Wojciech Drąg | University of Wroclaw (original) (raw)

Papers by Wojciech Drąg

CounterText, 2024

Contemporary life-writing, especially of an experimental disposition, increasingly demonstrates i... more Contemporary life-writing, especially of an experimental disposition, increasingly demonstrates its wariness of narrative as an organising principle of auto/biography and favours structures that resemble an archive – a repository of autobiographical content, disconnected, fragmentary, and arbitrarily arranged. Over the last two decades, we can observe a rise in the popularity of self-archives adopting alphabetical structures such as the bibliography, the encyclopaedia, the glossary, and the index. Of all the alphabetical arrangements of the archive, the index appears the least likely form to be used in life-writing because of the rigidity of its structure and its aura of formality and academic detachment. However, as this article demonstrates, the index can be successfully used in life-writing as a method of processing and investigating one’s past. The article begins with a theoretical discussion of the index – its historical and cultural significance, as well as its politics and poetics. It proceeds to analyse two notable uses of the index for autobiographical purposes: Alejandro Cesarco’s long-term artistic project titled Index (2000–2015) and Joan Wickersham’s memoir The Suicide Index: Putting My Father’s Death in Order (2008), a National Book Award’s finalist for non-fiction. The article shows that whereas Cesarco employs the index primarily to catalogue and examine his intellectual and artistic influences, Wickersham uses it as a structural foundation for her personal search to comprehend and mourn the suicide of her father.

The Experimental Book Object: Materiality, Media, Design, 2023

Following the publication of Lev Manovich’s seminal The Language of New Media (2001), the databas... more Following the publication of Lev Manovich’s seminal The Language of New Media (2001), the database has been widely seen as a cultural model of ever-increasing significance. Manovich calls it “a new way to structure our experience of ourselves and of the world” and “a new symbolic form of the computer age” (219). He points out that – in the aftermath of Nietzsche’s pronouncement of the death of God, Jean-François Lyotard’s diagnosis of the demise of master narratives and the emergence of the Internet – “the world appears to us as an endless and unstructured collection of images, texts, and other data records” (2001, 219). In Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow (2007), Victoria Vesna observes that we are becoming “increasingly aware of ourselves as databases,” since we are frequently identified by our data records, sequences of digits (such as our Social Security number) and our genetic structure (xiii). Both Ed Folsom and Marlene Manoff have argued that the database is “the genre” of the twenty-first century (Folsom 2007, 1576; Manoff 2010, 386). This chapter aims to survey the impact of this new hegemonic form on contemporary biography by examining the emerging genre of digital (or online) biography and one of its most successful representatives – David Clark’s net.art work 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein (to be played with the Left Hand) (2008b).

Studia Litteraria Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis, 2023

B.S. Johnson's The Unfortunates (1969) and Anne Carson's Nox (2010) are among the most formally i... more B.S. Johnson's The Unfortunates (1969) and Anne Carson's Nox (2010) are among the most formally inventive and materially unique literary responses to personal loss. The first novel-in-a-box in English literature, The Unfortunates is a poignant account of the premature death of Johnson's best friend Tony Tillinghast. Also contained in a box, Carson's elegy is printed on a 25-metre-long concertinaed scroll, which contains a collage of textual and visual fragments of various artefacts connected with Carson's dead brother. This article considers the implications of certain visual and tactile properties of both works for their representation of loss and the work of mourning, as theorized by Sigmund Freud and Jacques Derrida. It argues that both the card-shuffle structure and the scroll format accentuate the ongoingness of mourning and convey scepticism about the possibility of any closure. The article also examines the significance of encasing the contents of both elegies in coffin-like boxes and the importance of their extensive use of fragmentation.

Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, 2021

This article examines two brief travelogues by the American writer and visual artist Joe Brainard... more This article examines two brief travelogues by the American writer and visual artist Joe Brainard (1942-1994) as formally unique fusions of the travel journal and literary collage, in which the experience of travel becomes a catalyst for introspection. "Wednesday, July 7 th , 1971 (A Greyhound Bus Trip)" is a record of a bus journey that Brainard made in the summer of 1971, from the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City to Montpelier, Vermont, while "Washington D.C. Journal 1972" is a diary of a three-day car trip to the capital, taken with Brainard's oldest friend (and future biographer), the New York School poet Ron Padgett and his wife and son. In both texts, a description of the particulars of the trip is combined with meditation about the author's life and career. After introducing the structure of the travelogues, the article demonstrates their formal indebtedness to literary collage, which relies on fragmentation, heterogeneity, parataxis, and the use of appropriated content. What follows is an analysis of the texts' oscillation between an account of external stimuli and a record of Brainard's train of thought. It is argued that, gradually, the inward journey becomes more important than the outward, leading the author towards pushing the boundaries of his candour (in "Wednesday") and towards an artistic self-assessment (in "Washington"). The article interprets those works as a manifestation of twentieth-century travel writing's turn towards self-reflectiveness and concludes by considering the relationship between fragmentary, collage-like form and introspective content in the texts at hand, as well as in Brainard's entire artistic output.

Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, 2021

A review of: Jordan, Julia. Late Modernism and the Avant-Garde British Novel: Oblique Strategies.... more A review of: Jordan, Julia. Late Modernism and the Avant-Garde British Novel: Oblique Strategies. Oxford UP, 2020. 256 pages. ISBN 9780198857280. Hb. $80.00.

Orbis Litterarum, 2021

This article argues that David Markson’s four last works, often referred to as a quartet or a tet... more This article argues that David Markson’s four last works, often referred to as a quartet or a tetralogy (1996–2007), and Evan Lavender-Smith’s
From Old Notebooks (2010) can be classified as collage autothanatographies. Both authors construct their formally experimental books out of brief snippets that combine personal meditations on death with various facts, anecdotes, and self-reflexive comments. What grants those fragmentary texts a degree of unity is their concern with mortality: the refrain “timor mortis conturbat me” reverberates throughout Markson’s tetralogy while Lavender-Smith’s narrator announces that “death is the glue that holds the book together.” The article begins with an examination of the collage structure of both works. The formal analysis is followed by a discussion of the ways in which the works in question meet the generic criteria of both autobiography and autothanatography. The concluding part asserts the formal predisposition of collage to represent experiences of personal crisis such as an acute fear of death.

Litteraria Copernicana, 2020

Lublin Studies in Modern Languages and Literature, 2020

This article argues that David Clark's digital biography 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein (to b... more This article argues that David Clark's digital biography 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein (to be played with the Left Hand) (2008) meets all the criteria of a writerly/plural text as defined by Roland Barthes in S/Z (1970). The discussion focuses on the interactive and reversible structure of Clark's work, as well as on the plurality and hybridity of its components. The experimental form of Wittgenstein's biography is examined as an attempt to capture the elusiveness and the contradictions of its subject.

Polish Journal of English Studies, 2019

In the aftermath of a critical debate regarding the Man Booker Prize's adoption of 'readability' ... more In the aftermath of a critical debate regarding the Man Booker Prize's adoption of 'readability' as the main criterion of literary value, Goldsmiths College established a new literary prize. The Goldsmiths Prize was launched in 2013 as a celebration of 'fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form.' Throughout its six editions, the prize has been awarded to such writers as Ali Smith, Nicola Barker and Eimear McBride, and has attracted a lot of media attention. Annually, its jury have written press features praising the shortlisted books, while invited novelists have given lectures on the condition of the novel. Thanks to its quickly won popularity, the Goldsmiths Prize has become the main institution promoting -- and conceptualizing -- 'experimental' fiction in Britain. This article aims to examine all the promotional material accompanying each edition-including jury statements, press releases and commissioned articles in the New Statesman-in order to analyze how the prize defines experimentalism.

Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, 2019

A review of Kaye Mitchell and Nonia Williams's British Avant-Garde Fiction of the 1960s (Edinburg... more A review of Kaye Mitchell and Nonia Williams's British Avant-Garde Fiction of the 1960s (Edinburgh UP, 2019).

Electronic Book Review, 2020

A comprehensive summary of a career that, unlike those of Warhol, Lichtenstein, Katz or most othe... more A comprehensive summary of a career that, unlike those of Warhol, Lichtenstein, Katz or most other contemporaries, lets us recognize Joe Brainard as an antecedent of our current, dispersed and all-embracing digital arts practices. As Nathan Kernan argues in 2019, our multimodal online habitus “looks more and more like a Joe Brainard world.” Wojciech Drąg takes us further into Brainard's lifelong refusal of artistic grandeur. An aesthetic of visual attention that purifies objects and pieces of writing where Brainard wonders if he can "get by without saying anything."

Notre Dame Review, 2019

This article, published in issue 48 (Summer/Fall 2019) of Notre Dame Review, considers the relati... more This article, published in issue 48 (Summer/Fall 2019) of Notre Dame Review, considers the relationship between literary collage and crisis, on the level of both form and content. Following an overview of the most recent American collage works (including This Is Not a Novel by David Markson), the article examines Steve Tomasula's VAS: An Opera in Flatland (2002) and Lance Olsen's Head in Flames (2009) as collage works responding to the crises of their time.

