Cultural Baggage: Autobiographical Writings by Wanda Rutkiewicz and Arlene Blum

Sa？etak The article aims to compare and contrast two autobiographical stories, Wanda Rutkiewicz's Na jednej linie [On One Rope] (1986), co-authored with Ewa Matuszewska, and Arlene Blum's Breaking Trail, published in 2005. Unfolding the experiences of the female mountaineers from two different cultural backgrounds, it analyzes how their mutual encounters are narrated by Blum, the American icon of climbing, and by Rutkiewicz, the first Polish high-altitude mountaineer to scale Mount Everest. The article also examines the personal narratives by applying to the text analysis Edward Hall's division into high-context and low-context cultures and Geert Hofstede's cultural individualism-collectivism dimension