Books by Katarzyna Bartoszynska
For centuries, the standard account of the development of the novel focused on the rise of realis... more For centuries, the standard account of the development of the novel focused on the rise of realism in English literature. Studies of early novels connected the form to various aspects of British life across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including the burgeoning middle class, the growth of individualism, and the emergence of democracy and the nation-state. But as the push for teaching and learning global literature grows, this narrative is insufficient for studying novel forms outside of a predominately English-speaking British and American realm.
In Estranging the Novel, Katarzyna Bartoszyńska explores how the emergence and growth of world literature studies has challenged the centrality of British fiction to theories of the novel's rise. She argues that a historicist approach frequently reinforces the realist paradigm that has cast other traditions as "minor," conceding a normative vision of the novel as it seeks to explain why historical forces produced different forms elsewhere. Recasting the standard narrative by looking at different novelistic literary forms, including the Gothic, travel writing, and queer fiction, Bartoszyńska offers a compelling comparative study of Polish and Irish works published across the long nineteenth century that emphasize fictionality, or the problem of world-building in literature.
Reading works by Ignacy Krasicki, Jan Potocki, Narcyza Żmichowska, and Witold Gombrowicz alongside others by Jonathan Swift, Charles Maturin, Oscar Wilde, and Samuel Beckett, Bartoszyńska shows that the history of the novel's rise demands a more capacious and rigorous approach to form as well as a reconceptualization of the relationship between fiction and its cultural contexts. By modeling such a heterogeneous account of the novel form, Estranging the Novel paves the way for a bracing and diverse understanding of the makeup of contemporary world literature and the many texts it encompasses—and a new perspective on the British novel as well.
Papers by Katarzyna Bartoszynska
Studi Irlandesi : a Journal of Irish Studies, 2015
This piece offers a comparative reading of the early novel – and the ways in which it has been de... more This piece offers a comparative reading of the early novel – and the ways in which it has been described – in Polish and Irish literature. Contesting accounts that both traditions ‘fail’ to develop realism because they cleave uncritically to romance, it examines the generic hybridity of Lady Morgan’s The Wild Irish Girl and Maria Wirtemberska’s Malwina , czyli domyślnośc serca ( Malvina, or the Heart’s Intuition ). Reading Polish and Irish literature alongside each other allows us to see that neither is the anomaly it often appears to be in literary criticism. It also re-opens the questions of how we make sense of the relationship between literary works and the socio-political contexts they emerge from.
This essay argues for the power of free indirect discourse in the third-person narrative perspect... more This essay argues for the power of free indirect discourse in the third-person narrative perspective to serve as a collective voice, encompassing a diversity of perspectives, through a reading of two novels by Olga Tokarczuk, Bieguni (Flights) and Księgi Jakubowe (Books of Jacob). Both novels investigate the challenges inherent in the project of providing an image of the world, and alongside various interventions on the level of content, each examines the kind of world-image that different approaches to narrative voice can produce. In Flights, the narrator's striving to arrive at a more expansive and synthetic knowledge of the world is accompanied by an effort to go beyond the first-person voice, to a broader perspective. The novel subtly demonstrates the impossibility of such efforts, but, the essay argues, Books of Jacob continues this project, albeit from the opposite direction, examining the affordances of the third-person voice. Its innovative use of free indirect discourse...
Comparative Literature
This essay uses a comparative reading of two novels, Jan Potocki's Manuscrit Trouvé à Sar... more This essay uses a comparative reading of two novels, Jan Potocki's Manuscrit Trouvé à Saragosse (Manuscript Found in Saragossa, 1804–15) and Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), to investigate the methodologies of comparative and world literature studies. Although these novels were written around the same time and are strikingly similar, critical reflections on their commonality have been limited to passing comments noting their resemblance. Examining ways in which a comparative reading could proceed, the article demonstrates how the historicist interpretive strategies typically mobilized in discussions of works from non-major traditions, coupled with dominant theories of the development of the novel, serve to occlude the formal innovations of both texts. Attending to their complex work of worlding yields new critical insights, revealing how these works anticipate literary techniques associated with globalization. This suggests, more broadly, a need for a more robust formalism in world literature studies, particularly in discussions of works from non-major traditions.
Abstract: This dissertation undertakes a comparative reading of Polish and Irish novels, focusing... more Abstract: This dissertation undertakes a comparative reading of Polish and Irish novels, focusing on their use of fictionality, as a way of contesting dominant frameworks for understanding the development and function of the novel.
Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 2015
Accounts of the development of the novel, whether from commentators in the 18 and 19 centuries or... more Accounts of the development of the novel, whether from commentators in the 18 and 19 centuries or scholars working today, have tended to describe it using two, often overlapping, binaries: the romantic and realistic (or novelistic), and the domestic and oriental. Although these dichotomies have been, and continue to be, problematized and challenged, they were undeniably dominant conceptual frameworks in the minds of both authors and readers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As categories, they served to articulate and organize a host of various ideas and concerns about the increasingly popular genre of the novel: what kinds of stories it should tell and how, its relationship to reality, what effects it had on its readers, its moral and ethical status, etc. Much of the fiction of the period self-consciously staked out a position within these critical debates, be it through Prefaces explaining the purpose of the work, narratorial intrusions commenting on the story, or implicitly, in the telling of the story itself. Jan Potocki’s Manuscrit Trouvé à Saragosse – Manuscript Found in Saragossa – is a particularly fascinating intervention into these debates. Potocki’s novel is hard to place: a Gothic-Oriental hybrid, a travel narrative whose protagonist ultimately decides to stay, a fantastic story that never entirely clarifies its stance on the supernatural, a work that stages the clash between the exotic Orient and the rational West in a way that calls both categories into question. What makes his novel so interesting is the way that it strives to think past the dichotomies of East and West, realistic and marvelous, towards a more holistic understanding of the way that fiction triangulates between experience and imagination, and shapes a person’s perception of reality. Amusingly, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa mirrors the shift happening in contemporary studies of eighteenth and nineteenth-century fiction, a move away from a Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 2015 Vol. 37, No. 4, 283–300, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2015.1055875
Studies in the Novel, 2013
New Hibernia Review, 2013
Preface vii I Preliminary Measures 1 II What about This Religion? On the Threat of Fundamentalism... more Preface vii I Preliminary Measures 1 II What about This Religion? On the Threat of Fundamentalism Not Only the Religious Kind 14 III The Literati in Aid of Blundering Thought 34 IV Sources of Hope 46 V Fusion of Horizons 67 VI The Disinherited or, Creating Tradition Anew 81 VII God or Gods? The Gentle Face of Polytheism 107 Without Conclusions 115 Notes 117 Index 122
Genre, 2021
This essay argues for the power of free indirect discourse in the third‐person narrative perspect... more This essay argues for the power of free indirect discourse in the third‐person narrative perspective to serve as a collective voice, encompassing a diversity of perspectives, through a reading of two novels by Olga Tokarczuk, Bieguni (Flights) and Księgi Jakubowe (Books of Jacob). Both novels investigate the challenges inherent in the project of providing an image of the world, and alongside various interventions on the level of content, each examines the kind of world‐image that different approaches to narrative voice can produce. In Flights, the narrator's striving to arrive at a more expansive and synthetic knowledge of the world is accompanied by an effort to go beyond the first‐person voice, to a broader perspective. The novel subtly demonstrates the impossibility of such efforts, but, the essay argues, Books of Jacob continues this project, albeit from the opposite direction, examining the affordances of the third‐person voice. Its innovative use of free indirect discourse produces a perspective that, while appearing to be a single voice, contains multiple, contradictory points of view.
This essay uses a comparative reading of two novels, Jan Potocki's Manuscrit Trouvé à Saragosse (... more This essay uses a comparative reading of two novels, Jan Potocki's Manuscrit Trouvé à Saragosse (Manuscript Found in Saragossa, 1804–15) and Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), to investigate the methodologies of comparative and world literature studies. Although these novels were written around the same time and are strikingly similar, critical reflections on their commonality have been limited to passing comments noting their resemblance. Examining ways in which a comparative reading could proceed, the article demonstrates how the historicist interpretive strategies typically mobilized in discussions of works from non-major traditions, coupled with dominant theories of the development of the novel, serve to occlude the formal innovations of both texts. Attending to their complex work of worlding yields new critical insights, revealing how these works anticipate literary techniques associated with globalization. This suggests, more broadly, a need for a more robust formalism in world literature studies, particularly in discussions of works from non-major traditions.
The paper considers Jan Potocki’s Manuscript Found in Saragossa in light of its intervention into... more The paper considers Jan Potocki’s Manuscript Found in Saragossa in light of its intervention into nineteenth-century debates between what were called the ‘romantic’ and the ‘novelistic’ strains of literature. Potocki's novel is hard to place: a Gothic-Oriental hybrid, a travel narrative whose protagonist ultimately decides to stay, a fantastic story that never entirely clarifies its stance on the supernatural, a work that stages the clash between the exotic Orient and the rational West in a way that calls both categories into question. What makes his novel so interesting is the way that it strives to think past the dichotomies of East and West, realistic and marvelous, towards a more holistic understanding of the way that fiction triangulates between experience and imagination, and shapes a person's perception of reality. Amusingly, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa mirrors the shift happening in contemporary studies of eighteenth and nineteenth-century fiction, a move away from a realism-based account of the novel and towards a more global approach that focuses on the development of the concept of fiction.
