Memory and Non-Memory in Polish 20th Century Literature

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel investigates memory and non-memory in Polish 20th-century literature from a variety of angles—thematically, performatively, politically, transculturally, and institutionally—using a variety of theoretical tools, including memory studies, posthumanism, affective theory, and alterity theory.

Alexander Lindskog’s paper investigates S. I. Witkiewicz’s strategies for remembering human non-knowledge (“metaphysical feelings”) in his final works, including ways in which art may be able to have a rehumanizing function in face of what he considered the “catastrophic” posthuman horizon humanity has entered. Katarzyna Majchrowicz-Wolny’s paper looks at the relationship between trauma, memory, forgetting, and violence in Stanisław Lem’s Solaris (1961). Diana Sacilowski’s paper looks at traces, silence, and remembering in Paweł Huelle’s Weiser Dawidek (1989) in the broader context of Poland’s strategies and politics of forgetting, encountering, and re-membering its Jewish past. Aleksandra Naróg’s paper looks at how recent Polish, Ukrainian, and Jewish affective relationships to Bruno Schulz have in the past decades intersected: one case being the political disputes over Schulz’s frescoes that were smuggled from Ukraine to Israel in 2001, another being intercultural cooperation at the festivals in Drohobycz during the recent war years.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 20th Century

Chair

• Julia Kulon, U of Chicago

Papers

• Posthumanity and Non-Knowledge in S. I. Witkiewicz’s Late Work - Alexander Lindskog, U of Chicago

• Materializing Trauma: Research Station as a Non-Site of Memory in Stanisław Lem's 'Solaris' - Katarzyna Majchrowicz-Wolny, U of Illinois at Chicago

• Against Tracelessness: Paweł Huelle’s Memory Work in Weiser Dawidek - Diana Sacilowski, The Ohio State U

• The Memory Politics about Bruno Schulz: Affect, Transculturality, Potentiality - Aleksandra Naróg, Jagiellonian U (Poland)

Discussant

• Lukasz Wodzynski, U of Wisconsin-Madison