Book Chapters by Thomas Sliwowski
Berlin International: Literaturszenen in der geteilten Stadt (1970‒1989), 2023
This is an essay on Polish poet Witold Wirpsza, who spent the last years of his life in West Berl... more This is an essay on Polish poet Witold Wirpsza, who spent the last years of his life in West Berlin, experimenting with writing in German and with his own style of language poetry.
Dissertation by Thomas Sliwowski
Articulating an original reading strategy that builds on both American feminist affect theory and... more Articulating an original reading strategy that builds on both American feminist affect theory and anthropological models of historical consciousness, this dissertation advances a new theoretical account of the role played by the sensory or bodily awareness of history in Polish and East German literature. Its argument consists of, on the one hand, an account historical experience in the state-socialist period in People’s Poland and in the German Democratic Republic that focuses on specific, qualitative experiences of historical time and that places them in their cultural contexts and historical genealogies. These qualitative temporalities appear as concrete amalgamations of emotion and time. The three such amalgamations on which this dissertation focuses are: Stalinist cheerfulness and its “elastic” sense of history; the empty lateness of pre- Solidarność Poland in the 1970s, and the atmospheric depression hanging over Berlin directly before the Mauerfall. On the other hand, this argument presents a theoretical account of historical consciousness as such, which uses the example of socialist historical consciousness to argue that the categories of feeling, affect, and emotion are, in fact, central to how history is experienced throughout Modernity. This is, again, a wholly original argument that builds on literary, historical, anthropological, and cultural-studies theory to advance a new understanding of historical time, outside of chronology, simultaneity, and forms of linear ordering. These readings of the Polish and East German literature are, at once, an attempt to deprovincialize the socialist novel by elucidating its universal claims about the relationship of historical knowledge to historical experience.
Papers by Thomas Sliwowski
Ulbandus Review, 2022
In the decade since the eurozone crisis, there has been an explosion of historical "re-imaginings... more In the decade since the eurozone crisis, there has been an explosion of historical "re-imaginings" of state socialism in Eastern Europe. After it was discarded onto the "trash heap of history" in the 1990s, the socialist past was recast as a historical style in the new millennium, its material culture invested with nostalgic and commercial values. 1 And since 2010, the socialist past has become a bone of contention in the political field rather than just a commodity circulating in nostalgia-markets. We see this phenomenon in the endeavors of anticommunist memory entrepreneurs 2 in the European Parliament to bring totalitarian theory back into the common history of the twentieth century, but also in individual nation-states' attempted departures from Shoah-centered frameworks of public memorialization. But the new uses of the historical past also include, for instance, a Polish film style fixated on the surfaces and flourishes of the Stalinist period, one whose mode of
Interviews by Thomas Sliwowski
Interview conducted with me in Spring 2021 about my dissertation in progress by the Program in Cr... more Interview conducted with me in Spring 2021 about my dissertation in progress by the Program in Critical Theory, UC Berkeley.
Conference Presentations by Thomas Sliwowski
Presented at ASEEES 2019, on the "Retrotopia in Central Europe" panel. This paper examines the mo... more Presented at ASEEES 2019, on the "Retrotopia in Central Europe" panel. This paper examines the mode of historical representation in some recent Polish films about Stalinism, which I think about through the paradigms of "nostalgia film" and "cultural (rubbish) recycling," to arrive at an understanding of the Stalinist historical index in the context of 2010s Polish film-- and a reading of Warsaw's Palace of Culture and Science, Stalinist index par excellence, in particular.
At every step, in every paragraph, Kafka’s text foresees possible exegeses and confounds them, su... more At every step, in every paragraph, Kafka’s text foresees possible exegeses and confounds them, suggesting that the world of this parable operates according to a logic alien to the logic that governs our own world. All our attempts at understanding what is afoot collapse into speculations upon that impenetrable name, “Odradek,” a concentration of effort that paradoxically allows this text to engender an archive made up of all the critical and aesthetic responses to that name. This text, “as commencement and as commandment,” to quote Derrida’s essay on the archive, stages a naming-event, the giving of a name. I argue, broadly, that we can best understand how the name “Odradek” functions in the text by looking at the archive that comes into being under this name—that is, by looking at the text’s post-history.
Witold Gombrowicz and Czesław Miłosz are two writers who, despite their strange friendship and fr... more Witold Gombrowicz and Czesław Miłosz are two writers who, despite their strange friendship and fragmentary correspondence, seem to be incommensurable in a way that few literary pairs are. Miłosz, the Nobel laureate, the serious intellect who had seen the Warsaw Uprising, who had experienced totalitarianism first hand, and who lived to express his oracular visions of history, violence, and meaning, is like water to the oil that is Gombrowicz the jokester, the obscene satirist and slippery provocateur who could always be counted on to shock the conservative sensibilities of the literary public, in Poland and abroad. This, at least, is how the story is most often framed. We could, of course, inverse the poles of seriousness and silliness to see Miłosz as a Serious Intellect (with Serious Eyebrows to match), reckoning with capital-H History and confident enough about the conclusions he draws to both speak for the legacy of Polish literature and to find himself included among those Great Romantic Bards that nobody reads without being forced to. Gombrowicz, then, would be the subversive thinker, setting off logic bombs in Polish ideology and demystifying hierarchies and binaries at least a decade before deconstruc-tion came into vogue.
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Book Chapters by Thomas Sliwowski
Dissertation by Thomas Sliwowski
Papers by Thomas Sliwowski
Interviews by Thomas Sliwowski
Conference Presentations by Thomas Sliwowski