Giedra Radvilavičiūtė belongs to the current generation of Lithuanian essayists also represented by Vanda Juknaitė, Jurga Ivanauskaitė, Jurgis Kunčinas, Sigitas Parulskis, Marcelijus Martinaitis, Ričardas Šileika, Tomas Venclova, etc. Radvilavičiūtė is credited with creation of an original type of Lithuanian postmodern personal essay which combines unique thinking, solid structure, thick narration, cultural allusions, intellectual wit and humorous irony. Radvilavičiūtė is a recipient of the Lithuanian National Culture and Art Prize for the penetrating analysis of society and quality of the essay text. Although she states that "when you write, you lose your gender", she has launched an innovative trend in women's prose that personifies everyday life, opens the female world and merges all this with the intertexts of serious culture. Radvilavičiūtė creates an unparalleled authenticity and exciting suggestiveness (which is why her essays are often called "personal"). She opposes the consumerist cynicism of women's magazines and the superficial gloss of the female image; the postmodern element of the essays manifests in the principle that everything is allowed, the story often loses its linear plot line and can be read from any point because it no longer contains any laws of plot shifting – the intrigue is unfolded through the narrator's playful auto reflection of spatial and temporal parameters as well as through (self) irony.
Giedra Radvilaviciute (Radvilavičiūtė)
Panevezys, Lithuania 1960
Període d'activitat: Des de 1986 fins Encara activa
Classificació geogràfica: Europa > Lituània
Moviments socio-culturals
Edat contemporània
Edat contemporània > Pensament contemporani (des de final del s. XIX) > Postmodernitat
Edat contemporània > Moviments literaris i culturals des de finals del s. XIX > Literatura des de l'últim terç del s. XX
Grups per àmbit de dedicació
Escriptores > Dramaturgues
Escriptores > Assagistes
Escriptores
Escriptores > en > lituà
Context de creació femenina
Ressenya
Giedra Radvilavičiūtė has started an innovative trend in women’s prose: she personifies everyday life, opens the female world and merges all this with the intertexts of serious culture. Her texts contain an unparalleled authenticity and exciting suggestiveness in which there is a lot of artistic information in one sentence, a lot of a woman's life and, most importantly, the ability to look at everything as if from the outside and with irony. She uses effective comparisons and metaphors (e.g., “There was really a huge magnet buried under the earth holding me here steadfast, as if I was a metal chip”). The principles of juxtaposition or opposition allow comparisons of the amount of human warmth and shampoo or the deadline for repairs and the end of feelings.
Radvilavičiūtė's unique style is reminiscent of writing in maxims as many of her sentences may be quoted as witty observations. One of them, “I propose to shoot the plot”, has become a favorite phrase of critics that embodies the specificity of today’s postmodern literature. The play between life and fiction is one of the most fascinating features of such writing: Texts That Must Be Written and The Allure of the Text (the latter was published in the anthology of 30 European writers Best European Fiction 2010). It could be said that Radvilavičiūtė strongly strikes with her (s)words.
Justificacions
Biografia
Giedra Radvilavičiūtė was born in 1960 in Panevėžys, Lithuania. After finishing secondary school in Panevėžys, she graduated from Vilnius University in 1983 with a degree in Lithuanian language and literature. After that, she worked for a few years as a schoolteacher in her native region of north Lithuania. From 1987 to 1994, she worked as a journalist in Vilnius for family and parenting magazines, and from 1994 to 1998 she lived in the USA, where she published a directory of the Lithuanian and Prussian books of the Newberry Library in Chicago while her husband Giedrius Subačius was teaching at Chicago University. Her experience as an emigrant was captured in the essay entitled Motherland and Other Connections, in which fragments of emigrants’ fates and ideas (those of old Lithuanians, the Polish woman Alicija, poets Adomas Mickevičius and Alfonsas Nyka-Niliūnas) suggestively reveal various states of in-betweenness, from nostalgia for the homeland left behind to new attachments to the new country. Having returned home, Radvilavičiūtė stated: “There was really a huge magnet buried under the earth, holding me here steadfast, as if I was a metal chip”.
Although Radvilavičiūtė made her debut with short stories in 1986, the real recognition came in 1999, when she started publishing essays in the cultural press. The first five essays appeared in the collection I Propose to Shoot the Plot (2002). Following the publication of two books (Moments Planned, 2004 and Tonight I Shall Sleep by the Wall, 2010), she became one of the most read representatives of the Lithuanian essay genre. In 2010, Radvilavičiūtė won the EU Prize for Literature for her short story collection Tonight I Shall Sleep by the Wall (2010) and had her essay The Allure of the Text published in the anthology of 30 European writers Best European Fiction 2010. In 2018, she published a collection of essays entitled The Pursuit of Texts.
Among other initiatives, she has launched the international forum of contemporary literature Northern Summers (held in Jurbarkas since 2002). Now she lives in Vilnius with her daughter (a student at Vilnius Academy of Arts) and works as a language editor at a government institution.
http://www.šaltiniai.info/index/details/1537
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Obres
Books:
Šiąnakt aš miegosiu prie sienos (Tonight I Shall Sleep by the Wall), 2010
Siužetą siūlau nušauti (I Propose to Shoot the Plot), 2002
Suplanuotos akimirkos (Moments Planned), 2004, 2006
Tekstų persekiojimas: Esė apie rašytojus ir žmones (Chasing Texts: Essays on Writers and People), 2018
Bibliografia
Andriuškevičius, A., Beresnevičius, G., Geda, S., Parulskis, S., & Radvilavičiūtė, G. (2002). Siužetą siūlau nušauti. Vilnius: Baltos lankos.
Radvilavičiūtė, G. (2004). Suplanuotos akimirkos: esė rinktinė. Vilnius: Baltos lankos.
Radvilavičiūtė, G. (2010). Šiąnakt aš miegosiu prie sienos. Vilnius: Baltos lankos.
Radvilavičiūtė, G. (2018). Tekstų persekiojimas: Esė apie rašytojus ir žmones. Vilnius: Apostrofa.
Enfocament Didàctic
DIDACTIC APPROACH: Lithuanian literature.