Herod-baba J.I. Kraszewskiego – kobiecość w wersji polskiej i obcej, czyli czytanie po polsku ze stereotypami narodowościowymi i historycznie umotywowanymi w tle
“Herod-baba” by J.I. Kraszewski – Polish and Foreign Versions of Femininity. Reading in Polish with Historically Motivated National Stereotypes in the Background

Author(s): Anna Roter-Bourkane
Subject(s): Polish Literature, Philology
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: literature; stereotype; teaching Polish as a foreign language
Summary/Abstract: The paper constitutes an analysis of fragments of a short novel Herod-baba by J.I. Kraszewski. It focuses on the author’s strategy of constructing literary characters on the basis of contrast. The background of the analysis is a broadly understood term “stereotype”, referring both to gender and to nationality, and deeply embedded in the historical reality of the 19th and the turn of the 17th and 18th century. Showing how Kraszewski built his story between realism and partial vision also permits to denounce the presence of disdain for anyone or anything foreign in the history of Polish literature. Glaring juxtapositions of Poles and foreigners in Kraszewski’s novel were used as a basis for language exercises. They reflect the writer’s poetics of contrast and they constitute great teaching material for foreigners learning Polish, especially for vocabulary exercises.

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