Authors

Discussion

The aim of my paper is to investigate the potential of the post-/non-anthropocentric language developed in borderland literature in Poland in the last several decades (post-1989). I will analyse texts by a range of authors (Olga Tokarczuk, Julia Fiedorczuk, Małgorzata Lebda, Andrzej Stasiuk, Jurii Andrukhovych, among others) who have sought to create literature of place as an organic habitat linking the human to the environmental through complex entanglements of memory, affect and pre-modern (or, alternative to the modern) epistemologies which do not need to form any alternative systems but, at least, serve as the tools to ironically audit various formats of the discourse of modernity, including that of belonging, identity, having a voice, mastering the language and so on. The questions I will seek to answer in analysing the attempts to speak in the language that represents and expresses the non-verbal as phenomena rather than concepts and representations are the following: how to disengage thinking about the language from logocentric (effectively, always anthropocentric) circulatory discourse? How to deliver experience (narrativize it or encode it) through the embodied non-human form of being so as to show its active working in the human lives? How to compare a sense of place crucial in the writing of the analysed authors, so as to unravel its ethics of care that is embodied rather than inscribed? What are the modes of communicating the more-than-human experience of time, memory, and belonging/inhabiting, if literature can deliver them only via the language? How do the these authors solve this conundrum and how do they manage to write through affect, vulnerability, alterity as part of the embodied perceptiveness of the world?