Description and Performance as Essential Modalities of Representations in Memoir Narratives (Exemplified by Alta Vášová´s Writings) Cover Image

Opis a performancia ako základné modality reprezentácií v pamäťových naratívoch (na príklade textov Alty Vášovej)
Description and Performance as Essential Modalities of Representations in Memoir Narratives (Exemplified by Alta Vášová´s Writings)

Author(s): Zora Prušková
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Slovak Literature
Published by: Ústav slovenskej literatúry SAV
Keywords: narrative; transmediality; imagination; performance; creative work;

Summary/Abstract: The subject of the paper is to observe a coincidence between description and performance in autobiographic narratives. As an example, this phenomenon is traced in autobiographic writings by the Slovak prose writer Alta Vášová (1939), produced between the years 1995 and 2019. Her prose works Úlety/Flights of Fancy, Ostrovy nepamäti/Islands of Non-memory, Sfarbenia/Colorations, Menoslov/Name List, Dolety a Odlety/Ranges and Departures feature a strange type of memoir writing, which points to a certain general semiotic property of autobiographic memoir narration. From the semiotic, referential and stylistic points of view, this type of writing is part of latent discussion on the nature of creative work with a literary text at the level of basic stylistic and composition techniques of epic: description, narration and performative perspective of narrative representations. The paper is an attempt at presenting their mutual coincidence, inseparability and poetological scaling in Alta Vášová´s memoir writing. It also raises the question of performative and descriptive modality of recollecting (as a substitute of culture and history) in memoir writing.

  • Issue Year: 68/2021
  • Issue No: 1
  • Page Range: 40-52
  • Page Count: 13
  • Language: Slovak