Literatura w cieniu choroby, czyli tuberkulinowe fantazmaty Grabińskiego
Literature in the shadow of disease, or the tuberculosis phantasms of Grabiński

Author(s): Edyta Izabela Rudolf
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Literary Texts, Studies of Literature, Philology, Theory of Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
Keywords: Stephen Grabiński; tuberculosis; phantasm; disease
Summary/Abstract: Literature formed in the shadow of a deadly disease or lifethreatening events is not uncommon. The work of Stephen Grabiński is not the only one, especially that the writer suffered from tuberculosis, a disease marked by cultural ostracism, and imposing its bearer certain social requirements. Grabiński lived in the days when people were taught the names of pain and created the new geography of the body traced by the site of the pain. The ill, subject to a medical consultation, much more precisely managed to build up a picture of the disease. We can ask ourselves how the disease affects the sense of coherence and freedom of the writer, and the readers’ knowledge of the author’s struggle with his own body and how itinspires the understanding of suffering and its potential. Can fantasy, based on the fear built on the narrative worlds of nightmares, symbolise the function in the real world of suffering and diseases leading to death?

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