What does Polish fiction offer to a global theory of the novel? Considering the longer sweep of this question, Katarzyna Bartoszyńska alights upon Olga Tokarczuk’s recent call for a new type of writing —a 4th-person narrator that would meet the needs of the present. Though it seems like a creature of the contemporary moment, this perspective, Bartoszyńska argues, has much in common with free indirect discourse, which has a far longer—and more capacious!—history than is often recognized. She turns to Tokarczuk’s own fictional experiments as a case study, explaining how her work fascinatingly illuminates both the affordances and the challenges of various approaches to narrative voice.
Katarzyna Bartoszyńska is an Associate Professor in the Department of Literatures in English and the Program of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Ithaca College. She is the author of Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland, and Theories of World Literature (2021), and her essays on contemporary fiction have appeared in KGBBAR Lit, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Point Magazine. Her newest work, Reading Together, will be published by Ode Books in November.
Sponsorship
The Weintraub Lecture is organized by the Department of Slavic Literatures and Languages and is co-sponsored by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.
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