Irish Studies has long suffered a sense of discomfort or shame about the lack of a robust traditi... more Irish Studies has long suffered a sense of discomfort or shame about the lack of a robust tradition of realism in nineteenth-century Irish writing. As Joe Cleary remarks, “studies of the nineteenth century Irish novel have long been conditioned by the search for an Irish Middlemarch and by the attempt to explain why there is not one.” (Cleary, Outrageous Fortune, 48) The underlying comparison in this quest, Cleary notes, is to the British literary tradition - there is a tendency to read Irish literature ``as a somewhat anomalous or strange regional variant of a British (read English) historical `master narrative.'” (58) Noting the idiosyncratic nature of the rise of Anglo-French realism, Cleary proposes that an examination of the Irish novel in relation to other ``colonial and agrarian peripheries, such as South America or Eastern Europe, which may in fact offer closer parallels to the Irish situation,” could be more productive. This essay offers a (partial) response to this summons, considering the development of Irish literature in relation to that of Poland, which offers a markedly similar set of historical conditions in the nineteenth century. Using close readings of Lady Morgan's Wild Irish Girl and Maria Wirtemberska’s Malwina, or the Heart’s Intuition, I demonstrate how these novels challenge arguments that both traditions fail to develop realism because they cleave uncritically to romance. Destabilizing distinctions between satire and sincerity, these texts likewise problematize straightforward dichotomies of the realistic and the romantic, as well simplistic teleologies of the novel’s development. Reading the two traditions in relation to each other allows us to see that neither is the anomaly that it often appears to be from the perspective of the mainstream. It also re-opens the question of how we make sense of the relationship between literary works and the socio-political contexts they emerge from.
Studies in the Novel, Apr 2013
Abstract: This dissertation undertakes a comparative reading of Polish and Irish novels, focusing... more Abstract: This dissertation undertakes a comparative reading of Polish and Irish novels, focusing on their use of fictionality, as a way of contesting dominant frameworks for understanding the development and function of the novel.
Life Writing, Jan 1, 2005
Edward Said described the perspective of the exile as doubled, and thus privileged:‘Because the e... more Edward Said described the perspective of the exile as doubled, and thus privileged:‘Because the exile sees things both in terms of what has been left behind and what is actual here and now, there is a double perspective that never sees things in isolation’ (Said 1993, 60). Thus, the exile possesses a unique capability as an observer, which lends itself particularly well to autoethnography, a genre that attempts to describe a culture while telling the story of an individual's life.
In this article, I examine the work of Eva Hoffman and the way in which she first constructs this observer's perspective in Lost in Translation and then employs it in her subsequent publications. I conclude by arguing that Hoffman's exilic perspective leads her to write texts that are not only ethnographic but are also concerned with collective memory and provide a model for examining the past. I focus on a reading of Hoffman's third book, Shtetl, examining the observing consciousness in the text and the way that the autobiographical act becomes a narrative for a collective voice.
Conference Presentations by Katarzyna Bartoszynska
In early 19th century debates around the proper forms and uses of fictionality, usually glossed a... more In early 19th century debates around the proper forms and uses of fictionality, usually glossed as a battle between the romance and the novel, history frequently served as a point of comparison. It was typically portrayed as educational and edifying, if not necessarily pleasurable to read. As time passed, however, the distinction between fiction and history became less and less obvious, and authors provided increasingly assertive arguments about literature’s benefits. In his 1797 essay “Of History and Romance,” for instance, William Godwin argued that the “writer of romance is to be considered as the writer of real history; while he who was formerly called the historian, must be contented to step down into the place of his rival.” The novels of the time bear witness to these deliberations in intriguing ways, striving to argue by example, as it were, and exploring the effects of various techniques such as different narrative perspectives or invented ‘found’ documents. Godwin’s St. Leon (1799) offers a particularly curious case-study of such negotiations. The book’s protagonist, granted immortality and an endless supply of money, would seem to be the ideal vehicle for a demonstration of literature’s ability to provide lessons in history (and indeed, the text is often seen as a forefather of the historical novel). But the results are controversial, illuminating Godwin’s own conflicting ideas about the possibility of accurate knowledge of the past. This paper examines the ways in which St. Leon grapples with the representation of history, focusing on how it contemplates the resources that fiction offers to the project of faithfully portraying other times and places. The novel’s premise offers a hypothetical test case in the form of what would seem to be a particularly privileged perspective from which to view society and its inner workings, but ends up cataloguing a series of failures, culminating in a highly ambiguous ending that calls into question any claims of historical knowledge.
