Californian Flânerie in Karolina Waclawiak’s How to Get into the Twin Palms
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31261/https://doi.org/10.31261/PS_P.2021.27.09Keywords:
flânerie, Los Angeles, Polish American, gentrification, Karolina WaclawiakAbstract
Unlike most of the immigration novels created by contemporary Polish American female writers, How to Get into the Twin Palms written by Karolina Waclawiak, does not focus on the hardships of assimilation into American culture but depicts experiments with ethnic cross-dressing. Waclawiak, a representative of the so-called one-and-a half generation of Polish immigrants from the 1980s Solidarity wave, reinvents the immigration story as her protagonist, Zosia, a Polish American resident of Los Angeles, yearns to become Russian in order to be granted entrance to the mysterious and appealing Russian nightclub. The protagonist’s transformation into Anya goes hand in hand with her exploration of the City of Angels, the
postmodern megalopolis with neon lights and pavements reaching the horizon. Thus, Zosia/Anya becomes a Californian flâneuse, the urban scrutinizer and strolling observer of the what is known as the most photographed but least photogenic city in the United States. In this context, the main aim of this presentation will be to explore Californian flânerie in Waclawiak’s novel: while walking down the city streets the narrator flâneuse reflects on her home (Polish) culture, underscores her status as an immigrant outsider, and delves into the questions of alienation as well as defamiliarization. Hence, one may assume that flânerie itself contributes to the transformation of Waclawiak’s protagonist.
References
Andersen T., 2014, Los Angeles plays itself – A documentary, DVD, The Cinema Guild.
Banham R., 2009, Los Angeles: The architecture of four ecologies, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.
Bauman Z., 1994, Desert spectacular, in: Tester K., ed., The flaneur, London and New York: Routledge, 138–157.
Borchard K., 2003, From flanerie to pseudo-flanerie: The postmodern tourist in Las Vegas, “Studies in Symbolic Interaction”, no 26, 191–213.
Cuff D., 2000, The provisional city: Los Angeles stories of architecture and urbanism, Cambridge, London: The MIT Press.
Frisby D., 2001, Cityscapes of modernity, London: Polity Press.
Kozaczka G.J., 2018, Rekonstrukcja tożsamości w polskiej prozie migracyjnej początku XXI wieku: Rozterki pokolenia 1,5 w Stanach Zjednoczonych i Kanadzie, in: Kolenda Z., Chudzio H., Praszałowicz D., eds., Inteligencja polska w świecie, Kraków: Polska Akademia Umiejętności, 251–258.
Paetzold H., 2001, Rethinking key-concepts of modern urban culture: Flanerie and the city as theatre, in: Diaconu M., Heuberger E., Mateus-Berr R., and Vosicky L.M., eds., Senses and the City: An interdisciplinary approach to urban sensescapes, Berlin: Lit, 33–48.
Price J., 2006, Thirteen ways of seeing nature in L.A., “Believer”, no 33, https://believermag.com/thirteen-ways-of-seeing-nature-in-la/ [access: 10.12.18].
Shields R., 1994, Fancy footwork: Walter Benjamin’s notes on flânerie, in: Tester K., ed., The flaneur, London and New York: Routledge, 61–81.
Tester K., 1994, Introduction, in: Tester K., ed., The flaneur, London and New York: Routledge, 1–21.
Trivundza, I.T., 2011, Dragons and arcades: Towards a discursive construction of the flaneur, in: Trivundza I.T., Carpentier N, Nieminen H., Pruulmann-Venerfeldt P., Kilborn R., Sundin E., and Olsson T., eds., Critical perspectives on the European mediasphere, Ljubljana: Faculty of Social Sciences, Založba FDV, 71–81.
Vilder A., 2009, Foreword to the 2000 edition; Los Angeles: City of the immediate future, in: Banham R., ed., Los Angeles: The architecture of four ecologies, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, xxxiii–xlix.
Waclawiak K., 2012, How to get into the Twin Palms, Columbus, OH: Two Dollar Radio.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
The Copyright Owners of the submitted texts grant the Reader the right to use the pdf documents under the provisions of the Creative Commons 4.0 International License: Attribution-Share-Alike (CC BY-SA). The user can copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose.
1. License
The University of Silesia Press provides immediate open access to journal’s content under the Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). Authors who publish with this journal retain all copyrights and agree to the terms of the above-mentioned CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
2. Author’s Warranties
The author warrants that the article is original, written by stated author/s, has not been published before, contains no unlawful statements, does not infringe the rights of others, is subject to copyright that is vested exclusively in the author and free of any third party rights, and that any necessary written permissions to quote from other sources have been obtained by the author/s.
If the article contains illustrative material (drawings, photos, graphs, maps), the author declares that the said works are of his authorship, they do not infringe the rights of the third party (including personal rights, i.a. the authorization to reproduce physical likeness) and the author holds exclusive proprietary copyrights. The author publishes the above works as part of the article under the licence "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International".
ATTENTION! When the legal situation of the illustrative material has not been determined and the necessary consent has not been granted by the proprietary copyrights holders, the submitted material will not be accepted for editorial process. At the same time the author takes full responsibility for providing false data (this also regards covering the costs incurred by the University of Silesia Press and financial claims of the third party).
3. User Rights
Under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license, the users are free to share (copy, distribute and transmit the contribution) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material) the article for any purpose, provided they attribute the contribution in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
4. Co-Authorship
If the article was prepared jointly with other authors, the signatory of this form warrants that he/she has been authorized by all co-authors to sign this agreement on their behalf, and agrees to inform his/her co-authors of the terms of this agreement.
I hereby declare that in the event of withdrawal of the text from the publishing process or submitting it to another publisher without agreement from the editorial office, I agree to cover all costs incurred by the University of Silesia in connection with my application.
