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Please join the next Slavic Colloquium talk by George Gasyna (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign).

“Contemporary Polish Writing and the Discontents of Provincial Dreaming”

In today’s Poland, which has largely shed its communist ethos and can no longer claim to be multiconfessional or multiethnic, discourses of postsocialism and collective memory have come to intersect in unexpected ways. Their convergence has culminated in a new poetics of provincial subjectivity that is embodied against a backdrop of the memory of multiplicity of cultural and historical experience, the latter now reframed as an “ideal” Polish past. Drawing on texts by some of Poland’s most prominent post-1989 authors and filmmakers, including Andrzej Stasiuk and 2018 Nobel Prize in literature laureate Olga Tokarczuk, my talk investigates the phenomenon of textual “small homelands”– mythopoeic, oneiric private realms located in zones that were formerly part of what Hannah Arendt referred to as “the belt of mixed populations.” The small homelands that figure in these narratives, such as the Low Beskid area in southeast Poland or the small Silesian town of Nowa Ruda, formerly German Neurode, are paradigmatic instances of reterritorialization of marginal zones, subjected to further manipulation by authors seeking to mythologize these spaces as a way of stamping them with a mark of authenticity. My talk examines a number of such portrayals of local worlds – provincial, marginal, ex-centric – and assesses the extent to which their composition depends on a kind of tender conjuring and interrogation of multiple, and sometimes conflicting, local pasts.

George Z. Gasyna was born in Łódź, Poland, and emigrated with his family to Canada at the age of 11. He holds two degrees in Slavic Studies from McGill University in Montreal, and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Toronto. He is currently Associate Professor of Slavic Languages & Literatures and Comparative & World Literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, where he also holds faculty appointments in the Program in Jewish Culture and Society and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. Prof. Gasyna is author of Polish, Hybrid, and Otherwise: Exilic Discourse in Joseph Conrad and Witold Gombrowicz (London and New York: Continuum, 2011), and editor for the volume Joseph Conrad’s Polish Soul: Realms of Memory and Self (Lublin and New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). He wrote the introduction to Marek Hłasko’s 1964 novel, All Backs Were Turned, tr. Tomasz Mirkowicz (New York: New Vessel Press, 2014).  His articles have appeared in a number of journals including Slavic Review, Canadian Slavonic Papers, Polish Review, and Russian Literature. He is presently completing a book treating 20th and 21st century Polish provincial and borderland fiction. For 2020-2025, he has been appointed Arlys Conrad Humanities Professional Scholar in the College of Liberal Arts and Science at his university, an award that recognizes promising mid-career researchers in the humanities.

This talk is hosted by the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and co-sponsored by the èצӰ�� Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (CREEES).