Spotkania z przeszłością. Metahistoria, wyobraźnia i fantastyka w narracjach Doroty Terakowskiej

Encounters with the past. Metahistory, imagination, and fantasy in Dorota Terakowska’s narratives The encounters with the past, in which the childish and teenage protagonists of Dorota Terakowska’s novels are “entangled,” are present in the structure of her works mainly at the level of the figurative language of meta-story, in which the poetics of imagination and fantasy used by the writer as a literary convention play an important role. Analyzing the above issues from the perspective of narratology, the most important elements shaping the images of the past and the figures of memory in Terakowska’s works include: 1) literary conceptualizations of the image of a hero entangled in the past and seeking his or her own identity; 2) poetics of space-time; 3) organization of a plot scheme in which images of the past “operate” on the principle of strengthening the power of communication and provoke reflection on the present. History and the past are full of a sacred dimension in Terakowska’s works. Both the topoi of the wandering of the characters as they reach adulthood and the motif of the Song of the Only, which combines tradition with the present, and romantic images of the ruins of buildings from the past give the works an ambiguous symbolic dimension. They refer the reader to an unspecified past and tradition, which gives a deeper, metaphysical sense to the actions that the young heroes carry out in pursuit of their missions.