Communication strategies in the service of the past apotheosis in Zofia Bukowiecka’s historical prose from the partitions period

Abstract

The aim of the sketch is to identify writing strategies and the repertoires of linguistic means used in the apotheosizing description of the state that emerges from Zofia Bukowiecka’s historical prose. Creation of a laudatory vision of Poland’s past (in accordance with the guidelines of the era) is created by Z. Bukowiecka purposively and is of an educational, comforting, and finally – the most importantly – formative nature, i.e. it aims to awaken patriotic attitudes in a nation which was deprived of the state. A look at Zofia Bukowiecka’s texts from the perspective of linguistic pragmatics allowed us to distinguish several writing strategies that serve to implement the apotheosis of the past vision. These are the idyllic stylization of the landscape, the amelioration of the state, the glorification of the rulers and the magnification of the nation. Particularly frequently used linguistic means (from various levels of language and text organization) implementing particular strategies were: accumulation, hyperbole, contrast, evaluative vocabulary, the topos of becoming silent, brutalization, argumentum ad verecundiam.