Abstract
In August 1939, the Polish avant-garde writer and playwright Witold Gombrowicz left Poland for what was to be a month-long literary tour of South America. World War II broke out a week after Gombrowicz's arrival in Argentina, and he was never to return to Poland; instead he remained in Buenos Aires, where he would live for the next quarter of a century. In this essay George Gasyna argues that Gombrowicz overcame whatever nostalgic longings he may have felt for the homeland he had left behind-by an "accident" of world history-through articulating a new type of poetics, which Gasyna terms a "heterotopic imagination." Employing a key term used by Michel Foucault in his archaeologizing of western cultural knowledge, Gasyna theorizes heterotopia both as a desire to articulate the existential condition of deterritorialization in the spaces between mainstream literary and cultural discourses, and as a kind of textual sanctuary from the world. Within the zone of heterotopia, Gasyna argues, an author's exilic imagination may transform the nonplace of language into a linguistic refuge, a home-in-language. In his reading of Gombrowicz's second and perhaps most outrageous novel, Trans-Atlantyk, Gasyna demonstrates that despite its overt stylistic deviation and blatant political provocations, the novel is primarily concerned with elaborating an exilic space of hope for an autonomous subject-in this case the deracinated author who chose to divest himself of the political pressures of being a Polish émigré in wartime and the Cold War era, in order to become "merely a human being.".
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 898-923 |
| Number of pages | 26 |
| Journal | Slavic Review |
| Volume | 68 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Dec 1 2009 |
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ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Cultural Studies
- Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)
Cite this
Toward heterotopia : The case of Trans-Atlantyk. / Gasyna, George Zbigniew.
In: Slavic Review, Vol. 68, No. 4, 01.12.2009, p. 898-923.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - Toward heterotopia
T2 - The case of Trans-Atlantyk
AU - Gasyna, George Zbigniew
PY - 2009/12/1
Y1 - 2009/12/1
N2 - In August 1939, the Polish avant-garde writer and playwright Witold Gombrowicz left Poland for what was to be a month-long literary tour of South America. World War II broke out a week after Gombrowicz's arrival in Argentina, and he was never to return to Poland; instead he remained in Buenos Aires, where he would live for the next quarter of a century. In this essay George Gasyna argues that Gombrowicz overcame whatever nostalgic longings he may have felt for the homeland he had left behind-by an "accident" of world history-through articulating a new type of poetics, which Gasyna terms a "heterotopic imagination." Employing a key term used by Michel Foucault in his archaeologizing of western cultural knowledge, Gasyna theorizes heterotopia both as a desire to articulate the existential condition of deterritorialization in the spaces between mainstream literary and cultural discourses, and as a kind of textual sanctuary from the world. Within the zone of heterotopia, Gasyna argues, an author's exilic imagination may transform the nonplace of language into a linguistic refuge, a home-in-language. In his reading of Gombrowicz's second and perhaps most outrageous novel, Trans-Atlantyk, Gasyna demonstrates that despite its overt stylistic deviation and blatant political provocations, the novel is primarily concerned with elaborating an exilic space of hope for an autonomous subject-in this case the deracinated author who chose to divest himself of the political pressures of being a Polish émigré in wartime and the Cold War era, in order to become "merely a human being.".
AB - In August 1939, the Polish avant-garde writer and playwright Witold Gombrowicz left Poland for what was to be a month-long literary tour of South America. World War II broke out a week after Gombrowicz's arrival in Argentina, and he was never to return to Poland; instead he remained in Buenos Aires, where he would live for the next quarter of a century. In this essay George Gasyna argues that Gombrowicz overcame whatever nostalgic longings he may have felt for the homeland he had left behind-by an "accident" of world history-through articulating a new type of poetics, which Gasyna terms a "heterotopic imagination." Employing a key term used by Michel Foucault in his archaeologizing of western cultural knowledge, Gasyna theorizes heterotopia both as a desire to articulate the existential condition of deterritorialization in the spaces between mainstream literary and cultural discourses, and as a kind of textual sanctuary from the world. Within the zone of heterotopia, Gasyna argues, an author's exilic imagination may transform the nonplace of language into a linguistic refuge, a home-in-language. In his reading of Gombrowicz's second and perhaps most outrageous novel, Trans-Atlantyk, Gasyna demonstrates that despite its overt stylistic deviation and blatant political provocations, the novel is primarily concerned with elaborating an exilic space of hope for an autonomous subject-in this case the deracinated author who chose to divest himself of the political pressures of being a Polish émigré in wartime and the Cold War era, in order to become "merely a human being.".
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U2 - 10.2307/25593794
DO - 10.2307/25593794
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:74549115813
VL - 68
SP - 898
EP - 923
JO - Slavic Review
JF - Slavic Review
SN - 0037-6779
IS - 4
ER -