Urban Genres — an Attempt at Defining the Genological Landscape

Abstract

The article attempts to outline the urban genological landscape of contemporary Polish literature. This landscape is created primarily by means of textual arcades — essayistic, polymorphic form, which arises from the attempt to find a discursive equivalent of experiencing the city. The act of walking and reading the city/depicting the city in writing is the essence of modern urban genres. The other important determinants are: the construction of subject, which relates to the patterns of the anthropological figure of flâneur, and the socalled intellectual flânerie, which involves the principle of double vision — seeing the city and at the same time confronting it with history, the read books and with the traces of the past. This type of urban experience contributed to the development of other urban genres, which are called in this paper ‘urbantexts’, such as the modern urban novel, faits divers, urban legend or urban collages.