Dissertation: “Strategies of Silence: Representations of Jewish Poles in Polish Literature since the 1980"

Certified Fall 2021

In my dissertation, I examine the uses and implications of silence in Polish cultural texts of the last forty years that deal with Poland’s Jewish history. Specifically, I examine why, during a period when discourse regarding Jewish history and culture in Poland became increasingly more popular, various writers (including Paweł Huelle, Stefan Chwin, Hanna Krall, Piotr Szewc, Marek Bieńczyk, and Magdalena Tulli) chose more oblique methods of representation, using silence, both thematically and structurally, to engage with the topic. I argue that these writers actively utilize various strategies of silence—allusion and reference, pointedly erased, missing, and elided words, mute(d) objects, places, and people—to engage with longstanding myths and stereotypes regarding the “Jew” and to articulate new modes of understanding Polish and Jewish, and Polish-Jewish, identities. I work against interpretations that frame silence as a circumvention of difficult historical realities or as an articulation of cultural trauma. Indeed, while postmodern trauma theory greatly informs my understanding of the communicative power of silence, I try to think of silence as a potentially productive mode of representation outside of the purview of trauma. Instead, building off of Paul Connerton’s distinction between silencing and silence, or “imposed silences” and “intentional silences” (The Spirit of Mourning, 53–56), I argue that the authors I engage with are using silence as an aesthetic strategy precisely to point to the excisions and erasures that have been enacted against this history and to engage with it in more critical ways. Combining a conceptual framework built around the theories of Lévinas, Derrida, Butler, among others, as well as critical tools of memory studies, I demonstrate that silence can work as an ethico-political strategy that, while not unproblematic, deconstructs what Judith Butler calls “perceptual realities” (Frames of War, 29) regarding recognition of the cultural Other as a singular other, as a concrete life, and expands traditional paradigms of identity, community, and belonging.