Strategies of silence: Representations of Jewish Poles in Polish literature since the 1980s

Sacilowski, Diana

Permalink

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/113865 Copy

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.

Graduation Semester

2021-12

Type of Resource

Thesis

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/113865

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2021 Diana Sacilowski

Owning Collections