“Fragments of a Broken Mirror": Bruno Schulz's Retextualization of the Kabbalah
“Fragments of a Broken Mirror": Bruno Schulz's Retextualization of the Kabbalah

Summary/Abstract: As contradictory as it may seem, for such towering twentieth-century figures as Franz Kafka, Marc Chagall, and Walter Benjamin the explorations of their Judaic heritage was instrumental in shaping their visions of modernity. The mythical and the present, that is, Judaism and modernism, became for them two sides of the same coin. The fusion of the "old semantics" with the experimental, avantgarde tendencies of the day was also a prominent feature in the works of the Polish modernist writer Bruno Schulz. In fact, Schulz articulated this tendency in his oft-quoted essay "The Mythologizing of Reality," in which he discussed the ontological status of the word in the modern world: "Not one scrap of an idea of ours does not originate in myth, isn't transformed, mutilated, denatured mythology. [...]

• Details
• Contents