http://hdl.handle.net/11089/38317 2026-04-05T20:01:21Z http://hdl.handle.net/11089/38324 The (Self)portrait of a Writer: A Hermeneutic Reading of Virginia Woolf’s (Auto)biographical Writings Hołda, Małgorzata Woolf’s maturing as a writer was deeply influenced by her traumatic experiences in childhood, the (in)capacitating states of mental instability, as well as her proto-feminist convictions. Long before Barthes, she toppled the traditional position of the author, and her literary enshrinement of “the other reality” reached unity with the world rather than individuality. This article ponders Woolf’s creative impulse and investigates her autobiographical writings to show the import of their impact on her fiction, which, as Woolfian scholarship suggests, can be viewed as autobiographical, too. I argue that philosophical hermeneutics sheds light on the self-portrait that emerges from Woolf’s autobiographical writings and offers a rewarding insight into her path of becoming an author. I assert that Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy of subjectivity, and, in particular, his notion of narrative identity provide a route to examine how Woolf discovers her writing voice. In light of his hermeneutics of the self, the dispersed elements of the narrative of life can be seen as a possibility of self-encounter. Woolf’s writings bespeak her gradually evolving self-knowledge and self-understanding, which come from the configuration of those separate “stories” into a meaningful whole. The article also interprets Woolf’s autobiographical writings through the prism of Michel Foucault’s reflection on discourse and subjectivity, indicating that her texts instantiate his assertion of the subject’s constant disappearance. 2020-12-30T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/11089/38323 Supernatural Beings and Their Appropriation of Knowledge and Power in The Seafarer by Conor McPherson and Woman and Scarecrow by Marina Carr Koneczniak, Grzegorz This article is a comparative analysis of Woman and Scarecrow by Marina Carr and The Seafarer by Conor McPherson from a hauntological perspective. It aims at discussing the influence of supernatural beings on mortal protagonists as well as addressing the configurations of power and knowledge formed between the characters. Woman and Scarecrow follows the final moments of a dying woman accompanied by the mysterious figure of Scarecrow, who is hidden from other characters. The verbal exchanges between Scarecrow and Woman will be interpreted as a manifestation of the apparent power possessed by the former, the ambiguous supernatural figure, over the latter, a human being, in terms of appropriating the knowledge about the woman’s past. In McPherson’s The Seafarer, a mysterious relationship develops between Sharky and Mr. Lockhart, who knows about Sharky’s past, too. This paper will demonstrate both similarities and differences in the way in which Carr and McPherson make use of supernatural beings that manipulate human characters in the most crucial moments of their lives and will situate the two plays within the recent rise of interest in spectrality in Irish drama. 2020-12-30T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/11089/38322 Authenticity, Self-Invention and the Power of Storytelling: Sam Shepard’s Postmillennial Work Mirowska, Paulina The article reflects upon Sam Shepard’s playwrighting in the opening decades of the twenty-first century, paying particular attention to his last play, A Particle of Dread (Oedipus Variations), written specifically for the Derry/Londonderry City of Culture celebrations in 2013, and originally produced by the renowned Field Day Theatre Company. The article seeks to offer an insight into Shepard’s mature multilayered text, which, in many respects, looks back upon almost fifty years of his artistic creativity and, at the same time, expands his vision. It also addresses the realisation of Shepard’s play in performance and the significance of his text in an interplay of multiple creative inputs involved in the production process.While revisiting the familiar landscapes and themes, Shepard’s most recent work negotiates the boundaries between the actual and the fictitious, raising debates about the persistence of myths, mortality and the haunting legacies of the past. Richly intertextual and conspicuously metatheatrical, it grapples with questions of authenticity, performativity and storytelling – the narratives that are passed down, and how they form and inform our lives. It also engages with, and further problematises, issues of personal and cultural identity, which constitute Shepard’s most durable thematic threads, revealing both the dramatist’s acute concern with fateful determinism and commitment to self-invention. Significantly, while Shepard’s postmillennial output highlights the author’s ongoing preoccupation with instability and frontiers of various sorts (from those topographic, temporal and sociopolitical to those of language and art), it equally intimates his attentiveness to correspondences between times, lands and cultures. 2020-12-30T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/11089/38321 Authoring War Memories: War Memoir Writing and Testimonial Theatre Performances Bellot, Andrea Roxana This paper will discuss aspects concerning authorship, memory, and war representation, as well as trauma and healing. In order to do so, I will explore the writing of war memoirs and/or the re-enactment of war experiences on the stage as two ways of expressing and coping with war trauma. In both cases, the concept of the author, a war veteran as first-person narrator or self-performer, is central to the representation of the traumatic memories of war. It is precisely through this interaction between the author, as a legitimate witness, and source of authentic and reliable information, that the readership/audience connects emotionally with the experience of the combatants and can empathise with their situation. A theoretical conceptualisation of war memoir writing, and testimonial theatre will be illustrated with specific examples of texts connected with the Falklands War (UK-Argentina, 1982). The dominant perspective of the reflection are veterans’ stories. 2020-12-30T00:00:00Z