Text Matters, 2019

Paul Ricoeur declares that "being-entangled in stories" is an inherent property of the human cond... more Paul Ricoeur declares that "being-entangled in stories" is an inherent property of the human condition. He introduces the notion of narrative identity-a form of identity constructed on the basis of a self-constructed life-narrative, which becomes a source of meaning and self-understanding. This article wishes to present chosen instances of life writing whose subjects resist yielding a life-story and reject the notions of narrative and identity. In line with Adam Phillips's remarks regarding Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975), such works-which I refer to as fragmentary life writing-emerge out of profound scepticism about any form of "fixing" oneself and confining the variety and randomness of experience to one of the available autobiographical plots. The primary example of the genre is Joe Brainard's I Remember (1975)-an inventory of approximately 1,500 memories conveyed in the form of radically short passages beginning with the words "I remember." Despite the qualified degree of unity provided by the fact that all the recollections come from the consciousness of a single person, the book does not arrange its content in any discernible order-chronological or thematic; instead, the reader is confronted with a life-in-fragments. Although individual passages could be part of a coming-of-age, a coming-out or a portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man narrative, Brainard is careful not to let any of them consolidate. An attempt at defining the characteristics of the proposed genre will be followed by an indication of more recent examples of fragmentary life writing and a reflection on its prospects for development.

Lublin Studies in Modern Languages and Literature, 2020

Introduction to the special issue of Lublin Studies in Modern Languages and Literature titled For... more Introduction to the special issue of Lublin Studies in Modern Languages and Literature titled Formal Intersections between Narrative Fiction and Other Media. The entire volume is available here: https://journals.umcs.pl/lsmll/issue/view/604/showToc

Brno Studies in English, vol. 44, No. 1, 2018

It has become a critical consensus that microfictions (or flash fictions) are particularly suited... more It has become a critical consensus that microfictions (or flash fictions) are particularly suited to the age of social media. In his attempt to theorise the genre, William Nelles (2012) allows for a wide range of narrative and thematic possibilities but maintains that, because of their radical brevity, flash fictions need to renounce characterisation, reader empathy and identification. The aim of this article is to demonstrate that the generic limitations specified by Nelles can be transcended. By examining a selection of microfictions by David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers, the article argues that flash fictions can evoke projective empathy and become a successful vehicle for a “two-way conversation” between the author and the reader – in line with Adam Kelly’s notion of the postironic new sincerity. Textual analysis of the stories is supplemented by the results of a reader-response survey conducted among the students and staff of the University of Wrocław.

Anglica Wratislaviensia, 2018

In 2007 Philip Tew and Mark Addis released Final Report: Survey on Teaching Contemporary British ... more In 2007 Philip Tew and Mark Addis released Final Report: Survey on Teaching Contemporary British Fiction, whose aim was to establish the most popular authors and works as taught by academics at British universities. The purpose of this article is to present the results of a similar survey, which examines the reading lists of British and Irish literature courses offered in the Eng-lish departments of chosen Polish universities (in Warsaw, Gdańsk, Toruń, Poznań, Łódź, Lublin, Wrocław, Opole and Kraków). A discussion of the results-most commonly taught writers and texts-is accompanied by an analysis (based on an online survey) of the lecturers' motivations behind The first aim of this study is to examine the make-up of the curricular canon of twentieth-and twenty-first-century British and Irish literature as taught in the departments , institutes and faculties of English at Polish universities. The second aim is to establish the selection criteria for the syllabi of survey courses of the literature of the period in the said institutions. The context for those considerations has been set by the so called canon wars debate, which took place in the United States and Britain in the last two decades of the twentieth century. A brief summary of the legacy of this ideological confrontation will be followed by a discussion of

B.S. Johnson’s novel-in-a-box The Unfortunates (1969) gives a moving account of the author’s frie... more B.S. Johnson’s novel-in-a-box The Unfortunates (1969) gives a moving account of the author’s friendship with Tony Tillinghast and of his grief after Tillinghast’s death of cancer at the age of 29. In order to evoke the chaos and random nature of his memories of the deceased friend and the unpredictability of cancer, Johnson chose to publish the book in 27 unbound sections, which the reader is invited to shuffle and read in any order they like. This article reconstructs a portrayal of friendship from the abundance of fragments and examine the bond between the narrator and Tony with reference to Elizabeth Telfer’s idea of “shared activity” as a necessary condition for friendship. Michael Pakaluk’s notion of friendship as a site of ongoing struggle between the altruistic and egoistic motives has been used to account for the narrator’s uneasy oscillation between the preoccupation with his own art and the awareness that Tony’s incurable disease should be the graver concern. Finally, the article considers the ways in which the aleatory form of Johnson’s elegy informs its representation of mourning.

