„Ja rozumiałem, tylko nie mogłem mówić”. O twórczości Leo Lipskiego jako afatyka. Rekonesans
“I understood, only I could not speak”. About Leo Lipski’s aphasia. Reconnaissance

Author(s): Olga Osińska
Subject(s): Philology
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: aphasia; speech disorders; speech therapy; medicine; perseveration
Summary/Abstract: The article analyzes the work of Leo Lipski, who is known to have suffered speech disorders of a neurological background, from the perspective of speech therapy. As a context, which is crucial to understand the writer’s disease, the history of aphasic studies has been presented. The authoress also refers to Chris Eagle’s Dysfluencies. On Speech Disorders in Modern Literature (2013), a study on speech disorders in the literature of Western Modernism. The symptoms of Lipski’s disease – recorded in memoirs, audiovisual recordings and his literary works – have been discussed in the light of contemporary knowledge about various kinds of aphasic disorders. In the next part of the article, the authoress has tried to relate the particularity and uniqueness of Lipski’s literary work to his health disorders, and asked the question how the experience of suffering from neurological diseases is represented in his prose and how it becomes a subject thereof. Finally, the attention is drawn to the way in which speech therapy knowledge could be used as a tool for literary studies in general.

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