Gentleman and Plebeians A Word for the Opening of a Conference Dedicated to the Work of Witold Gombrowicz
Keywords:
Gombrowicz, stylistics and aesthetics of modernism, grazia, sprezzatura, the latest Polish proseAbstract
The article draws attention to the aesthetic feature of Gombrowicz’s prose as an effect of the unconstrained verbal games (para-logic, homonymies, delexicalisation of phraseologies, etc.) which play a fundamental role in the narratives of the author of Kosmos. Such a narrative strategy can be described with the help of the notion of sprezzatura introduced by Baldasarre Castiglione in The Book of the Courtier (Il Cortegiano, 1528 – in his adaptation of Castiglione’s work the Polish writer of the Renaissance, Łukasz Górnicki, used a neologism “nizaczmienie”). Using the reference to the Renaissance aesthetics of grace (grazia), the author of the article emphasizes the “aristocratic” feature of Gombrowicz’s prose. In this respect, Gombrowicz’s writings differ favorably from the publications of contemporary Polish prose writers (D. Masłowska, M. Sieniewicz, and M. Witkowski). Although the mentioned artists refer to both the poetics and anthropological concepts of Gombrowicz, their works do not achieve a similar degree of narrative freedom. This aesthetic difference is accompanied by a cultural and social difference – the brilliance of Gombrowicz’s narrative was elitist and characteristic of “high modernism”, while modern writers are associated with a more plebeian cultural formation.
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