Wisława Szymborska’s All Feminist Readings
Summary The article analyzes the reading strategies that are inscribed into Wisława Szymborska’s reviews and feuilletons in the collection Wszystkie lektury nadobowiązkowe [All Non-Obligatory Readings] published in 2015. Drawing on the figure of an implied woman reader described and defines by Ewa Kraskowska (and earlier by Anna Bojarska), the article identifies a number of traces that reveal Szymborska’s gender-oriented sensitivity of various mechanisms excluding women from history and cultural history. However, to deconstruct the false universality of dominant order she employs not so much empathy with the excluded (not just women) as irony disguised by a mask of naiveté. In this way she conducts her critique of the grand narratives from a somewhat different perspective than second wave difference feminism, expanding her range of feminist readings to include postcolonial and posthmanist themes.