Connecting with nature as a way of discovering one’s identity – a comparative perspective

The room on the 2nd floor in Veröld (Heimasvæði), Wednesday, April 29, 15.00-17.00

This paper presents a comparative analysis of Viktoria Hanišová’s novel The Mushroom Picker and Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story. It focuses on the fact that the main characters in both books are united by the need to rebuild their own identities. The text also attempts to answer the question of whether contact with nature can play a significant role in this process, in accordance with Arne Naess’s concept of deep ecology and Stacy Alaimo’s theory of trans-corporeality, and whether the humanistic environmental sciences, which challenge anthropocentrism, are capable of revealing the flows and mutual interactions between humans and other beings.

Katarzyna Rytlewska - Ph.D. in Humanities, Assistant Professor in the Department of General Literature and Comparative Literature at Casimir the Great University in Bydgoszcz (Poland). Her research interests include the ambivalence of closeness and alienation, the space of the psychiatric hospital, and ecocriticism; she specializes in the work of Olga Tokarczuk. She is the author of the monograph The Microcosm of a Psychiatric Hospital: From the Perspective of Modernist and Postmodernist Theory and Practice (2022), based on her doctoral thesis, as well as articles published in anthologies and journals. She is the co-editor of an issue of the journal “Litteraria Copernicana” dedicated to Zbigniew Herbert, titled Herbert Still “Discovered” and Still “Interpreted” (2024).