Professor: Michał Paweł Markowski *Course*: *POL 535 * *Time: Tuesdays at 3:30-6:15* *Topic*: *Gombrowicz: Exile and Exposition* Gombrowicz is one of the most intriguing writers of European Modernism. Spending most of his mature life in exile (Argentina, Germany, France) and deprived of the traditional means of making his career as a national writer (he was unknown abroad and banned in Poland,) Gombrowicz was forced to develop a unique dialectics of writing. On the one hand, this dialectics was aimed at familiarizing the foreign and the exotic (especially in Argentina) while it also exposed him to the uncanny and absurd in life. His ability to morph political exile into an existential venture with no self-assuring back plan was one of the most interesting features of his post-war work, brought to the fore in the most spectacular way in the *Diary*, the text upon which this course will focus. Removed from the black-and-white fields of true and false or facts and fictions, the three volumes of the *Diary* reveal a writer who creates himself through a series of surreal provocations and who exposes the reader to an unexpected experience of reading. Studied alongside other key figures of European Modernism, such as Cioran, Bataille, and Sartre, the *Diary*, a work without comparison in Polish literature, reveals Gombrowicz’s philosophical acumen as well as his literary bravura. As such, the *Diary* is an indispensable text to understand the breadth of intellectual and artistic tensions within European Modernism. --
Posted on: Fri, 15 Nov 2013 15:45:16 +0000
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