The last decade has seen a revival of interest in novels that follow a fragmentary structure. Dav... more The last decade has seen a revival of interest in novels that follow a fragmentary structure. David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas (2005), J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year (2007) and Richard McGuire's graphic novel Here (2014) are among the most notable examples of recent works that reject a linear plot narrative and a set of standard " readerly " expectations. This article outlines the scope of the current proliferation of fragmentary writing —a category which rarely features in Anglophone (as opposed to French) literary criticism— and delineates its characteristic ingredients. After introducing the main tenets and examples of the six most common categories of fragmentary texts, the article discusses two theoretical frameworks for analysing such works: Joseph Frank's notion of the spatial form and Sharon Spencer's idea of the architectonic novel. The latter conception is applied to a close analysis of the structural variety and randomised composition of one of the most recent and critically acclaimed fragmentary novels —Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation (2014), which offers a non-linear and highly intertextual account of a marriage crisis narrated with the use of several hundred loosely connected paragraphs, composed of narrative snippets, multiple quotations, seemingly unrelated anecdotes and scientific curiosities.

In " Discourse in the Novel " Mikhail Bakhtin argues that heteroglossia – a diversity of voices o... more In " Discourse in the Novel " Mikhail Bakhtin argues that heteroglossia – a diversity of voices or languages – is one of the essential properties of the novel. The distinct languages spoken by individual characters (referred to as " character speech "), he maintains, inevitably affect " authorial speech ". In experimental fiction, where " authorial speech " is often eliminated altogether, one can speak of the most radical instance of novelistic polyphony. Whereas in The Sound and the Fury, The Waves and B.S. Johnson's House Mother Normal in place of the narrator the reader is presented with several parallel voices which offer an alternative version of some of the same incidents, Will Eaves's The Absent Therapist (2014) comprises 150 one-or two-page monologues, each of which is delivered by a different nameless speaker. The book, described by reviewers as an " experimental novella " , a " miniature novel " , and an " anti-novel " , is devoid of any frame that would account for the coexistence of so many stories. The only interpretive clues are provided in the paratext: the title and the dedication from 1 Corinthians (" There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and none of them is without signification "). They appear to invite the reading of the entire text as an amalgam of disparate (but also, in large part, desperate) voices united by their addressee – the figure of the therapist who is not there. The aim of the article is to examine Eaves's assemblage of voices and outline the tenuous relationship between the sections. The analysis of common themes and motifs that provide a degree of qualified unity to the book's multiple monologues is situated in the context of fragmentary writing (as practised, among others, by Burroughs and Barthes) and its postmodernist aesthetics of the collage.

The antinovel is a niche genre which positions itself radically and emphatically against what mig... more The antinovel is a niche genre which positions itself radically and emphatically against what might be called the conventional novel. It chooses to dispense with such novelistic devices as linear plot, cause-and-effect relation of events, richly delineated setting, verisimilitude and characterisation. Instead, the antinovel favours anti-mimetic strategies, fragmentation, digression and repetition. This article examines the generic status of David Markson's tetralogy composed of Reader's Block (1996), This Is Not a Novel (2001), Vanishing Point (2004) and The Last Novel (2007). Although each book contains the word " novel " either in its title or subtitle, a case is made for classifying them all as antinovels as theorized by Jean-Paul Sartre, J. A. Cuddon, M. H. Abrams and others. A critical and historical introduction to the genre is followed by a commentary on the thematic and formal structure of the tetralogy and a detailed consideration of its antinovelistic elements – the renunciation of plot and character, the prominence of metafiction, and fragmentary construction.

