Gombrowicz: Pornografia

Russian Literature, 2020

Maturity and immaturity are the hallmarks of Witold Gombrowicz's literary texts. They were introduced in his first novel, Ferdydurke, and an early collection of short stories, Memoirs from a Time of Immaturity, and continued to play a central role in his fiction and nonfiction works, including the Diary, A Kind of Testament, and the penultimate novel, Pornografia. Although Gombrowicz has been widely regarded as a staunch critic of maturity and defender of immature spontaneity, playfulness, and formlessness, this view is largely based on his earlier writings. Later works offer a more complex image of Gombrowicz. Pornografia, in particular, no longer pits immaturity against maturity with the goal of discrediting the latter through humor and irony. Instead, it experiments with the possibility of a new relationship between the two, a relationship which would ameliorate the discontents that often come with aging.

New York University Press eBooks, 2020

Helena Goscilo received her Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures in 1976 from Indiana University. She is currently Associate Professor and Chairwoman of the Slavic Department at the University of Pittsburgh. A specialist in Russian women's prose, she has published widely on gender and sexuality in Russian culture as well as on 19th-century fiction. Dr. Goscilo has most recently edited Fruits of Her Plume (M.E. Sharpe, 1993), a collection of original essays on contemporary Russian women's culture.

One+One Filmmakers Journal, 2013

2014

1993

Helena Goscilo received her Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures in 1976 from Indiana University. She is currently Associate Professor and Chairwoman of the Slavic Department at the University of Pittsburgh. A specialist in Russian women's prose, she has published widely on gender and sexuality in Russian culture as well as on 19th-century fiction. Dr. Goscilo has most recently edited Fruits of Her Plume (M.E. Sharpe, 1993), a collection of original essays on contemporary Russian women's culture.

«Porn Studies», 2016

The Erotics of Restraint, Biblioasis, 2019

Mimesis journal, 2022

2020

The exploration of human sexuality at the end of the nineteenth century did not immediately stimulate the development of research in literary eroticism. Its development is associated not so much with the discoveries made by anthropologists as with the influence of the Nietzsche’s philosophy and Freud’s psychoanalysis. The theory of Dionysian culture with its concept of libido (which in times of the supremacy of high culture remains hidden in the language of literature) contributed to the first wave of erotic criticism. Decades later, its development was related to feminist criticism, followed by gender studies and homoerotic studies. What seems interesting in this context is the lack of reflection on the role of the audiovisual pornographic imagination in most contemporary literature. While porn studies is present in sociology, anthropology, and film studies, it is still absent from literary studies. The article presents the mutual influence of literature and pornographic cinema, sh...

Slavonica, 2013

An attempt is made to sketch a strategy for reading Kronos (2013), Witold Gombrowicz’s (1904–1969) recently published intimate journal, which he kept in the years 1952–1969. It treats Kronos as belonging to Gombrowicz’s corpus, not merely as a literary sensation or an indiscretion, but as an important artistic and philosophical exhibit, which throws further light on Gombrowicz’s preoccupation with the expression of the body and the existentialist concept of person as presence, one of his Nietzschean strategies for countering metaphysics and its ideal transcendence. The key concepts that bring together the artistic, the autobiographical/somatic, and the philosophical are pain and aging. This reading, in demonstration of the artistic unity of Gombrowicz’s corpus, situates Kronos in the context of the novel Pornografia (1960) and the Diary (1953–1969), which share the major themes of aging and pain.