Aleksandra Rychlicka

Supervisors: Dr Katarzyna Zechenter and Dr Peter Zusi
Email: aleksandra.rychlicka.10@ucl.ac.uk

Present status: PhD candidate

Working title of thesis: Second-Hand Memory, Second World Literatures: Overcoming the Trauma of Collective Past in the Writing of Post-1989 Generation

Research: My research focuses on several writers born in the 1980s – ‘Poles without the past’, as I call them in my project – in order to examine how the past that exceeds individual life span continues forming one’s biography and dictating creative choices. The project is not a systematic study of the 1980s generation of Polish writers, but focuses on writers selected due to their ‘in-between’ status. Placed in a cultural limbo, these writers create ‘second-hand’ memories that allow them to personalize and claim the otherwise alienated past.

The main objective of my research is to analyse exactly this phenomenon of ‘second-hand memory’, a notion I propose for a new form of remembrance that emerges in response to these unique circumstances. Second-hand memory describes the connection of the third generation to the emotionally distant past that is founded not on the sense of duty, but is stirred from the need to find individual points of reference in the collective past. Whilst acknowledging the relevance of literature in constructing cultural memory, my project reverses the question and asks how imposed remembrance influences the language and narrative strategies of my writers.