera, the Argentine Experience A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Literature by Milda Žilinskaitė Committee in charge: Professor Jaime Concha, Chair Professor Amelia Glaser Professor Luis Martin-Cabrera Professor Michael Monteón Professor William Arctander O’Brien 2014 The Dissertation of Milda Žilinskaitė is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication on microfilm and electronically: Chair University of California, San Diego 2014 iii EPIGRAPH I speak of exile not as a privilege, but as an alternative to the mass institutions that dominate modern life. Exile is not, after all, a matter of choice: you are born into it, or it happens to you. But, provided that the exile refuses to sit on the sidelines nursing a wound, there are things to be learned: he or she must cultivate a scrupulous (not indulgent or sulky) subjectivity. Edward W. Said iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Signature Page ...……………………………………………………………………...iii Epigraph ........................................................................................................................ iv Table of Contents ........................................................................................................... v List of Abbreviations .................................................................................................... vii Note on Translation and References ............................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • Philosophy and Parody in the Novels of Witold
    AT WORK AND PLAY: PHILOSOPHY AND PARODY IN THE NOVELS OF WITOLD GOMBROWICZ by Guy Wilkinson B.A., The University of British Columbia, 1999 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Department of English) We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA April 2001 ©Guy Wilkinson, 2001 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department of OAQ \ * £ *- The University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada Date DE-6 (2/88) 11 ABSTRACT This thesis examines the function of philosophy and parody in the novels and pseudo-autobiographical writings, in translation, of the Polish author Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969). It is intended not as an introduction, but as an analysis and explication to readers already familiar with Gombrowicz's work. Problems: This thesis examines Gombrowicz's philosophical/theoretical system of Interhumanity, and elucidates such concepts within that system as the "individual," "inaccessibility," "inauthenticity," "Form," the "Formal Imperative," and "Chaos." It analyses the portrayal of Interhumanity within Gombrowicz's novels, and the various levels at which Interhumanity is illustrated as operating.
    [Show full text]