Investigations in the Phantomatic City: Breslau in the Retro Detective Novels of Marek Krajewski

Abstract

Owing to the compatibility of the text (signifier) and city (signified), it is relatively easy to represent the city in a literary text. The city is always already semiotically mediated and therefore prepared for its further semiotic processing in interpretation. Individual strategies of representation are always connected with certain layers of textual structures and are open to analysis by different areas of literary studies. The topographic representation of the city mediated by the layer of historical toponyms that form chains and paths crosses the boundary of the strictly internal textual structure and calls for geopoetics as analytical tool. The strategy of representing ordinariness via period objects for everyday use makes up for the layer of the retro genre. The narrative representation of the city – stories (and their matrixes) that form Krajewski’s literary Breslau – predominantly constitutes the layer of detective thriller. Combination of these strategies of representation of the city, delimited by a cross-section of the textual corpus of the Breslau series, forms Krajevski’s specific generic representation of the city.

Keywords

• retro detective novel
• geopoetics
• representation of the city
• toponyms
• breslau