The Woman Artist: Essays in memory of Dorota Filipczak
The Woman Artist: Essays in memory of Dorota Filipczak
Contributor(s): Tomasz Dobrogoszcz (Editor), Tomasz Fisiak (Editor), Agata G. Handley (Editor), Krzysztof Majer (Editor)
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Translation Studies, Theory of Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
Keywords: Woman; artist; feminism; Dorota Filipczak
Summary/Abstract: The volume, honoring Professor Dorota Filipczak, whose energetic and fruitful academic career was cut short in 2021, offers a contribution to literary criticism and culture studies, the areas on which her own scholarly endeavors centered. The theme of “the woman artist” was of particular significance both for Filipczak’s inquiry into the work of writers such as Alice Munro, Jane Urquhart, Michèle Roberts or Margaret Laurence, and for her own poetic practice. Rather than focus on her achievements in various fields (as scholar, writer, teacher, poet, and translator), the texts collected in this volume go beyond remembrance and the honoring of an established scholar’s remarkable feats. Despite their undeniable commemorative role, the chapters are an attempt to carry Dorota Filipczak’s academic endeavors forward, into the future, with her own texts serving as prologue and inspiration. The contributors to the volume — representing various fields of the academia — are her friends, colleagues and collaborators, and the essays eloquently testify to her intellectual influence. From more personal reflections and ruminations inspired by Filipczak’s life and work to articles exploring the work of a range of women artists, the volume offers an investigation of various approaches to autobiography, tensions between public personas and private selves, subversive performative personas, transcending religious frameworks of bodily discipline, as well as “toggling” between the human and the nonhuman.
Series: Uniwersytet Łódzki
- E-ISBN-13: 978-83-8331-398-6
- Print-ISBN-13: 978-83-8331-397-9
- Page Count: 202
- Publication Year: 2024
- Language: English
Preface
Preface
(Preface)
- Author(s):Tomasz Dobrogoszcz, Agata G. Handley, Krzysztof Majer, Tomasz Fisiak
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Translation Studies, Theory of Literature
- Page Range:9-12
- No. of Pages:4
Aesthetic Modes of Attack: The Woman Critic-Artist, Caractère unique
Aesthetic Modes of Attack: The Woman Critic-Artist, Caractère unique
(Aesthetic Modes of Attack: The Woman Critic-Artist, Caractère unique)
- Author(s):Aritha van Herk
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Translation Studies, Theory of Literature
- Page Range:15-26
- No. of Pages:12
- Keywords:women critic-artists; Dorota Filipczak; Aesthetics
- Summary/Abstract:To honour the memory of Dorota Filipczak and express my grief over her untimely passing, I comment here on three artworks in which time is a central issue, all three in very different ways. “Untimely” comes to mean not simply “premature,” as is the death of someone we greatly miss, but as unorthodox, confusing, and artistically challenging deployments of time. The three artists are from three different continents: Europe, Latin America, and Asia. They share a commitment to the current problems of the world, to a reflection on violence, especially gendered; on loneliness and on memory. They believe in the power of art to make people think, and even change their opinions. As they use artistic tools, before all else, they resist the unreliability of time as we tend to see it: in chronology and with a steady rhythm. Ann Veronica Janssens (Belgium) makes us experience, in her mist rooms, how hampering our clear sight slows everything down. When I once asked her to characterize her work, her simple answer was: “abstract and political.” Doris Salcedo (Colombia) fights the forgetfulness of violence; in the case here, of the indifference to refugees, which causes the death by drowning of so many. Her installation Palimpsesto makes slowly moving, then quickly disappearing drops of water the carriers of the names of those anonymous victims. Nalini Malani (India) presents her thoughts as images shooting from her head, in animations with a frantic pace. Her unsettling speed can be seen as a foreshortening of time. The three artworks, as well as the women who invented and made them, demonstrate that art matters, as a variant of the title of the journal that Dorota created: Text Matters. This paper explores how women who are both critics and artists resist the designations assigned to genre and gender. The alias of caractère unique subverts the academic categories that seek to locate and confine their unique practice and their work. In a set of creative evasions that explore the limitations of brackets and applications, this investigation of ambiguity proceeds as a poetics of digression, working from interviews that Dorota Filipczak conducted with Mieke Bal and Rukmini Bhaya Nair. The result is an excursion into bavardage that is nevertheless an aesthetic disruption of the authority of structure and destination.
