dc.description.abstract | "The author's objective was to offer in this dissertation a possibly precise analysis of description
as one of the aspects of narration in Stefan Żeromski''s Ashes (a famous novel of one of the
most outstanding writers at the turn of the 19th and 20th c.) Żeromski's novel, published in 1904
and constituting one of the milestones of the Polish classic fiction, is a work whose actual form
was shaped by several factors: 1) the theme which was a vision of the Polish history against the
background of the Napoleonic era, 2) the Partitions as the time that gave rise to that vision, 3)
the poetics of Modernism, 4) the writer's individual style. Such a difficult task required that the
author of the paper employ a consistent and systematic theory of description. 'I'he best means
to achieve those ends was to work out a new theory of description. I'hat is why the dissertation
consists of two parts. The first one is a record of the author's way to the definition of description.
'The definition lays particular emphasis on the following aspects: 1) description as a form of narration,
2) description as the narrator's monologue, 3) phenomena on the subject-object axis of
description, 4) adequate demarcation between description and relation. "The theory calls into
question the so far predominant (in the delimitation of descriptions) opposition of the static and
the dynamic elements in the object of the narrator's monologue, and negates its validity as a key
criterion by which to define the form of narration. Apart from that, the author offers a new subject
classification of description — putting aside certain terms as, for instance, ''description of situation”.
The other part of the work shows the validity of the attained theoretical system for the
analysis of the narration in Ashes. Making use of the term 'narrative perspective” the author of
the paper introduces the notion of sphericity, which is particularly important for the characteristics
of the subject layer of description. Discussions of some concerte descriptive units with clearly
drawn boundaries constitute only a small fragment of the examined individual descriptions. T'he
second part of the paper closes with the typology of descriptions in Ashes and the respective statistics—
this being, at the same time, a synthetic view on the problems discussed, a presentation
of actual results of the undertaken research and a summary of remarks and conclusions concerning
the narration in Ashes. The dissertation is a fragment of a larger work. | pl_PL |