Przemilczana cielesność druku – Balzak, nowoczesność, literatura
Silenced Physicality of Print: Balzac, Modernity, and Literature

Summary/Abstract: The text refers to the diagnoses of relationships between the body, print, and modernity in Honoré de Balzac’s Lost Illusions. As based on the cultural history of the book and the circles associated with its production, the author attempts to analyse how Balzac evokes and reformulates the modern division between the spiritual work of writers-creators and the physical work of printers-craftsmen, and reveals the physical and material production of texts as a process constituting the social background of modern literature. She assumes that the dualism of the body and text, materiality and semioticity of literature, is not only the result of specific phenomena in the field of the history of ideas, and not an effect—as Walter J. Ong claimed—of the very visuality of a massively reproduced, reader-oriented book. On the basis of the recognition of Balzac himself, she argues that this dualism is the work of processes of developing capitalism, which, through the material production of illusions of “pure,” detached from the body, creativity, conceals certain economic and social mechanisms, deciding, i.a., on the formative function of modern literature

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