„Kartki z podróży” Józefa Ignacego Kraszewskiego a poetyka reportażu
“Kartki z podróży” and the Poetics of the Reportage

Summary/Abstract: The aim of the article is to tackle the issue of the relationship between Józef Ignacy Kraszewski’s “Kartki z podróży” and the poetics of the reportage. The departing point of the analysis is the assumption that the text in question is an example of a heavily syncretic work of literature and combines the genre features of a travel memoir, a reportage, a travel guide, a vade mecum, a physiological sketch, and an ekphrasis. The opening of the article deals with the poetics of reportage and the circumstances under which “Kartki z podróży” came into existence. The most crucial part of the article is dedicated to the analysis of the connection between Kraszewski’s work and the reportage tradition. To achieve this, the problem of the presence of the defining features of the 19th-century reportage poetics (taking into account their function, relation to the reader, and linguistic shape, as indicated by Jolanta Sztachelska 1997) in the given text is elaborated upon. The analysis consistently employs the theoretical category of the genre’s dominant mode and views Kraszewski’s work through the prism of the process of the reportage genre development. The whole interpretation is based on the text of “Kartki z podróży”, and the context in which the writer’s views on his foreign correspondence are investigated are those fragments of the book “Gawędy o sztuce i literaturze” in which the author expresses his opinions on the literature theory.

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