From rejection to praise of irony. Dorota Masłowska in her search of “we”
From rejection to praise of irony. Dorota Masłowska in her search of “we”

Summary/Abstract: The adventures of Dorota Masłowska, experienced between her novels Snow White and Russian Red and Honey, I Killed Our Cats, show a world where capitalism is the only way of organising reality. At the same time, it is a power affecting all types of relations: among people and between people and the world. The motif connecting Masłowska’s novels is the pursuit – through one’s writing – of liberation from the tools of the capitalist rule recorded and reinforced in the language. Attempts at comprehending this rule, undertaken always as an element of a writer’s ethos, are an extremely interesting path from destruction to praising conservatism and from combat for yourself (as defined by Hallward) – as an expression of a specific configuration of reality – to the singularity of a writer’s absolute. Taking this path requires a change to the use of two literary categories: grotesque and irony which remain Masłowska’s trademarks. At the same time, in her subsequent books grotesque and irony bring a new angle to her polyphonic writing. The author analyses the evolution of Masłowska’s writing making a (critical) use of the tools of postcolonial theory. She refers to the notions of “singular” and “specific” as used by Peter Hallward in his Absolutely Postcolonial. Writing between Singular and the Specific (2001). In his dissertation, Hallward presents two trends; a description thereof allows him for “the global and contemporary discrimination of fundamental approaches to our general conceptions of agency and context, self and other, politics and particularity.” Snochowska-Gonzalez refers Hallward’s categories to the subject of interest of the postcolonial theory (like freshly located and de-territorialisation, national determination and freedom from it). She develops the method of applying analytical tools presented in her article “Od melancholii do rozpaczy. O prozie Andrzeja Stasiuka” published in Studia Litteraria et Historica, no. 2 (2013).

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