Trash in the Provinces: The Dreams of Bruno Schulz

• In Event: Afterlives: Trash as a Form of Memory

Abstract

This paper delineates Schulz’s paradigm of provincial mythopoeia with his texts set in the last years of the Austrian empire. It argues that provincial spaces and provincial dreaming portrayed in Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles constituted a new kind of modern(-ist) subject-position in Polish literature. The material world used for narrative reconstruction, best described as a collection of second-hand, imitative, decaying, and cheap hand-me-down objects – under the generic name of “tandeta” or “trash” – are imports from metropolitan cultural centers of the ancien regime. These elements of production, consumption, and material identity or value of objects are then reclaimed within a new narratology of essences from an ambivalent perspective of hard-won (thus overdetermined) national independence.

Author

• George Z Gasyna, U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign