Kalendář

Lecture by Natalia Pamula (Univertsity of Warsaw)

December 12, 12:00

Campus Veleslavín,  Room FHS 1

My talk, “No Future: Intellectual Disability in Post-1989 Polish Literature” focuses on two young adult novels, Dorota Terakowska’s Poczwarka (The Chrysalis) and Wyspa mojej siostry (My Sister’s Island) by Katarzyna Ryrych and Anna Sobolewska’s disability memoir Cela: Odpowiedź na zespół Downa (Cela: A Response to Down Syndrome) to reveal conflicting literary discourses on intellectual disability in post-socialist Poland. In the two hugely successful young adult novels by Dorota Terakowska and Katarzyna Ryrych, the main protagonists - girls with Down syndrome die unexpectedly at a young age, which might suggest literature’s failure to imagine a future for intellectually disabled subjects under capitalism. Anna Sobolewska’s memoir testifies to a more political and social problem of the state’s inability to provide a “respectful” future for her daughter, Cela, who has a Down syndrome. In my talk I ask to what extent literature by its inability to imagine a future for intellectually disabled girls reveals its own limitations and to what extent it might signal a foreclosure of the democratic promise of freedom and equality for disabled subjects in capitalist Poland