Original scientific paper
”On the Operating Table”. The hospital experience in modern Polish women’s poetry
Joanna Grądziel-Wójcik
orcid.org/0000-0001-9770-6234
; Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań
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.
Keywords
20th-and 21st-century Polish poetry; women’s poetry; medicine; somatics; identity; „non-place”
Hrčak ID:
167602
URI
Publication date:
14.9.2016.
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