Browsing by Author "Drewniak, Dagmara"
Now showing 1 - 11 of 11
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Addicted to the Holocaust – Bernice Eisenstein’s ways of coping with troublesome memories in "I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors"(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2015) Drewniak, DagmaraIn her I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors published in Canada in 2006, Bernice Eistenstein undertakes an attempt to cope with the inherited memories of the Holocaust. As a child of the Holocaust survivors, she tries to deal with the trauma her parents kept experiencing years after WWII had finished. Eisenstein became infected with the suffering and felt it inescapable. Eisenstein’s text, which is one of the first Jewish-Canadian graphic memoirs, appears to represent the voice of the children of Holocaust survivors not only owing to its verbal dimension, but also due to the drawings incorporated into the text. Therefore, the text becomes a combination of a memoir, a family story, a philosophical treatise and a comic strip, which all prove unique and enrich the discussion on the Holocaust in literature. For these reasons, the aim of this article is to analyze the ways in which Eisenstein deals with her postmemory, to use Marianne Hirsch’s term (1997 [2002]), as well as her addiction to the Holocaust memories. As a result of this addiction, the legacy of her postmemory is both unwanted and desired and constitutes Bernice Eisenstein’s identity as the eponymous child of Holocaust survivors.Item ‘And yet, what would we be without memory?’ Visualizing memory in two Canadian graphic texts(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2018-03-09) Drewniak, DagmaraSince “we live in a culture of confession” (Gilmore 2001: 2; Rak 2005: 2) a rapidly growing popularity of various forms of life writing seems understandable. The question of memory is usually an important part of the majority of autobiographical texts. Taking into account both the popularity of life writing genres and their recent proliferation, it is interesting to see how the question “what would we be without memory?” (Sebald 1998 [1995]: 255) resonates within more experimental auto/biographical texts such as a graphic memoir/novel I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors (2006) by Bernice Eisenstein and a volume of illustrated poetry and a biographical elegy published together as Correspondences (2013) by Anne Michaels and Bernice Eisenstein. These two experimental works, though representing disparate forms of writing, offer new stances on visualization of memory and correspondences between text and visual image. The aim of this paper is to analyze the ways in which the two authors discuss memory as a fluid concept yet, at the same time, one having its strong, ghostly presence. The discussion will also focus on the interplay between memory and postmemory as well as correspondences between the texts and the equally important visual forms accompanying them such as drawings, portraits, sketches, and the bookbinding itself.Item Between the global and the private: the Second World War and the Cold War in two novels by Lithuanian-Canadians(2017-09) Drewniak, DagmaraThis article offers an analysis of selected texts of Lithuanian-Canadian literature which concentrate on different perceptions of war. It explores the secret war of the 1940s led by the Lithuanian underground during the Second World War, as presented in Antanas Sileika’s Underground (2011), and the Cold War period analyzed by Irene Guilford in The Embrace (1999). Since these texts present certain marginalized, multicultural perspectives on conflicts and highlight the tensions in locations situated outside Canada, it is the ethnic perspective which allows the authors to introduce their stories into the Canadian literary scene. The article also raises questions concerning the links between family members torn apart by conflicts as well as dilemmas regarding heroism and betrayal. Finally, the influence of global conflicts on personal choices and identities is examined.Item Changing Traditions in Non-fictional Jewish-Canadian Writing – the Study of Selected Texts by Eva Hoffman, Elaine Kalman Naves and Bernice Eisenstein(2014) Drewniak, DagmaraRecent years have witnessed a substantial growth of interest in various forms of non-fictional writing. Canadian literature has also abounded in a range of non-fictional texts. Among the different forms of such texts are memoirs and life narratives. This paper aims at tracing the changes within formal trends and tendencies in these narratives. Therefore, the article offers an examination of a selection of non-fictional texts from the perspective of paratextual elements such as photographs, maps, drawings, illustrations, ekphrasis and other graphic aspects as well as metatextual, self-conscious remarks on the process of writing included in the texts. The texts chosen for analysis are written by contemporary Canadian authors of Jewish origins (or authors identified with Canada and more broadly with North America as it is in Eva Hoffman’s case). The authors of the chosen memoirs are all first or second generation immigrants whose experiences of migration, changing countries and cultures have shaped their identities formed through their own or inherited post/memories. Family histories combined with personal accounts can be found in all selected texts such as: Eva Hoffman’s seminal “Lost in Translation” (1989) a