Dark lives, lives impossible to retell?

The text is a comparative study of Galician Tales  (Opowieści galicyjskie) by Andrzej Stasiuk and Small Lives by Pierre Michon. Although Michon is a representative of a different generation and different political and cultural reality, similarly to Stasiuk, he chooses his characters from the social margin. The object of analysis are the narrative strategies used to highlight the state of exclusion of the characters in both volumes. The stories have a common objective of returning at least the fictitious subjectivity to the characters in the context that is common for both authors, namely the work of Michel Foucault. Both authors derive a lot from the tradition of biographical fiction, the genre of dark lives, which are opposed to traditional biographistics and funeral literature. The connection between the literary topic and the means of constructing the narration proves that there exists a European cultural space that is independent from political divisions. The function of such literature is to take up the responsibility for retaining the memory.

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Porownania 9 01 04	[pdf]	[550 KB]