Browsing by Author "Bartnik, Ryszard"
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Item Factual/Fictional Eye-Witnessing of the Political Transition in South Africa – Mike Nicol’s The Waiting Country: A South African Witness(Department of Dutch and South African Studies, Faculty of English, 2012) Bartnik, RyszardThis paper concerns Mike Nicol’s memoir The Waiting Country, in which the author positions himself as an eyewitness of dramatic and outstanding events going on in South Africa before and during the elections of 1994. The primary goal the author assumes is to interpret the time of the political transition, hence his insistence on the legitimization of storytelling. In the text one finds, as explained by Nicol “[s]tories [he] ha[s] taken in and made part of what it is to live here. Stories [he] use[s] to depict [...] what is happening and what [he] think[s] is happening” (Nicol 1995: 12). Through a mosaic of cross-racial and literary viewpoints his text takes on the guise of a sincere and serious attempt at understanding the troubled South African self, both in its individual and collective dimension, and explaining that self to others. Nicol’s factual/fictional version of the country’s historical moment depicts the mixed feelings of exhilaration and anxiety everyone seems to have felt on the threshold of this fundamental, systemic change.Item Living in the face of menacing ‘unreason’ - Martin Amis's "The Second Plane" as a response to ideological fundamentalisms(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2010) Bartnik, RyszardThis work touches upon Martin Amis’s diagnosis of the Western world and its cultural foundations which seem to have been threatened, as maintained by the author, by a specific form of “de- Enlightenment” (2008). Amis, a repository of Western intellectual ethos, steps to the fore to defend reason. In view of the world’s unrests, he fosters a thorough investigation of public beliefs, either of a religious or political nature, highlighting how deeply individual freedom has been censored and imperiled by various fundamentalisms. In his highly controversial, often blasphemous, collection of essays and short stories titled The second plane Amis renounces in an uncompromising way religious militancy, intellectual insularity, and political dogmatism. Politically incorrect and willfully offensive, the novelist appears unsparing in his criticism of Islamic integrity and right-wing ‘theological’ intransigence. My intention, thus, is to discuss Amis’s overall standpoint referring both to the short story “The last days of Muhammad Atta” and a number of his articles written between 2002-2007.Item On South African violence through Giorgio Agamben’s biopolitical framework: A comparative study of J.M. Coetzee’s "Disgrace" and Z. Mda’s "Ways of Dying"(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2014) Bartnik, RyszardIn this article I argue that the developments of countries going through transition from authoritarian to democratic rule are always stamped by numerous references to formerly sanctioned and fully operational institutionalized violence. A perfect exemplification of this phenomenon is [post-] apartheid South Africa and its writing. In the context of the above, both the social and the literary realm of the 1990s might be perceived as resonant with Giorgio Agamben’s ‘concentrationary’, deeply divisive imaginary. Escaping from, and concurrently remembering, past fears, anxieties, yet seeking hope and consolation, the innocent but also the formerly outlawed and victimized along [interestingly enough] with [ex]perpetrators exemplify, as discussed in J. M. Coetzee’s and Z. Mda’s novels, the necessity of an exposure of the mechanism of South African ‘biopoliticization’ of life. Their stories prove how difficult the uprooting of the mentality of segregation, hatred and the policy of bracketing the other’s life as insubstantial, thus vulnerable to instrumental violence, in [post-] apartheid society was. In view of the above what is to be highlighted here is the authorial perception of various attempts at disavowing past and present violence as detrimental to South African habitat. In the end, coming to terms with the past, with the belligerent nature of local mental maps, must inevitably lead to the acknowledgement of guilt and traumatic suffering. Individual and collective amnesia conditioned by deeply-entrenched personal culpability or personal anguish is then construed as damaging, and as such is subject do deconstructive analysis.Item Peter Ackroyd’s London as the backdrop to esoteric corners of the past and present(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2008) Bartnik, RyszardThis article concerns Peter Ackroyd’s depiction of London as an arcane labyrinth within which demarcation of the borderline between what is rationally, historically acknowledgeable and what is not is not only highly problematic but in fact undesirable. London, with its echoes of the past, with its people and mysteries, is envisaged as metapolis which exposes, through both its architecture and textual topography, hidden tropes leading to knowledge which spills beyond the knowable. Listening intently to the voices of various rationalists and scientists, as well as occultists and visionaries, the author removes layer after layer of the city’s substance in order to define its spirit and “consolidate its origins” (Ackroyd 2000a: 229). The paradox is that Ackroyd, though a literary historian, defies the use of mechanical rationality placing the occluded knowledge in the foreground so as to allow that cultural and intellectual tradition which sank into oblivion to resurface. It is the past, often complex and mysterious, which foreshadows the present, he seems to be saying, hence his acknowledgement of London’s ignored and forgotten forefathers who, in the eyes of the author, must be rescued from oblivion otherwise the vision of London and Londoners is to remain incomplete.Item Review of Siegfried Huigen Knowledge and Colonialism: Eighteenth-Century Travelers in South Africa Leiden – Boston: Brill, 2009 273 pp. ISBN: 978 90 04 17743 7(Department of Dutch and South African Studies, Faculty of English, 2010) Bartnik, RyszardItem [Un]succesful "metabolization" of the Northern Irish War: The post-troubles trauma in Glenn Patterson's writing(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2009) Bartnik, RyszardNorthern Irish literature of the last decade illustrates an arduous effort of the Ulster men to break down the walls of political and cultural partition. Yet, even though the Northern Irish community tends to present itself in terms of a variety of images, the ultimate impression is that the recent novelistic and critical productions resonate with past antagonisms and the post-Troubles trauma. It is so since the North, as many a scholar indicates, is as if fated to continually recompose its past. This paper then, set against the background of the civil war experiences, discusses Glenn Patterson’s excavation of individual and collective memories which prove that the dead are constantly materializing in today’s Northern Irish reality. Hence, Glenn Patterson’s accumulation of voices by means of which the author ponders over the politics of memory and imparts knowledge of the characters who, on a long journey out of the darkness into the space of light, find some vestiges of the old conflicts still echoing and rather difficult to hush up.