Document Type

Article

Publication Date

7-2024

Publication Title

The Polish Review

Volume

69

Issue

2

Pages

129-131

Publisher Name

University of Illinois Press

Abstract

Katarzyna Bartoszyńska prefaces her innovative project pairing a series of “anomalous” (or “freakish”) Polish and Irish novels with epigraphs from Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy on the power of storytelling (“let the people tell their stories their own way”) and Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire about Stanley's Polishness (“They're something like the Irish, aren't they? [. . .] Only not so—highbrow?”). The seeming disconnect between these two quotations signals a central tension between the universal and the particular at the heart of Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland, and Theories of World Literature. Bartoszyńska's book is organized around four pairs of Polish and Irish novels whose “oddness,” she argues, calls for a “new global history” that estranges “our sense of the novel as form, offering new and interesting perspective on what it can do” (p. 126). This approach, which Bartoszyńska defines as a “weak theory of the novel,” naturally decenters the novel by extending it “geographically and chronologically, without claiming any particular mode as definitive” (p. 134). The irony that Williams toyed at times with the idea of making Stanley Italian, Irish, and even Mexican in drafts of his play only speaks to the common or “anecdotal” similarities many observers perceive between the Poles and the Irish that conflate their experience on a range of levels (from politics to stereotypes). As she admits in her introduction, the resemblance between Poland and Ireland may, in fact, not mean much of anything, but by focusing on the formal features of these novels, she makes a compelling case for the value of understanding how people “tell their stories their own way” as a way “to teach us different ways of reading” (p. 15).

Comments

Author Posting © The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois, 2024. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of the University of Illinois Press for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in The Polish Review, VOL.69, Iss.2, (July 2024), https://doi.org/10.5406/23300841.69.2.13

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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