From meat to flesh : on returnig to the body in Aneta Żukowska's autopathography

Bibliogr. s. 133-134

This article is an analysis of Aneta Żukowska's "Mięcho" - an account of the author's experience of cancer - in light of Arthur W. Frank's theory of quest narrative, as described in "The Wounded Storyteller". The main subject of the text is the way the narrator depicts her illness experience as a journey towards a particular kind of embodied epistemology, acquired through the affirmation of eroticism and immediacy in light of a life-limiting illness. Drawing on Iwona Boruszkowska's theory of "the medical experience" ("doświadczenie medyczne") the article focuses on the type of knowledge illness experience brings forth as the ultimate objective of the quest. The titular concept of "mięcho", an augmentative and derogative form of the noun "flesh" in Polish, is interpreted as interrelated to the category of "mięsność" ("fleshness") coined by Jolanta Brach-Czaina, whose philosophy of the existential opening and the existential concrete provide the framework for the entire argument.