Historytelling. Narrating the Past in Contemporary Polish Gonzo Literature

• Applicant: Dr. Aleksandra Konarzewska
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 457886284

The following project investigates the narration of the past in the works of the three main representatives of Polish contemporary gonzo literature – Ziemowit Szczerek, Jacek Hugo-Bader, and Mariusz Szczygieł. I am going to analyze how they construct narrations on the recent past (including the recent ‘illiberal turn’ in politics) in a manner that escapes the dominant historical discourses. Traditional Polish literature, both fictional and nonfictional, has for decades followed the Romantic conviction that writing about events from the past has a moral and existential dimension. The two dominant discourses of narrating the past are thus either idealistic or critical: The aim of the former is to provide a commemoration that would boost the reader’s morale, while of the latter – a commemoration that would shake the reader’s conscience. Gonzo nonfiction emerged from American New Journalism, a branch of creative nonfiction that in the mid- and late 1960s abandoned ‘objectivity’ and put the nominal author in the center of interest. Gonzo is characterized by its subjectivity, first person narrative, colloquial language, perspective ‘from below’, full dialogues, and sarcasm. In Poland, gonzo stylistics were successful in composing literary stories that, thanks to their metonymic potential, can call into question both dominant discourses: the critical and the idealistic one. Szczerek’s, Szczygieł’s, and Hugo-Bader’s gonzo writings often take the form of travelogues. The destinations in them are Poland’s neighboring lands and further countries of the region (e.g. Hungary). The authors focus on local curiosities, such as the daily life in small towns, unexpected phenomena of the borderland provinces, nationalisms of ‘small nations’ and their unusual manifestations, and the paradoxes of established discourse categories (e.g. ‘Easternness’). Their main topic is recent history, expressed through the complicated fates of the inhabitants of Central and Eastern Europe. All three authors reconsider the different historical trajectories in the visited countries without making any attempt at ‘objectivity’ – on the contrary, they even stress their potential bias. Their own traits of Polish, male, and liberal serve as prisms through which a given story is narrated. The authors are interested in the historical reasons behind the ‘illiberal turn’ in the regions they visit. The gonzo stylistics enable them to mix uneasy topics with irony and to focus on the narrated story itself. My aim is to determine how gonzo historytellers form their own ways of narrating the recent past of Eastern and Central Europe, focusing on how they reuse and dispel stereotypes concerning class and gender identities and play with issues concerning ethnical, national, and political identities. In my work, I am going to take into consideration masculinity studies, the theory of historiography (‘revival of the narrative’), the spatial turn, and postcolonial studies.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Austria, Poland, USA
• Cooperation Partners: Dr. Magdalena Baran-Szoltys; Dr. Andrzej Czyzewski; Professorin Dr. Irena G. Gross