Apointments about body and resistance: an analysis of two of Wis?awa Szymborska’s poems.

Abstract

For the 20th centrury poets, the experience of the two Worl Wars represented a moment of change and renewal for both style and diction, until then marked by a fissure between world and language. From this renewal came what Michael Hamburger baptized as “the new antipoetry”, which returned to ordinary themes and advocated a more casual language. This is the starting point of our reflection, where we briefly scrutinize the poetics of Wis?awa Szymborska, polish poet awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature, focusing on two of her recognized poems: “tortury”, published in Couldn’t have (1972), and “autotomia”, published in People on the bridge (1987). In these poems, the body is frequently put in question. To understand this movement, we utilize the considerations made by Jean-Luc Nancy and Severo Sarduy around the concept of body and analyze the semantic development of that specific concept in the two poems of Szymborska here analysed.