Untimeliness, Inter-ship, Mutuality
Untimeliness, Inter-ship, Mutuality
(Untimeliness, Inter-ship, Mutuality)
- Author(s):Mieke Bal
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Translation Studies, Theory of Literature
- Page Range:27-45
- No. of Pages:19
- Keywords:Veronica Janssens; Nalini Malani; Doris Salcedo; contemporary art
- Summary/Abstract:To honour the memory of Dorota Filipczak and express my grief over her untimely passing, I comment here on three artworks in which time is a central issue, all three in very different ways. “Untimely” comes to mean not simply “premature,” as is the death of someone we greatly miss, but as unorthodox, confusing, and artistically challenging deployments of time. The three artists are from three different continents: Europe, Latin America, and Asia. They share a commitment to the current problems of the world, to a reflection on violence, especially gendered; on loneliness and on memory. They believe in the power of art to make people think, and even change their opinions. As they use artistic tools, before all else, they resist the unreliability of time as we tend to see it: in chronology and with a steady rhythm. Ann Veronica Janssens (Belgium) makes us experience, in her mist rooms, how hampering our clear sight slows everything down. When I once asked her to characterize her work, her simple answer was: “abstract and political.” Doris Salcedo (Colombia) fights the forgetfulness of violence; in the case here, of the indifference to refugees, which causes the death by drowning of so many. Her installation Palimpsesto makes slowly moving, then quickly disappearing drops of water the carriers of the names of those anonymous victims. Nalini Malani (India) presents her thoughts as images shooting from her head, in animations with a frantic pace. Her unsettling speed can be seen as a foreshortening of time. The three artworks, as well as the women who invented and made them, demonstrate that art matters, as a variant of the title of the journal that Dorota created: Text Matters.
Disciplined Interdisciplinarity
Disciplined Interdisciplinarity
(Disciplined Interdisciplinarity)
- Author(s):David Jasper
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Translation Studies, Theory of Literature
- Page Range:47-56
- No. of Pages:11
- Keywords:interdisciplinary; literature; religion; gender; unity; professionalism
- Summary/Abstract:Interdisciplinarity is a word often used in contemporary universities, but little understood or practiced. “Professionalism” tends to keep academics within the narrow boundaries of their own field of research. Dorota Filipczak has long represented a different and more vibrant form in interdisciplinarity which this essay seeks to explore through a brief review of the two journals Literature and Theology and Text Matters, as well as Dorota’s early research and writing on Canadian literature and Malcom Lowry in particular. These suggestions are within the tradition of J. H. Newman’s great vision of a university in the middle of the nineteenth century, and the discussion concludes with a reflection on the conference organized by Dorota in 1998 entitled Dissolving the Boundaries.
“Alternative Selves” and Authority in the Fiction of Jane Urquhart
“Alternative Selves” and Authority in the Fiction of Jane Urquhart
(“Alternative Selves” and Authority in the Fiction of Jane Urquhart)
- Author(s):Dorota Filipczak
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Translation Studies, Theory of Literature
- Page Range:61-75
- No. of Pages:15
- Keywords:Jane Urquhart; Immanuel Kant; Pamela Sue Anderson; feminist literature
- Summary/Abstract:The article engages with “alternative selves,” a concept found in The Stone Carvers by a Canadian writer, Jane Urquhart. Her fiction is first seen in the context of selected texts by Lucy Maud Montgomery, Margaret Laurence and Alice Munro, who explore the clash between female characters’ conventional roles and their “secret” selves. My analysis was inspired by Pamela Sue Anderson’s A Feminist Philosophy of Religion, which stresses the need for “reinventing ourselves as other” in the face of biased beliefs and dominant epistemology. In particular, my article refers to Anderson’s concern with Kant’s imaginary from The Critique of Pure Reason, where “the territory of pure understanding” is projected on the island, while desire, chaos and death are identified with the sea. Seen through the prism of a feminist reading of the philosophical imaginary, the sea becomes the female beyond. Urquhart’s three novels: Away, The Stone Carvers and A Map of Glass dissolve Kantian opposition between island and water, by showing how reason is invaded by desire and death, and how the female protagonist embodies the elements that have been repressed. The article ends with the analysis of a Homeric intertext in A Map of Glass, where Sylvia identifies with Odysseus “lashed to the mast” so that he would not respond to the call of the siren song. Reading Homer’s passage on the siren song, one realizes that the use of the Kantian imaginary turns Ithaca into the island of truth, and the sea into the stormy beyond, identified with desire, death and femaleness. While the Odyssey suppresses the dangerous message of the siren song, Urquhart’s fiction rewrites it and reclaims it as positive inspiration for the female protagonist.
What Is In the Picture (and What Is Not): Canada, Women, and Autobiography in the Work of Geraldine Moodie, Eva Hoffman and Alice Munro
What Is In the Picture (and What Is Not): Canada, Women, and Autobiography in the Work of Geraldine Moodie, Eva Hoffman and Alice Munro
(What Is In the Picture (and What Is Not): Canada, Women, and Autobiography in the Work of Geraldine Moodie, Eva Hoffman and Alice Munro)
- Author(s):Norman Ravvin
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Translation Studies, Theory of Literature
- Page Range:77-97
- No. of Pages:21
- Keywords:autobiography; photography; Canadian women
- Summary/Abstract:An artist may be drawn toward, or overtly resistant to, autobiography. The range of possible approaches affects the inward, intimate portrait they create, but also their rendering of place and time. The impact of such varied approaches can be seen in the work of three women: photographer Geraldine Moodie, memoirist Eva Hoffman, and fiction writer Alice Munro. In Moodie’s case, a documentary portrait of place and time is found in her studio and landscape photographs of Cree in south Saskatchewan, as well as in her photographs of early 20th-century Inuit at Fullerton Harbour. For Munro, in a suite of late-career pieces, the focus is Wingham, her Ontario countryside birthplace in the 1930s and ‘40s. In Lost in Translation Hoffman depicts Jewish Vancouver of the late 1950s and early ‘60s. In each of these, the portrait of place and time is ambiguously linked to autobiography. Moodie’s camera provides a seemingly objective record which lacks a guiding artistic statement, since no autobiographical record exists. Hoffman presents an overt and detailed memoir of Jewish Vancouver at the time of her Jewish Polish family’s emigration from Kraków. But her self-portrait, however intimate, leaves a great deal out, and even obscures the life of the city in a way that signals how autobiographical writing can turn in directions almost fictional, guided decisions about what to reveal. Munro’s final volume, Dear Life, ends with four short pieces described in the author’s note as “autobiographical in feeling,” and “the closest things I have to say about my own life.” These three contrasting portraits of self and place bridge a half-century in their portrayals of young women’s lives. Through them the reader learns how to seek their own autobiographical impulses as they relate to Canadian ground.
Elizabeth Bernholz’s Gazelle Twin: Disguise, Persona and Jesterism
Elizabeth Bernholz’s Gazelle Twin: Disguise, Persona and Jesterism
(Elizabeth Bernholz’s Gazelle Twin: Disguise, Persona and Jesterism)
- Author(s):Philip Hayward, Matt Hills
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Translation Studies, Theory of Literature
- Page Range:99-119
- No. of Pages:21
- Keywords:artistic persona; electronic music; Englishness; jesterism
- Summary/Abstract:The proliferation of low-cost, high-quality, digital production and distribution systems over the last two decades has allowed a range of performers to develop repertoires and careers in non-traditional contexts. While often difficult, the ability to gain traction at the fringes of the (still) highly male-dominated music industry has provided opportunities for female artists such as Grimes and FKA Twigs to achieve commercial success and critical acknowledgement. Although not as well-known as the previously named performers, Elizabeth Bernholz, who adopted the professional alias Gazelle Twin (henceforth referred to as GT) in 2009, has also carved out a distinct niche for herself as a vocalist, electronic music composer, performer and video maker. Over the past 13 years she has explored various personae, including, in the run-up to and aftermath of Brexit, that of a 21st-century jester, turning tropes of traditional Englishness against themselves. This chapter provides an analysis of GT’s personae and related creative outputs. In order to address these, the chapter engages with persona studies and deploys elements of analytical musicology, media studies and cultural studies to analyze GT’s multi-faceted output and the broader cultural contexts she has sought to represent. Writing about an artist such as Bernholz involves a complex negotiation of / switching between the performer’s perception of herself, her perception and representation of her creative persona (which has undergone various transitions) and critical responses to her work. As the chapter outlines, these complex roles and switches are as much a part of the creative entity known as GT as they are explanatory factors behind it.
