Family and Artistic Relations in Polish Women’s Autobiographical Literature

Aleksandra Grzemska is Assistant Professor in Polish Literature at the University of Szczecin (Poland). Her research focuses on life writing and contemporary Polish women’s literature and art. She is an editor at the academic journal Autobiografia. Literatura. Kultura. Media [Autobiography. Literature. Culture. Media] and a critic for various academic and non-academic literary magazines. Tul’si (Tuesday) Bhambry received her PhD in Polish literature at University College London in 2013 and has since been working as a literary and academic translator from Polish and German. She won the Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize in 2015. Among her book-length translations in the humanities are Ryszard Nycz’s The Language of Polish Modernism (Peter Lang, 2017) and Lena Magnone’s Freud’s Emissaries (sdvig, 2023).

INTRODUCTION: Being in Charge of Autobiography

Blended stories and family archives

Phantoms of genealogy

The framework of duty and obligation

CHAPTER 1: Glorification and Reckoning

Daughterhood as an emotional concept

Ancestors and inheritors

Egocentric or altruistic?

Uprooted from everyday life

CHAPTER 2: Artistic Practices in the Autobiographical Field

Aesthetic, ethical and performative potential

Confrontations and alliances

The logic of the transcryptum and the power of self-fragilization

“Yellow was my mother’s code”

“Mom used to say that onions save lives”

CHAPTER 3: Blood Ties, Blood Bonds

Entangled in relationships

Literary genograms

“[Mother] acquired the habit of erecting defensive walls wherever she could”

“I’ve taken your story, Mama, your apocalypse”

“[Mother] talked, she talked only to be talking”

(Bio)heredity of (in)experience

CHAPTER 4: Mothers, Daughters and Their Shame

Shame, guilt and empathy

Shame in the family and politics

Shame, disgust and the body

CHAPTER 5: Topologies of Illness

Excerpts from the medical record

Laboratory of private configurations

The family as a malady

EPILOGUE: Aesthetics of Autobiographical Hybrids

Writing up the family

Family (auto)pathographies