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Books by Katarzyna Bartoszynska
In Estranging the Novel, Katarzyna Bartoszyńska explores how the emergence and growth of world literature studies has challenged the centrality of British fiction to theories of the novel's rise. She argues that a historicist approach frequently reinforces the realist paradigm that has cast other traditions as "minor," conceding a normative vision of the novel as it seeks to explain why historical forces produced different forms elsewhere. Recasting the standard narrative by looking at different novelistic literary forms, including the Gothic, travel writing, and queer fiction, Bartoszyńska offers a compelling comparative study of Polish and Irish works published across the long nineteenth century that emphasize fictionality, or the problem of world-building in literature.
Reading works by Ignacy Krasicki, Jan Potocki, Narcyza Żmichowska, and Witold Gombrowicz alongside others by Jonathan Swift, Charles Maturin, Oscar Wilde, and Samuel Beckett, Bartoszyńska shows that the history of the novel's rise demands a more capacious and rigorous approach to form as well as a reconceptualization of the relationship between fiction and its cultural contexts. By modeling such a heterogeneous account of the novel form, Estranging the Novel paves the way for a bracing and diverse understanding of the makeup of contemporary world literature and the many texts it encompasses—and a new perspective on the British novel as well.
Papers by Katarzyna Bartoszynska
In this article, I examine the work of Eva Hoffman and the way in which she first constructs this observer's perspective in Lost in Translation and then employs it in her subsequent publications. I conclude by arguing that Hoffman's exilic perspective leads her to write texts that are not only ethnographic but are also concerned with collective memory and provide a model for examining the past. I focus on a reading of Hoffman's third book, Shtetl, examining the observing consciousness in the text and the way that the autobiographical act becomes a narrative for a collective voice.
Conference Presentations by Katarzyna Bartoszynska
In Estranging the Novel, Katarzyna Bartoszyńska explores how the emergence and growth of world literature studies has challenged the centrality of British fiction to theories of the novel's rise. She argues that a historicist approach frequently reinforces the realist paradigm that has cast other traditions as "minor," conceding a normative vision of the novel as it seeks to explain why historical forces produced different forms elsewhere. Recasting the standard narrative by looking at different novelistic literary forms, including the Gothic, travel writing, and queer fiction, Bartoszyńska offers a compelling comparative study of Polish and Irish works published across the long nineteenth century that emphasize fictionality, or the problem of world-building in literature.
Reading works by Ignacy Krasicki, Jan Potocki, Narcyza Żmichowska, and Witold Gombrowicz alongside others by Jonathan Swift, Charles Maturin, Oscar Wilde, and Samuel Beckett, Bartoszyńska shows that the history of the novel's rise demands a more capacious and rigorous approach to form as well as a reconceptualization of the relationship between fiction and its cultural contexts. By modeling such a heterogeneous account of the novel form, Estranging the Novel paves the way for a bracing and diverse understanding of the makeup of contemporary world literature and the many texts it encompasses—and a new perspective on the British novel as well.
In this article, I examine the work of Eva Hoffman and the way in which she first constructs this observer's perspective in Lost in Translation and then employs it in her subsequent publications. I conclude by arguing that Hoffman's exilic perspective leads her to write texts that are not only ethnographic but are also concerned with collective memory and provide a model for examining the past. I focus on a reading of Hoffman's third book, Shtetl, examining the observing consciousness in the text and the way that the autobiographical act becomes a narrative for a collective voice.
This paper sketches some of these resemblances between Poland and Ireland, offering specific examples of the kinds of benefits derived by reading the two literary traditions in relation to each other, then considers the drawbacks of the selfsame approach. It asks how comparisons are formulated; what kinds of insights they enable, and what limitations they struggle with.
While Gothic fiction has often been perceived in opposition to the rise of realism, as a persistence of obsolete structures of romance, or in terms of a backlash against emerging scientific discourses of the time, I argue that it is more profitably seen in relation to developing ideas of fictionality, akin to a new technology. Gothic writers examined the power of literature, its ability to create world using words alone, and contemplated fiction’s purpose, value, and moral obligations. Thus, they are more properly aligned with self-conscious works such as Tristram Shandy, though their form of reflexivity varies. These are texts that consider what kinds of feelings literature should evoke in its readers, and the ethical status of reading about horrific crimes – and deriving enjoyment in doing so. Though realism is commonly credited with teaching readers how to suspend their disbelief and learn about the world from a story that they know to be untrue, I argue that the Gothic, which encouraged readerly absorption even as it openly displayed its impossibility, also played a crucial role in this process, one that has not been thus far appreciated.