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This collection of essays has grown out of a project undertaken at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków in cooperation with the International Visegrad Fund. The inspiration for the project came from the work of Professor Hayden White, who kindly accepted the project coordinators’ invitation to give a lecture and conduct a workshop for scholars from Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and the Czech Republic. The resultant material has been divided into four sections which exemplify diverse aspects of fiction’s engagement with history. In the opening essay, “Historical Truth, Estrangement, and Disbelief,” Professor White offers an outstanding analysis of Saul Friedlander’s Nazi Germany and the Jews as an example of the kind of historiography which may be capable of giving an account of historical events whose appalling nature defies representation and thus eschews older conventions of historical scholarship. The other essays in the first part analyse contemporary novels which seek alternative modes of narrating the past. The articles in Part Two examine novelistic instances of the intersection of history and ordinary lives, focusing on the convergences and divergences between collective and individual narratives. Part Three is concerned with Jewish history, while Part Four focuses on attempts to represent history as a space of memory by means of literature, music and the visual arts.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface
Part One: Challenging the Historical Past: Alternative Representations
Chapter One: Hayden White, “Historical Truth, Estrangement, and Disbelief”
Chapter Two: Bożena Kucała, “The Postmodern Historical Novel—
A Contribution to Historiographic Inquiry”
Chapter Three: Grażyna Maria-Teresa Branny, “Confronting Historicity:
Louise Erdrich’s Native American Fiction”
Chapter Four: Šárka Bubíková, “What If? Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America”
Chapter Five: Beata Piątek, “Eschewing Factuality: Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife”
Part Two: Personal Trauma and the Burden of National History
Chapter Six: Michał Palmowski, “The Story of Margaret Garner, or How
History Disremembers the Past, and Toni Morrison’s Act of the Imagination”
Chapter Seven: Marek Pawlicki, “‘Imagining the Unimaginable.’
Confronting the Burden of Colonial History in J. M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country”
Chapter Eight: Krystyna Stamirowska, “Intersection of History and
Ordinary Lives: Wish You Were Here by Graham Swift”
Chapter Nine: Olga Roebuck, “Stealing the Baby from the Crib: The
Burden of Scottish History and Cultural Misrepresentation”
Part Three: Jewish Experience as a Master Narrative
Chapter Ten: Dagmar Blight, “The Myth of the Wandering Jew in
W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz”
Chapter Eleven: Robert Kusek, “Traces of the Holocaust in the Oeuvre of J.M. Coetzee”
Part Four: The Space of Memory: Fragments and Ruins
Chapter Twelve: Karolina Kolenda, “Ruination of Things Past.
On W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz”
Chapter Thirteen: Ewa Kowal, “Texts like Fractals: ‘Memory Spaces’
and the ‘Black Carnival’ of 9/11”
Contributors
Projekt i wykonanie: YELLOWTEAM