Intertextual Ethnography Based on the Example of the Novel “Pod słońcem” by Julia Fiedorczuk

Abstract

This article is devoted to a reading of selected themes from Julia Fiedorczuk's novel Pod słońcem, published in 2020. Manfred Pfister's intertextual analytical tools are combined with ethnography in Michel Leiris's understanding to present the novel's structure as intertextual (auto)ethnography, a new proposition within literary ethnography. The novel's structure of references is examined, according to Pfister's criteria, such as referentiality, communicativeness, self-reflexivity, structurality, selectivity, and dialogicity. The analysis includes historiographic allusions present in Fiedorczuk's novel, a poem by Alexander Pushkin, the Tale of the Bird Sister from Jerzy Ficowski's collection Gałązka z Drzewa Słońca (A Twig from the Sun Tree), Osip Mandelstam's poem A Body Was Given to Me, a sonnet by Juliusz Słowacki, and quotations from the Holy Bible in the author's modernized translation. Intertextual ethnography is presented as a narrative tool of self-discovery, which aims to discover the unknown in the known: an attempt to integrate the place, times, and actions of fictional, non-fictional, and quasi-fictional actors within a specific geographical region, which in the novel is Podlasie.