Year: 2021
Type: article
Abstract: The article analyzes texts that represent the artistically diverse literary forms which were written in Polish, German, Yiddish, Hebrew and Russian in Łódź before 1939. The author attempts to identify the constitutive elements of the “Łódź text” (based on Toporow’s typography) and seeks similarities in the ways in which space in a modern industrial city is created in the modernist literature. The space of Łódź created before 1939 is discontinuous, transitory, and filled with its anonymous residents, working masses and peddlers. Łódź, like Manchester, London, Chicago and New York, is a modernist colossal urban space of swindle, extortion and degradation that brings chaos and is impenetrable and oppressive. The language of spatial creation in Łódź, the resulting “Łódź text”, reflects its key components – the problems of industrialization and modernity.
Author: Tomasz Cieślak
Institution: University of Łódź
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W3191472895