Browsing by Author "Just, Daniel"

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Open Access
The autobiographical provocation: Witold Gombrowicz's Diary as a transformative text
(Modern Humanities Research Association, 2018) Just, Daniel
An author's name on autobiographical texts has a different status from its pre-sence on works of fiction because we tend to regard the former as more firmly bound with reference, with more essential ties to the author and real events. According to Paul de Man, we endow writers of autobiographical genres with ontological identity that gives their texts contractual authority, rather than representational and cognitive identity rooted in tropes, as in fictional texts: we perceive these genres as speech acts that substantiate the author's con-tractual claim, and read them as verification of the validity of the contract and authenticity of the author's signature on it.De Man questions the belief that life inevitably produces autobiography, and asks whether writing about oneself is not 'in fact governed by the technical demands of self-portraiture and thus determined, in all its aspects, by the resources of [one's] medium?'He argues that autobiographical genres offer neither a reliable body of know-ledge to readers nor a definitive means of self-presentation to writers, as they cannot eliminate fictionality and provide closure and totalization.Unable to escape the tropological language of substitutions that haunts all literary texts, these genres cannot make language and what it names coincide.
Open Access
Bohumil hrabal and the poetics of aging
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018) Just, Daniel
Open Access
The difficult childhood of an adult: aging and maturity in Witold Gombrowicz’s pornografia
(Elsevier, 2020) Just, Daniel
Maturity and immaturity are the hallmarks of Witold Gombrowicz’s literary texts. They were introduced in his first novel, Ferdydurke, and an early collection of short stories, Memoirs from a Time of Immaturity, and continued to play a central role in his fiction and nonfiction works, including the Diary, A Kind of Testament, and the penultimate novel, Pornografia. Although Gombrowicz has been widely regarded as a staunch critic of maturity and defender of immature spontaneity, playfulness, and formlessness, this view is largely based on his earlier writings. Later works offer a more complex image of Gombrowicz. Pornografia, in particular, no longer pits immaturity against maturity with the goal of discrediting the latter through humor and irony. Instead, it experiments with the possibility of a new relationship between the two, a relationship which would ameliorate the discontents that often come with aging.
Open Access
Literatura a život: sebestylizace jako strategie v autobiografických a esejistických textech Bohumila Hrabala
(Akademie Ved Ceske Republiky, 2019) Just, Daniel
Bohumil Hrabal often emphasizes that his work is firmly anchored in reality. He says that it is based either on what had happened to him, or what he had heard from other people and had identified with to such an extent that he merged in with it. This emphasis on the indivisible link between literature and real life is strongest in his later autobiographical and essayistic texts in which he writes directly about himself and not through narrators or literary characters as he did previously. In these texts he also thinks more systematically about what it means to be a writer, how he himself developed as a writer and what his objectives were in writing and in life in general. Characteristically, these texts cannot be reduced to what Hrabal says to us in them, as he frequently stylizes himself in various forms and makes use of a number of other typically literary techniques. What Hrabal writes about and how and why he keeps coming back to the problem of the relationship between literature and life is a sign of his efforts to come to terms with what is weighing him down. For him literature becomes a kind of adaptive strategy to deal with his chronic inability to be in the present moment.
Open Access
The literary bias: narrative and the self
(The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023-10) Just, Daniel
Narratives are an interface that evolution has instilled in our brains for their optimal interaction with reality. Without them we would not be who we are: creatures that narrativize their experiences, integrate them into their autobiographical self, and imagine the future of this self. But narratives also distort reality by endowing it with meaning, purpose, and causality even when none exist. Literary stories with weak narrativity, such as those by Raymond Carver, remind us of another modality of the human mind and selfhood available to us, one that registers the world without subjecting it to narrative selection and chronological ordering. © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved.