We are happy to announce the next presentation of the Visegrad Scholarship at OSA. Join the event in the Archivum, or online following the link below!
The presentation will be held at 11:00 on Wednesday, November 15, 2023, in the Meeting Room of the Blinken OSA Archivum, and online. The Zoom link of the meeting is: https://ceuedu.zoom.us/j/93641-359543-?pwd=NXk3NnMrTlg-0TzRHakJhM-
VdtOEFwQT09 Meeting ID: 936 4135 9543
Narratives of Crisis. Great History and a New Emotional Regime in Polish Personal Diaries and Memoirs of the 1980s.
by Katarzyna Stańczak-Wiślicz, cultural historian, the Institute of Literary Research, Polish Academy of Sciences
The aim of the research is to examine how the new emotional regime that emerged in Poland during the crisis of the 1980s was reflected in the diaries and memoirs submitted to competitions organised at the time by official and dissident actors. Focusing on the “great history” they were witnessing, the memoirists searched for terms and categories to write about the profound political and social changes since August 1980. As the crisis was a “transitional phase” between the old and the new, it manifested itself in the crisis of language. The 1980s in Poland saw the birth of new ideas and political emotions. The new emotional regime, based on the knowledge produced and mediated by foreign media such as RFE, by samizdat publications and, to a lesser extent, official media, provided individuals with a framework for understanding and describing them, and for articulating attitudes that had previously been censored.
The analysis of RFE materials from the Blinken OSA Archivum’s collections allows us to examine the process of the emergence of this regime.