The battle for world vision: the openness in Witold Gombrowicz’s diary Cover Image

Walka o wizję świata. Ujawnienia diarysty Gombrowicza
The battle for world vision: the openness in Witold Gombrowicz’s diary

Author(s): Martyna Pańczak
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Polish Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Szczecińskiego
Keywords: Gombrowicz; Bourdieu; diary; openness; battle for personality; labour of enunciation

Summary/Abstract: The article discusses the battle for personality, which the narrator of Witold Gombrowicz’s Diary wages in the name of a free self-creation and an unhampered capability to impose meanings. The author argues that this fight’s most important rule is a strategy of revealing oneself. It is the call for openness – being the opposite of the concept of „intimacy” and taking advantage of the dynamics and performative qualities of language – that makes Diary a space enabling an enunciation of what is unspoken or forgotten. Thereby, the speaking subject can initiate a symbolic labour, which is necessary, as Pierre Bourdieu claims, to go beyond the limits of the widely recognized and oppressive order of discourse. The distance, which is thus attained, is fundamental for creating new, unorthodox possibilites of self-identification and visioning of the world.

  • Issue Year: 7/2016
  • Issue No: 2
  • Page Range: 39-55
  • Page Count: 17
  • Language: Polish