Strategies of silence: Representations of Jewish Poles in Polish literature since the 1980s
Sacilowski, Diana
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/113865
Description
Title
Strategies of silence: Representations of Jewish Poles in Polish literature since the 1980s
Author(s)
Sacilowski, Diana
Issue Date
2021-11-30
Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Gasyna, George Z
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Gasyna, George Z
Committee Member(s)
Kaplan, Brett Ashley
Murav, Harriet
Tempest, Richard
Department of Study
Slavic Languages & Literature
Discipline
Slavic Languages & Literature
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Polish literature
Polish-Jewish literature
Polish-Jewish identity
Holocaust literature
post-Holocaust literature
memory
Polish
Jewish
Abstract
In this project, I examine the uses and implications of silence in Polish cultural texts of the last forty years that deal with Poland’s Jewish history. Specifically, I examine why, during a period when discourse regarding Jewish history and culture in Poland became increasingly more popular, various writers (including Paweł Huelle, Stefan Chwin, Hanna Krall, Piotr Szewc, Marek Bieńczyk, and Magdalena Tulli) chose more oblique methods of representation, using silence, both thematically and structurally, to engage with the topic. I argue that these writers actively utilize various strategies of silence—allusion and reference, pointedly erased, missing, and elided words, mute(d) objects, places, and people—to engage with longstanding myths and stereotypes regarding the “Jew” and to articulate new modes of understanding Polish and Jewish, and Polish-Jewish, identities. I work against interpretations that frame silence as a circumvention of difficult historical realities or as an articulation of cultural trauma. Instead, combining a conceptual framework built around the theories of Lévinas, Derrida, Butler, among others, as well as critical tools of memory studies, I demonstrate that silence can work as an ethico-political strategy that, while not unproblematic, deconstructs and expands traditional paradigms of identity, community, and belonging.
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