Nie-ludzkie doświadczenie i jego ślady w kobiecych autobiografiach. Przypadek trzech modernistek

The practice of life writing, seemingly vastly anthropocentric, can be perceived as a valuable testimony to human-animal relations. The history of women’s autobiographical writing in particular demonstrates shows how necessary it is for an autobiographer to include other, often non-human perspectives in a narrative. Drawing on the theory of autobiography as well as the conceptions of Éric Baratay and Erica Fudge, I argue that personal narratives can be seen as a practice of leaving behind traces of both human and non-human experience. Taking the autobiographies by Colette, Virginia Woolf and Zofia Nałkowska as representative examples, I try to shed light on the possible ways of finding those traces and revealing how animal lives are entangled with the lives of the autobiographers. Such a reading mode enables to recognize non-human animals as agents and subjects that are strongly interrelated with but not dependent on humans.  The article discusses the possibility of reading women’s autobiographies with the main focus on the lives non-human animals. Drawing on the theory of autobiography and the field of animal studies I argue that it is feasible to extract valid and accurate accounts of numerous human-animal relationships or find traces of various animal experience whereby animals can be recognized as agents and subjects