The self-portrait with a fox. The past to overcome in Magdalena Tulli’s autobiographical prose Cover Image

Autoportret zlisem. Przeszłość do przezwyciężeniawprozie autobiograficznej Magdaleny Tulli
The self-portrait with a fox. The past to overcome in Magdalena Tulli’s autobiographical prose

Author(s): Janusz Waligóra
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Theory of Literature, Sociology of Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego
Keywords: Tulli; postmemory; trauma; childhood; Holocaust; literature; autobiography

Summary/Abstract: The author focuses on the creation of the children’s hero from autobiographical novels by Magdalena Tulli: Włoskie szpilki (2011) and Szum (2014). The expressing of traumatic experience from the past in Tulli’s works takes not only the form of a successful artistic endeavour, but is also a kind of self-care. Waligóra argues that the fact of rejecting a girl by her mother and numerous examples of oppressiveness of the outside world result in life failures, the heroine’s emotional dys­function and melancholic-depressive nature of memories.The psychological and sociological vivisection of the existence of a family of Jewish (mother) and Italian (father) origin is enriched by the Holocaust and postwar anti-Semitic topics. The female narrator of both novels explores the sources of devastating experience of Shoah that became a pain­ful part of her motherʼs and auntʼs biography. The moving complaint about an unhappy childhood, tempered by the creation of a fictional friend — a fox, takes the form of a difficult forgiveness in parallel, the forgiveness including the closest people: the wrongdoers who have become victims themselves.

  • Issue Year: 59/2019
  • Issue No: 1
  • Page Range: 135-150
  • Page Count: 16
  • Language: Polish
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