Encountering antiquity in the work of Zbigniew Herbert: materiality, time, and theory

Thesis

One of Polish literature’s most famous recipients of antiquity, Zbigniew Herbert (1924-1998) has long been presented as using Graeco-Roman history and mythology as a lens through which to comment on authoritarianism or to compare the horrors of the twentieth century to a long-lost moral and ethical ideal. This thesis both resists and expands on this allegorical interpretation by focusing on Herbert’s travelogues as spaces of embodied encounters with the material remains of Mediterranean antiquity. For the first time in the study of Herbert’s oeuvre, this thesis directly thematises his interest in the process of classical reception, exploring the possibility of constructing a more widely applicable body of reception theory from his travel essays, press articles, and unpublished writings (as stored at the Zbigniew Herbert Archive), supplemented and tested by his travel sketches as embodied reception in practice.

Herbert is shown to interrogate the ideas of distance and mediation (Chapter 1), the place of the past in future-facing socialist modernity (Chapter 2), and the potential of historical artefacts to create cross-temporal connection (Chapter 3). Drawing these reflections together, Chapter 4 suggests four “Herbertian” models of contact between modernity and antiquity: reception as labour, compassion, surrogate victimhood, and incorporation. In its use of embodiment as a methodological framework, this thesis aligns itself with the current turn to everyday life in the academic study of the Cold War period, while simultaneously positing physical and affective experiences such as hunger, food consumption, or traumatic rupture as avenues of connection between Herbert and other reception contexts where his reflections might find application. One of the first studies to treat Herbert’s bipolar disorder as a crucial component of his subjectivity, this thesis also addresses the relationship between mental illness and reception as an act of care, both for the self and for the past.

Authors: Leszczyk, M

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-0zw980bd7
• Type of award: DPhil
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: eastern Europe; classical reception; travel writing; reception studies; cold war; Zbigniew Herbert; trauma; material culture; temporality; reception theory; embodiment; Polish literature
• Subjects: Ruins in literature; Mental illness; Material culture in literature; Travelers' writings, Polish; Europe, Eastern; Twentieth century; Socialism and literature; Classical antiquities in literature; Cold War; Travel writing--History--20th century; Collective trauma in literature