”On the Operating Table”. The Hospital Experience in Modern Polish Women’s Poetry Cover Image

„Na stole operacyjnym”. Doświadczenie szpitala we współczesnej polskiej poezji kobiet
”On the Operating Table”. The Hospital Experience in Modern Polish Women’s Poetry

Author(s): Joanna Grądziel-Wójcik
Subject(s): Polish Literature, Theory of Literature
Published by: Filozofski fakultet, Sveučilište Josipa Jurja Strossmayera, Osijek
Keywords: 20th-and 21st-century Polish poetry; women’s poetry; medicine; somatics; identity; „non-place”;

Summary/Abstract: The essay concerns „hospital verses” collected from modern women’s poetry: poems thematizing hospital space, taking place in it as well as describing typical hospital communicative situations. The author analyzes the poems using devices of geopoetics and identity studies – in her interpretations she is searching and confronting categories of places autobiographical and atopical. In the analyzed poetry a hospital appears as a „non-place”: a no-(wo) man’s-space, incomprehensible and inhospitable. Its corridors, windows and operating rooms must be first rationalized and domesticated; they provoke questions on sense and identity. „Surgical incision”, so often described in women’s poetry analyzed here, is a cut opening not only the body, but also the consciousness; it opens up new metaphysical and eschatological perspectives and problematizes the psyche – soma relation.

  • Issue Year: 3/2016
  • Issue No: 1
  • Page Range: 39-60
  • Page Count: 21
  • Language: Polish