Academic Scientific JournalsThe Memory of the City in Mȕnchhauseniada by Jerzy Limon
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26881/kg.2023.1.06Keywords:
Mȕnchhauseniada, novel, magic realism, memory, collective memoryAbstract
The article analyses the first novel by Jerzy Limon, Mȕnchhauseniada (1980), rooted in a postwar seaside spa, whose prewar inhabitants, Germans, have been largely replaced by dislocated people from Eastern Poland. Thus, the new inhabitants were forced to renegotiate its own identity. The novel, analysed withing the framework of memory studies, traces Limon’s pursuit of an adequate literary genre which would depict the effects massive displacement of people after World War II.
The juxtaposition of paradocumentary descriptions, picaresque novel or narrative transgressing the limitations of conventional novel of manners. All theses features seem to be stemming from the instability of the times in which the narration is set, as well as from historical and social events in a town which mimetically follows Sopot and Gdansk after World War II. In consequence, the novel offers additional insights if is interpreted in terms of magical realism, which first appeared in unstable post war Europe, i.e. in the Weimar Republic in 1925.
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