Vernacular Architecture: Posthumanist Lyric Speakers in Elizabeth Willis’s Address
Vernacular Architecture: Posthumanist Lyric Speakers in Elizabeth Willis’s Address
(Vernacular Architecture: Posthumanist Lyric Speakers in Elizabeth Willis’s Address)
- Author(s):Mark Tardi
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Translation Studies, Theory of Literature
- Page Range:121-130
- No. of Pages:10
- Keywords:American poetry; posthumanism; witches; feminist poetics; lyric subject
- Summary/Abstract:American poet Elizabeth Willis’s award-winning fourth book of poetry Address is a collection inhabited by poisonous plants and witches, tornados and forecasts, bees and blacklists. The opening title poem foregrounds a poetic landscape of diffuse and impalpable lyric subjectivity as Willis writes, “I is to they . . . / the sun belongs to I / once for an instant / The window belongs to you.” These slurry and slippery pronouns in Willis’s poems not only aim to complicate and critique (historical) representations of women, but may also be giving voice to ghosts, hills, months or shoes. Working within the posthumanist framework of thinkers such as Donna Haraway (When Species Meet), Rosi Braidotti (Nomadic Subjects), and others, this essay seeks to examine Willis’s authorial strategy in presenting the lyric subjects of her poems that toggle between the micro- and macro-scales of human and nonhuman, self and world, invisible and imaginary, biological and alchemical, and private vs. political. Willis’s disruptions of voice and syntax offer a poetics of becoming and undoing where “When the ghost is on you, / you don’t even see it happen.” How does Willis’s animate the invisible in her poems, and, as Michael Palmer wonders, “from what site––or address––can [the poem] possible speak in the profoundly unstable currents of our time?”
“Let me hear Thy voice”: Michèle Roberts’s Refiguring of Mary Magdalene in the Light of The Song of Songs
“Let me hear Thy voice”: Michèle Roberts’s Refiguring of Mary Magdalene in the Light of The Song of Songs
(“Let me hear Thy voice”: Michèle Roberts’s Refiguring of Mary Magdalene in the Light of The Song of Songs)
- Author(s):Dorota Filipczak
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Translation Studies, Theory of Literature
- Page Range:133-145
- No. of Pages:13
- Keywords:6. Michèle Roberts; The Secret Gospel of Mary Magdalene; The Song of Songs
- Summary/Abstract:The article engages with the protagonist of The Secret Gospel of Mary Magdalene by Michèle Roberts, first published in 1984 as The Wild Girl. Filipczak discusses scholarly publications that analyze the role of Mary Magdalene, and redeem her from the sexist bias which reduced her to a repentant whore despite the lack of evidence for this in the Gospels. The very same analyses demonstrate that the role of Mary Magdalene as Christ’s first apostle silenced by patriarchal tradition was unique. While Roberts draws on the composite character of Mary Magdalene embedded in the traditional association between women, sexuality and sin, she also moves far beyond this, by reclaiming the female imaginary as an important part of human connection to the divine. At the same time, Roberts recovers the conjunction between sexuality and spirituality by framing the relationship of Christ and Mary Magdalene with The Song of Songs, which provides the abject saint from Catholic tradition with an entirely different legacy of autonomy and expression of female desire, be it sexual, maternal or spiritual. The intertext connected with The Song of Songs runs consistently through The Secret Gospel of Mary Magdalene. This, in turn, sensitizes the readers to the traces of the Song in the Gospels, which never quote from it, but they rely heavily on the association between Christ and the Bridegroom, while John 20 shows the encounter between the risen Christ and Mary Magdalene in the garden whose imagery is strongly suggestive of the nuptial meeting in The Song of Songs.
A Catholic New Woman Artist: A Contradiction in Terms? Sex, Music and Religion in George Moore’s Evelyn Innes and Sister Teresa
A Catholic New Woman Artist: A Contradiction in Terms? Sex, Music and Religion in George Moore’s Evelyn Innes and Sister Teresa
(A Catholic New Woman Artist: A Contradiction in Terms? Sex, Music and Religion in George Moore’s Evelyn Innes and Sister Teresa)
- Author(s):Jan Jędrzejewski
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Translation Studies, Theory of Literature
- Page Range:147-160
- No. of Pages:14
- Keywords:Late-Victorian; fiction; New Woman; music; Catholicism
- Summary/Abstract:The paper offers an overview of George Moore’s long-neglected novels Evelyn Innes (1898) and its sequel Sister Teresa (1901), focusing on the presentation of their eponymous protagonist as a woman, an artist, and a committed if independent-minded Roman Catholic. The two novels constitute an extended study of the relationship between artistic inspiration, sensuality, and religious experience: Evelyn Innes, an opera singer who ultimately chooses to join a religious order and become a nun, tries to reconcile in her life the conflicting demands of her vocation as an artist, her passionate nature, her personal and religious loyalties, and the expectations of Victorian society. Focusing on the novels’ interwoven musical and religious imagery, the chapter traces the presentation of Evelyn’s growth as a character, arguing, in the context of the development of late Victorian fiction, that she emerges as a rare example of a Catholic New Woman artist; at the same time, the novels shed some light on George Moore’s perception of the interface of the issues of aesthetics, gender, and religion in the context of turn-of-the-century British and Irish social, literary, and cultural life.
Cherishing the Body: Embodiment and the Intersubjective World in Michèle Roberts’s Playing Sardines
Cherishing the Body: Embodiment and the Intersubjective World in Michèle Roberts’s Playing Sardines
(Cherishing the Body: Embodiment and the Intersubjective World in Michèle Roberts’s Playing Sardines)
- Author(s):Marta Goszczyńska
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Translation Studies, Theory of Literature
- Page Range:161-174
- No. of Pages:14
- Keywords:Michèle Roberts; Playing Sardines; intersubjectivity; embodiment; Maurice Merleau-Ponty
- Summary/Abstract:The essay sets out to analyze selected stories from Michèle Roberts’s 2001 collection, Playing Sardines, in the light of theories of embodiment. Opposing the Cartesian body/mind dualism, these theories refuse to view the body merely as an object or an imperfect instrument over which the mind must exercise control. Instead, they insist on recognizing the embodied character of human experience by portraying the body as intricately engaged with the surrounding world. As I will demonstrate, these views find their reflection in Roberts’s fiction, whose purpose has always been, as she declares, “to rescue the body and cherish it and love it and touch it and smell it and make it into language” (“January”). This self-appointed project seems to me to be consistent with the approach of embodiment theorists, who also “rescue” the reputation of the body by identifying it as an ethically productive locus of intersubjectivity. My argument in the essay will be threefold. First of all, I will discuss Roberts’s stories as sharing with the philosophies of embodiment their skepticism towards the Cartesian body/mind dualism. In particular, I will focus on stories depicting the negative consequences of privileging the mind over the body, a stance that Sonia Kruks identifies as leading to what she refers to as “antagonistic intersubjectivity” (39–42). In the second part, I will move on to discuss scenes dramatizing the moment of liberation, granted to many of Roberts’s characters as they break free from damaging interpersonal relationships and/or move towards more positive interactions with others. Finally, in the third part of the essay, I will consider these positive, mutually affirmative experiences of intersubjectivity.
On Spaces Within and Between: Dorota Filipczak’s (Embodied) Visions of the Sacred
On Spaces Within and Between: Dorota Filipczak’s (Embodied) Visions of the Sacred
(On Spaces Within and Between: Dorota Filipczak’s (Embodied) Visions of the Sacred)
- Author(s):Monika Kocot
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Translation Studies, Theory of Literature
- Page Range:175-201
- No. of Pages:27
- Keywords:place; the sacred; landscape; feminism; body; mind
- Summary/Abstract:On the cover of her debut book of poems entitled W cieniu doskonałej pomarańczy, Dorota Filipczak shares an insight which might be treated not only as an important gateway to the realm of her poetry but also to her academic writing—“I’m passionate about the sacred in poetry and prose, and ways of its unconventional interpretation. Writing poetry and literary criticism is like looking at one and the same landscape through two separate windows” (translation mine). This essay explores a number of unconventional interpretations of the sacred in Filipczak’s poems, but it also points to similar practices in her academic writing. The image of two windows and one landscape serves as a metaphor describing the two modes of Filipczak’s writing. In order to show how this metaphor works in her poetry, I look at selected pieces from all her books of poems. In my analyses, I refer to essays by Marek Czuku and Wojciech Ligęza who focus on the link between body, mind, landscape, and myth in Filipczak’s poetry. My intention is to develop their insights and show how various metaphors of the body/body-mind are interconnected with the theme of spirituality, female empowerment, trauma and Polish history, and how they foreground the importance of places and spaces in Filipczak’s writing.
