![]() It proposes that universality in Flights emerges as an ethical and political question of reading, translating, and writing across not only national, social, historical languages and contexts, but also across itinerant and fractured subjectivities, languages, myths, and temporalities embedded within the fabrics of Tokarczuk’s novel. By analyzing mobilizations of flight in the novel, the article suggests its universal is woven out of “the shadows of consciousness,” untranslatable idioms of language, pagan Slavic mythologies, old Slavic sect of Bieguni that is virtually unknown in Eastern Europe, and forgotten historical figures and incidents that the narrator “tenderly” narrates. ![]() ![]() ![]() Can literature re-imagine universality in a way that would not be an expression of an underlying urge toward homogeneity and totality? Beginning with the remarks from Olga Tokarczuk’s Nobel Lecture “The Tender Narrator” where she calls for literature to “universalize our experience” that involves-somewhat counterintuitively-a tender attunement to the fragment, this article discusses a new, paradoxical, feminine formulation of universality in Tokarczuk’s bestseller Flights. ![]()
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