CounterText, 2024

The Experimental Book Object: Materiality, Media, Design, 2023

Studia Litteraria Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis, 2023

Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, 2021

Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, 2021

Orbis Litterarum, 2021

Litteraria Copernicana, 2020

Lublin Studies in Modern Languages and Literature, 2020

Polish Journal of English Studies, 2019

Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, 2019

Electronic Book Review, 2020

Notre Dame Review, 2019

Text Matters, 2019

Lublin Studies in Modern Languages and Literature, 2020

Brno Studies in English, vol. 44, No. 1, 2018

Anglica Wratislaviensia, 2018

Revisiting Loss: Memory, Trauma and Nostalgia in the Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro (Japanese translation), 2020

The preface focuses on the current status of Kazuo Ishiguro and his relationship to Japan, while ... more The preface focuses on the current status of Kazuo Ishiguro and his relationship to Japan, while the afterword is devoted to the representation of memory in The Buried Giant.

This monograph considers the phenomenon of the continued relevance of collage, a form established... more This monograph considers the phenomenon of the continued relevance of collage, a form established over a hundred years ago, to contemporary literature. It argues that collage is a perfect artistic vehicle to represent the crisis-ridden reality of the twenty-first-century. Being a mixture of fragmentary incompatible voices, collage embodies the chaos of the media-dominated world. Examining the artistic, sociopolitical and personal crises addressed in contemporary collage literature, the book argues that the 21st Century has brought a revival of collage-like novels and essays.

The Poetics of Fragmentation in Contemporary British and American Fiction, 2019

The last decades have seen a resurgence of fragmentation in British and American works of fiction... more The last decades have seen a resurgence of fragmentation in British and American works of fiction that deny linearity, coherence and continuity in favour of disruption, gaps and fissures. Authors such as Ali Smith, David Mitchell and David Shields have sought new ways of representing our global, media-saturated contemporary experience, which differ from modernist and postmodernist experimentations from which writers nevertheless draw inspiration. This volume aims to investigate some of the most important contributions to fragmentary literature by British and American writers since the 1990s, with a particular emphasis on texts released in the twenty-first century. Contributors theorise and classify literary fragments, examine the relationship between fragmentation and the Zeitgeist (influenced by globalisation, media saturation and social networks), analyse the mechanics of multimodal and multimedial fictions, and consider the capacity of literary fragmentation to represent personal or collective trauma and to address ethical concerns. Besides the already mentioned authors, the volume makes reference to the works of J.G. Ballard, Julian Barnes, Mark Z. Danielewski, David Markson, Jonathan Safran Foer, David Foster Wallace, Jeanette Winterson and several others.

Loss is the core experience which determines the identity of Kazuo Ishiguro’s narrators and shape... more Loss is the core experience which determines the identity of Kazuo Ishiguro’s narrators and shapes their subsequent lives. Whether a traumatic ordeal, an act of social degradation, a failed relationship or a loss of home, the painful event serves as a sharp dividing line between the earlier, meaningful past and the period afterwards, which is infused with a sense of lack, dissatisfaction and nostalgia. Ishiguro’s narrators have been unable to confine their loss to the past and remain preoccupied by its legacy, which ranges from suppressed guilt to a keen sense of failure or disappointment. Their immersion in the past finds expression in the narratives which they weave in order to articulate, justify or merely understand their experiences. Their reconstructions of the past are interpreted as exercises in misremembering and self-deception which enable them to sustain their illusions and save them from despair.

Revisiting Loss is the first book-length study of memory encompassing Ishiguro’s entire novelistic output. It adopts a highly interdisciplinary approach, combining a selection of philosophical (Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricoeur, and Jean Starobinski) and psychological perspectives (Sigmund Freud, Frederic Bartlett, Jacques Lacan, and Daniel L. Schacter). The book offers a thoroughly researched critical survey drawing on all published critical monographs and collections of academic articles on Ishiguro’s work.

The authors of this volume discuss the tangible need for a revision of the vocabulary of emotion ... more The authors of this volume discuss the tangible need for a revision of the vocabulary of emotion used in literary criticism and culture studies. The articles offer a wide range of interdisciplinary approaches to emotional states such as love, shame, grief, nostalgia and trauma. They demonstrate that the once stable concept of emotion disintegrates in the course of re-evaluation and is replaced by such notions as affects, passions, feelings and emotions. This volume examines the representations of emotion in drama, poetry and prose – from the anonymous Court of Love (ca. 1500) to Ali Smith's How to Be Both (2014)-as well as in life writing, music, the visual arts and theology.

An on-site conference to be held at the University of Wrocław in Poland on 22-23 April 2022.

Polish Journal of English Studies, 2020

A review of Magda Dragu's monograph Form and Meaning in Avant-Garde Collage and Montage (New York... more A review of Magda Dragu's monograph Form and Meaning in Avant-Garde Collage and Montage (New York and London: Routledge, 2020) published in Polish Journal of English Studies 6.1(2020).