Playing Chopin backwards. Kuncewicz's and Themerson's transnational Polish literature

Thesis

My doctoral thesis investigates the construction of a transnational paradigm for Polish literature in the activities and works of Maria Kuncewicz and Stefan Themerson. I view their literary practices – extending across Polish, French, and English – as part of their wider search for transnational communities and literary genealogies in the aftermath of the Second World War. In the first chapter, I explore how gender and familial tropes – femininity and motherhood in Kuncewicz’s writings, and masculinity and fatherhood in Themerson’s – are turned into metaphors for the dissolution of national bonds. The second chapter looks into the transnational communities and literary genealogies they forged in place of national ones. I compare Kuncewicz’s PEN Club Centre for Writers in Exile and Themerson’s Gaberbocchus Press as institutions that embraced identity-building outside of the paradigm of the nation-state. Then, I analyse Kuncewicz’s writings on Joseph Conrad and Themerson’s on Guillaume Apollinaire to show how they conceptualised transnational literary practice. The third and final chapter probes the issue of language. By focusing on Themerson’s and Kuncewicz’s translingual experiments – such as self-translations, concealed translations, and pseudotranslations – I demonstrate their effort to construct a new language for their writings. I argue that this language is not a rejection of national language but constitutes its transnational idiom. I present Themerson's and Kuncewicz’s literary projects as ethical responses to the experience of twentieth-century totalitarianisms, laying the foundation for a literature that is at once national and transnational.

Authors: Sidorkiewicz, O

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-n1q45pm4r
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Second World War; transnationalism; Polish studies; Themerson; translingualism; Kuncewicz; Conrad; migration
• Subjects: Literature, Experimental; Exiles' writings, Polish; Comparative literature; Modernism (Literature)