(in Polish) Avalon, Atlantyda, I-lands. Psychologia i przyroda fantastycznych wysp. 3700-AL-AAIL-qHT

As Stephanos Stephanides and Susan Bassnett point out in “Islands, Literature, and Cultural Translatability” in early modernity island allegories applied in social criticism: often “[e]ighteenth-century Enlightenment discourses of travel standardized the representation of islands within an emerging rationalist and positivist framework.” In Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels the protagonist is shipwrecked on an island and also encounters a flying island which is a means of transport between other islands. His encounters with the inhabitants of these strange lands, who are described as ludicrous intellectuals fixated on the most bizarre theories and inept politicians, give an opportunity to satirically criticize his contemporaries. In Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe Robinson (who as an Englishman is an islander by birth) finds himself a castaway on a desert island in the tropics, where he attempts to stay a civilized man. The novel has often been discussed in the context of European colonization and its famous postmodern (and postcolonial) rewriting, Foe by J.M. Coetzee, comments on Defoe’s colonial discourse and the way it renders gender and ethnicity. During our classes which are divided into three groups – Avalon, islands of imagination (fantasy). Atlantis, insular allegories (utopia) I-lands, insular metaphors (dystopia) – we are going to discuss a number of such literary islands.