Titel des Projekts/Title: Through the Eyes of a Child: The Holocaust in Polish Children’s and Young Adult Literature after 1989
VerfasserIn/Author:
Krzysztof Rybak, PhD
(
Sprache/Language: Polnisch
Art des Projekts/Type: Dissertation
Projektlaufzeit/Duration: 2016-2023
Universität/University: University of Warsaw
Keywords: Polish children’s literature, Holocaust literature, Narrative theory, Peritexts, Ideology
Veröffentlicht unter/Published as: Krzysztof Rybak: Obrazowanie Zagłady. Narracje holokaustowe w polskiej literaturze XXI wieku dla dzieci i młodzieży. Warschau, 2023. https://doi.org/10.31338/uw.9788323562818.
Beschreibung/abstract:
The project is devoted to the description and interpretation of Polish literature aimed at child readers, created in the twenty-first century that deals with the Holocaust. In my dissertation titled “Imaging the Shoah: Holocaust Narratives in Polish Children’s and Young Adult Literature of the 21st Century” I analyse children’s and youth literature works about the Shoah published in the 21st century, which I describe with the term ‘Holocaust narratives’. The study covers books published between 2007 and 2020. The main aim of the research is to determine how authors imagine or represent the Holocaust in books aimed at young readers. Identifying and analysing the narrative devices used in the verbal and visual texts, as well as the ways of creating peritextual elements, shows what kind of Holocaust images reach the audience of contemporary Polish children’s and youth literature. The main research question is: how are the literary and visual images of protagonists, space, and time (the three elements that create the fictional world) as well as peritexts that surround the main text constructed? On the one hand, therefore, I have limited the scope of the research to selected aspects of each category; on the other hand, I am extending the perspective usually used in literary studies focused on the main text to cover also the peritexts such as titles, cover illustrations, publishing notes or blurbs, i.e., elements that build the Holocaust narrative of the book, as – among other things – they create reader expectations of the work. My method is based on three pillars: narratology (focusing on characters, space, focalization, or beginning and ending formulas), post-memory, and ideology studies. In the first chapter, I analyse literary characters, both children and adults, as well as animals and plants. In chapter two, I investigate the creation of space, including verbal and visual images of the ghetto, home, and hiding place. Chapter three is devoted to the time, including the beginning and ending formulas and the use of the time travel motif. Chapter four, devoted to peritexts such as titles, cover illustrations, publisher’s notes, and endpapers, showed that these are just as important elements of the Holocaust narratives as the main text. The dissertation shows that Holocaust books for children and youth published in Poland in the 21st century are complex and often stand in opposition to what is commonly regarded as children’s literature.
The project’s accompanying website contains both a catalogue of children’s literature and a bibliography of theoretical texts. It is designed to help schoolteachers and academic teachers select materials to work with schoolchildren and university students. The website may also be useful to librarians and other people interested in books for the young reader.
Biographische Informationen/CV:
Assistant professor at the Faculty of “Artes Liberales,” University of Warsaw, Poland. He is a member of the European Children's Literature Research Network and co-initiator of Grow (with Rosalyn Borst and Chiara Malpezzi), an initiative that aims at stimulating transnational dialogue and collaboration among young scholars of children’s literature: https://www.instagram.com/grow_childlitresearch/. In 2018 and 2021 he received International Youth Library in Munich fellowship. In his Ph.D. he analysed narrative strategies in contemporary Polish children’s literature on the Holocaust (within a research project “Oczami dziecka / Through the Eyes of a Child”: https://oczamidziecka.al.uw.edu.pl/index.php/en/project/), but for some time now his main research interest is children’s nonfiction that he investigates within a research project “Dziecięca książka informacyjna w XXI wieku: tendencje – metody badań – modele lektury” [Informational Children’s Book in the 21st Century: Trends – Research methods – Models of reading] (National Science Centre, Poland, 2021–2024).
Weitere Informationen/Additional information:
Project's website