text partly devoted to her Canadian experiences, Elaine Kalman Naves’ “Journey to Vaja. Reconstructing the World of a Hungarian-Jewish Family” (1996) and “Shoshanna’s Story. A Mother, a Daughter, and the Shadows of History” (2003), as well as Bernice Eisenstein’s “I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors” (2006) which is one of the first graphic memoir in Canadian life writing. All of these texts were published in Canada within the last few decades (it needs to be noted that it is only Eva Hoffman’s book that is available in Polish) and they all take up a discussion concerning the problem of immigrant identity and offer a range of paratextual and metatextual remarks whose appearance contributes to the inquiry into the contemporary developments in Jewish-Canadian life writing.Item Dialogues, reinterpretations, critical repositionings in literary and cultural discourses of 21st century Canada(2020) Drewniak, Dagmara; Branach-Kallas, AnnaItem Forgetful Recollections: Images of Central and Eastern Europe in Canadian Literature(Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2014) Drewniak, DagmaraThe present study is an attempt to explore the position of the memory and postmemory of Central and Eastern Europe in contemporary Canadian literature. The analysis is inspired by Simona Škrabec’s concept of the 20th century Central Europe seen as diverse and evolving “space of dispersion.” In this context, the book situates the novels and memoirs, published in Canada at the turn of the 20th and 21st century and written by immigrants and their descendants from Central and Eastern Europe, as the texts which try to recreate the images of 'Old Places' filtered through the experience of living in transcultural Canada. The analyses of the selected texts by Janice Kulyk Keefer, Lisa Appignanesi, Irena F. Karafilly, Anne Michaels, Norman Ravvin, and Eva Stachniak are predominantly based on Marianne Hirsch’s idea of “postmemory” and Pierre Nora’s “lieux de mémoire". These two concepts capture the broad spectrum of attitudes to the past, remembering and forgetting, and sites of memory as exemplified in the discussed texts. While all of the chosen novels and memoirs explore the problem of post/memory and un/belonging caused by immigration, poverty, and the trauma of World War Π, they try to address the question of identity of immigrants (or their descendants) created on the border between the memory and postmemory of the past and the contemporary reality of transcultural Canada. As a result of this, the post/memory and the recreated after/images of Central and Eastern Europe offer both therapy and consolation as well as testimony to the past and its sites of memory.Item “It was empty and silent, except for the devilish laughter of the coyotes” – The Perception of Canada as a Peaceable Kingdom and Promised Land in Selected Immigrant Memoirs(Polskie Towarzystwo Badań Kanadyjskich, 2013) Drewniak, DagmaraL’attitude du gouvernement canadien et de la société canadienne envers l’immigration a considérablement changé depuis des décennies. Elle a souvent réfléchi l’état de l’économie canadienne et a ainsi réflété les possibilités que le Canada offrait aux nouveaux venus. Le concept du “Royaume paisible” ainsi que la réflexion de Northrop Frye sur l’idéal social canadien – « le mythe pastoral » (Frye 1971: 238) – est juxtaposé ainsi que contesté par sa notion de « mentalité de garnison » (225) imposée aux immigrants par d’autres groupes sociaux, aussi bien que par la nature canadienne écrasante. L’article vise à examiner l’ambivalence des attitudes canadiennes envers les immigrants venant d’Europe de l’Est dans trois mémoires réflétant deux phases différentes d’immigration : après la Première Guerre mondiale et après la Deuxième Guerre mondiale. L’article présente Marynia, Don’t Cry A Mother’s Legacy de Apolonja Maria Kojder publié en 1995 et les mémoires de Barbara Głogowska intitulés Three Generations publiés dans le même volume que le récit de Kojder et consacrés à l’histoire de l’immigration d’un Polonais, Mike Deputat. La perception des immigrants du “Royaume paisible” est troublée par le passé traumatisant qu’ils ont connu et par la réalité dure à laquelle ils se sont confrontés au Canada, ce qui était la réalisation d’une autre affirmation fameuse de Frye, selon laquelle « entrer au Canada est une question d’être silencieusement avalé par un continent étranger ».Le récit Born and Raised Under a Straw Roof: A True Legacy of the Human Spirit de Mary A. Drzewiecki, publié en 2000, jette encore un autre regard sur l’hospitalié canadienne et sur l’adaptation des immigrants d’Europe de l’Est. Bien que douloureux et traumatique, ce récit vise l’image pastorale de Frye et relate le parcours de l’immigration d’après la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, celle qui est reconnue pour avoir été un facteur important contribuant au développement de la terre d’abondance canadienne. Déterminés par les périodes de la migration, les Polonais ont fait face à des conditions de vie complètement différentes au Canada. Pourtant, les membres des familles de Kojder, de Deputat et de Drzewiecki ont réussi à mener une vie prospère au Canada et ils ont ainsi fui la mort ou la misère inévitable dans une Europe déchirée par des conflits.Item Memory and forgetting in Lisa Appignanesi’s "The Memory Man"(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2012) Drewniak, DagmaraThe aim of this paper is to look at Lisa Appignanesi’s novel The memory man ([2004] 2005), which won the 2005 Holocaust Literature Award, and examine the patterns of remembering and forgetting as indispensable aspects conducive to the formation of Jewish identity. The main character of the book, Bruno Lind, a Holocaust survivor and a scientist dealing professionally with the complicated neurological issues of remembering and losing memory, tries to recollect his war memories during a journey to the places of his youth which are at the same time the sites of his and his family’s trauma. The Holocaust, change of identities, the war memories and finally the stay at the DP camps and escape to Canada return to Bruno Lind’s mind in order to be passed onto the next generation and remembered. This article shows Appignanesi’s novel as an important contribution to the discussion on the role of memory in Jewish identity.Item Quo vadis Polish-Canadian writing? Reflections on home, language, writing, and memory in recent texts by Canadian writers of Polish origins(2020) Drewniak, DagmaraThe aim of this paper is to look at the recent publications by writers of Polish extraction living in Canada and writing in English in order to examine these texts in the context of their treatment of the concept of home, attitude to mother tongue and the usage of English, as well as the authors’ involvement in shaping the Canadian literary scene. The analysis will concentrate on selected texts published after 2014 to delineate the latest tendencies in Polish-Canadian writing. The discussion will include life writing genres such as memoirs, short stories, and novels. Since these writers have undertaken themes of (up)rootedness, identity, and memory and they have touched upon the creative redefinition of the figure of home, these aspects will also be examined from a theoretical perspective in the introductory part of the article. Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek through his concept of “in-between peripherality” (2010: 87) proposes to view Central and Eastern European literature as both peripheral and in-between its “own national cultural self-referentiality and the cultural influence and primacy of the major Western cultures” (2010: 87). Moreover, as diasporic studies are inspired by the search for transcultural, dynamic exchanges and hybridity (Agnew 2005), the analysis will also include discussions on hybridity understood as a transgression of borders, both literary and genealogical as well as thematic. That is why, the classic notion of hybridity known widely in postcolonial studies, is here understood, according to Moslund (2010), as having horizontal and vertical orientations, where the former designates transgression of borders and space and the latter is connected to the movement across time. This approach is particularly interesting in the context of Polish-Canadian migrant and diasporic literature as, according to Pieterse (2001), hybridity understood as movement and translocation can offer new perspectives on migrant literatures in multi-and transcultural worlds.Item The self and the world. Aspects of the aesthetics and politics of contemporary North American literary memoir by women(Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2018) Rzepa, Agnieszka; Drewniak, Dagmara; Macedulska, Katarzyna"The self and the world: aspects of the aesthetics and politics of contemporary North American literary memoir by women" constitutes an attempt at a selective, but far-ranging analysis of the aesthetics and politics of memoirs written by Canadian and US women of different racial and ethnic backgrounds since 1990. The study focuses on memoirs by experienced writers, consciously deploying in their texts a number of literary, visual and paratextual devices. The aim is to illuminate the ways in which they make sense of their experience and how they endow it with a particular narrative shape, with special focus on the implicit and explicit ideological baggage of the memoirs. An important aspect of the project is the critical reflection on the nature of memory that emerges from the selected texts in connection with both individual and collective history. Special focus falls on configurations of gender and race/ethnicity in the contexts of the two multicultural North American societies, and their influence on the process of self-fashioning.Item The self and the world. Aspects of the aesthetics and politics of contemporary North American literary memoir by women(Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2018) Rzepa, Agnieszka; Drewniak, Dagmara; Macedulska, KatarzynaThe book constitutes an attempt at a selective, but far-ranging analysis of the aesthetics and politics of memoirs written by Canadian and US women of different racial and ethnic backgrounds since 1990. The study focuses on memoirs by experienced writers, consciously deploying in their texts a number of literary, visual and paratextual devices. The aim is to illuminate the ways in which they make sense of their experience and how they endow it with a particular narrative shape, with special focus on the implicit and explicit ideological baggage of the memoirs. An important aspect of the project is the critical reflection on the nature of memory that emerges from the selected texts in connection with both individual and collective history. Special focus falls on configurations of gender and race/ethnicity in the contexts of the two multicultural North American societies, and their influence on the process of self-fashioning.