Weintraub Lecture | Literature & Culture Seminar
Katarzyna Bartoszyńska, Associate Professor, Ithaca College
Moderator: Aleksandra Kremer, Alfred Jurzykowski Professor of Polish Language and Literature, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
What does Polish fiction offer to a global theory of the novel? Considering the longer sweep of this question, I alight upon Olga Tokarczuk’s recent call for a new type of writing, for a 4th person narrator that would meet the needs of the present. Though it seems like a creature of the contemporary moment, this perspective, I argue, has much in common with free indirect discourse, which has a far longer—and more capacious!— history than is often recognized. I turn to Tokarczuk’s own fictional experiments as a case study, explaining how her work fascinatingly illuminates both the affordances and the challenges of various approaches to narrative voice.
Katarzyna Bartoszyńska is Associate Professor in the Department of Literatures in English and the Program of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Ithaca College. She is the author of Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland, and Theories of World Literature (2021), and her essays on contemporary fiction have appeared in KGBBAR Lit, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Point Magazine. Her newest work, Reading Together, will be published in November by Ode Books.
Co-sponsored by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.
LOCATION:Thompson Room (110), Barker Center STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20251106T220000Z DTEND:20251106T233000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR