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The Slow Blackening of Mirrors

Summary/Abstract: While writing about her attitude towards feminist criticism and gender studies, the authoress emphasizes the possibility of referring to the sphere of individual experience which permits her to write about literature, without relinquishing her own subjectivity. Presenting the biographies and creative output of the authoresses as well as the life stories of the heroines described in their works from the point of view of the category of experience, has refreshed the language of Polish literature studies, which has so far been dominated by structural and historical methodology; at the same time, it has made room for self-expression or else “self-creation” of the researcher and for breaking the barriers between science and life in a critical text. The authoress confesses that today the problem of self-creation and the role of her own experience in the process of reading and interpreting literary texts is no longer so important to her. The subject has ceased to act like a mirror for the analyzed text; the unavoidable process of the “blackening of the mirror” has been initiated. Yet the practice of feminist criticism teaches one that critical and academic texts are always somehow entangled in the biography of the writer. The ability to understand this truth allows one to better understand oneself and others.

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