Wojciech Drąg
Associate Professor at the Institute of English Studies at the University of Wrocław. Author of Collage in Twenty-First-Century Literature in English: Art of Crisis (2020) and Revisiting Loss: Memory, Trauma and Nostalgia in the Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro (2014) and co-editor of Critical Perspectives on Max Porter (2024), The Poetics of Fragmentation in Contemporary British and American Fiction (2019), Spectrum of Emotions: From Love to Grief (2016) and War and Words: Representations of Military Conflict in Literature and the Media (2015).
Address: Wrocław, Poland
Address: Wrocław, Poland
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Papers by Wojciech Drąg
From Old Notebooks (2010) can be classified as collage autothanatographies. Both authors construct their formally experimental books out of brief snippets that combine personal meditations on death with various facts, anecdotes, and self-reflexive comments. What grants those fragmentary texts a degree of unity is their concern with mortality: the refrain “timor mortis conturbat me” reverberates throughout Markson’s tetralogy while Lavender-Smith’s narrator announces that “death is the glue that holds the book together.” The article begins with an examination of the collage structure of both works. The formal analysis is followed by a discussion of the ways in which the works in question meet the generic criteria of both autobiography and autothanatography. The concluding part asserts the formal predisposition of collage to represent experiences of personal crisis such as an acute fear of death.
From Old Notebooks (2010) can be classified as collage autothanatographies. Both authors construct their formally experimental books out of brief snippets that combine personal meditations on death with various facts, anecdotes, and self-reflexive comments. What grants those fragmentary texts a degree of unity is their concern with mortality: the refrain “timor mortis conturbat me” reverberates throughout Markson’s tetralogy while Lavender-Smith’s narrator announces that “death is the glue that holds the book together.” The article begins with an examination of the collage structure of both works. The formal analysis is followed by a discussion of the ways in which the works in question meet the generic criteria of both autobiography and autothanatography. The concluding part asserts the formal predisposition of collage to represent experiences of personal crisis such as an acute fear of death.
Revisiting Loss is the first book-length study of memory encompassing Ishiguro’s entire novelistic output. It adopts a highly interdisciplinary approach, combining a selection of philosophical (Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricoeur, and Jean Starobinski) and psychological perspectives (Sigmund Freud, Frederic Bartlett, Jacques Lacan, and Daniel L. Schacter). The book offers a thoroughly researched critical survey drawing on all published critical monographs and collections of academic articles on Ishiguro’s work.