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World as Language

Spoken Language and Linguistic Grotesque in Dorota Masłowska’s Prose

Summary/Abstract: The article deals with an analysis of language in Dorota Masłowska’s experimental novels (“Wojna polsko-ruska <White and Red>”, “Paw królowej <The Queen’s Peacock>”, “Inni ludzie <Other People>”). Its starting point assumes that the prose is not a direct transfer of colloquial speech (as was claimed by many critics), but it consists in its radical transformation according to the rules of linguistic grotesque. “Someone else’s words” are both subject and material of representation. No mode of expression has here neutral form, and none forms background for eccentrically transformed forms. Also, the sphere of the narrator’s comments, heterogeneous and flickering with many various voices, becomes a place of (auto)parodical activities. Using someone else’s language and its means of expression, Masłowska unmasks its vices, creating the effect of auto-grotesque. It complicates the problem of the author’s subjectivity which is not constructed in a different order of expression, but in a multidirectional, intertextual, dialogical reference to some else’s word.

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