Toward Heterotopia
The Case of Trans-Atlantyk
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4885512 |
|---|---|
| Authors | George Gasyna, George Zbigniew Gasyna (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2009 |
| Volume | 68 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 898-923 |
| Publication date | 2009-01-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Slavic Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0037-6779 • E-ISSN: 2325-7784 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0037677900024578 |
| OpenAlex | W2586392709 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 4 |
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
Art · Existentialism · Heterotopia (medicine · Homeland · Literary criticism · Literature · Mainstream · Poetics · Poetry · Political science · Politics · Theology · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Crime and Detective Fiction Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Spatial and Cultural Studies
| Highly cited | No |
|---|