Dyskursywne i tekstowe reprezentacje współczesnej przestrzeni miejskiej

Abstract

The main object of the dissertation was planned reading of the textual representation of Polish cities. The reading was structured as to enable conclusions leading to defining the elements in individual statements about a city, appears as a result of textual “subordination”. In the whole project, the category that regulates the imagery is discourse. The author's goal is to, firstly, to track the chosen types of discourse in the texts she analyses, and secondly, to construct the rules, norms and conventions of a wider discourse that would include all discourses referring to city. This creates a higher-level category of urban discourse. The argument pursues the following line of reasoning. The first chapter describes and conceptualises the basic concepts: text, discourse, point of view, discursive view of the world. These categories form the basic research toolkit and define the direction of interpretation. The second chapter presents the category of 'city' in a wider, cultural perspective. This perspective introduces additional contexts and concepts important for the further analysis, relating directly to the category of city (place, centre, border, palimpsest, 'third space'). The third chapter forms the basic building block of the interpretation. The analysis focuses on the conventions of a tourism discourse, creating particular images of urban space. The interpretation starts by presenting the analysis of images of Warsaw and attempting to group them into semantic subgroups (facets). This attempt demonstrates the semantic complexity of a city. The community of users is the necessary element of a discourse. That is why the author gives much attention to figures of a tourist and a wanderer (a modern flâneur) and their ways of experiencing a city. A tourist represents the Stranger in the urban space. The tourist perspective depends on the genre conventions of the texts that describe the city. The author focuses on travel guides, with a particular modern variation of a city walking guide taken as a typical for a tourism discourse. The imagery appearing in the travel guides was then confronted with the individual and particular views of urban spaces, as seen through the lens of travel blogs. The fourth chapter of the dissertation changes the point of view from a tourist to a resident. The research process was based on placing the tourist and the resident on the oppositional axis of FAMILIAR (OURS) – STRANGER (THEIRS). The relationship between these two categories creates the opportunity and framework for considering the differences in the way the city is represented, and the city space is valued, these differences being due to differing experiences and thus differing points of view. The collective subject of 'residents' is diverse and polyphonic. In order not to lose this diversity of voices, the author analysed both statements by municipal officials (texts placed on the official Internet pages of the city authorities) and so-called 'ordinary members of the community' (posts of users of Internet forums). As was the case with tourists, this choice of texts for analysis enables the confrontation and comparison of individual and personal perception with the institutional view. The argument is concluded in the fifth chapter, where the author presents a model (theoretical construct) of urban discourse that forms a point of reference for the interpretations of individual, particular semiotic representations of a city.