Jak gazeta codzienna przekraczała codzienność Wielkiej Wojny. „Nowy Kurier Łódzki” 1914–1918
How a Daily Newspaper Went Beyond the Everyday of the Great War. “Nowy Kurier Łódzki” 1914–1918

Summary/Abstract: In the contemporary humanistic sciences, including cultural anthropology, which is to a greater or lesser extent geared to historical thinking, the approach to war is usually based on the chronotope of reversion, i.e. on the perception of war as the opposite of peace. Such an approach involves a very particular perception of the war-marked everyday; a perception which is, fundamentally, a phenomenological one. According to this perception, the reversed everyday of the wartime is non-ordinary and peculiar; as a result, it is experienced as alien and unfamiliar. Referring his reflections to the cultural reality of the city of Łódź as marked by the Great War, the author attempts to demonstrate that not the entire everyday of a city undergoes a reversion during wartime, or that not all the elements of that everyday are reversed to the same extent. He demonstrates that the daily press is one such element. On the example of “Nowy Kurier Łódzki”, one of the newspapers typical of the place and time, he shows how, during wartime, a daily paper preserves the ways of writing about the world which are familiar to it from the pre-war period, also by making use of all the journalistic genres that make it possible to go beyond the straightforward truth of facts and events. Owing to this approach, the newspaper transgresses the commonplace and mundane everyday of a wartime city.

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