On Thursday, November 6, 2025, Professor Kasia Bartoszyńska gave a talk with Harvard's Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures entitled:
Professor Kasia Bartoszyńska Presents at Harvard
By Department of English, November 6, 2025
Professor Kasia Bartoszyńska gave a talk at Harvard on Thursday, Nov. 6 on Global Formalism, Free Indirect Discourse, and Olga Tokarczuk.
What (Polish) Novels Can Do: Global Formalism, Free Indirect Discourse, and Olga Tokarczuk
From Harvard's Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures website:
What does Polish fiction offer to a global theory of the novel? Considering the longer sweep of this question, I alight upon Olga Tokarczuk’s recent call for a new type of writing, for a 4th person narrator that would meet the needs of the present. Though it seems like a creature of the contemporary moment, this perspective, I argue, has much in common with free indirect discourse, which has a far longer—and more capacious!— history than is often recognized. I turn to Tokarczuk’s own fictional experiments as a case study, explaining how her work fascinatingly illuminates both the affordances and the challenges of various approaches to narrative voice.