From sign to word in contemporary Polish “HTML literature”. Post-avant-garde heirs of modernist typography

Abstract

_{Digital literature or "HTML literature" is one of the more expressive and important trends of the Polish literature of the 21st century. In order to present the main aims and objectives of HTML literature, it is essential to take under consideration the digital works characterized by the autonomisation of words, as well as the isolation of words from the linguistic and non-linguistic context and reality, so that "the word itself and for itself would have a clear meaning" – as it was claimed in the late 1960s by one of the main representatives of Polish language art and the icon of Polish concrete poetry, Stanisław Dróżdż. The authors search for the predecessors of such an approach to literary texts in the period of the Great Avant-garde – one can refer here to the pronouncements of the Polish Formists and Constructivists (the true beginning are the literary manifestoes and poems of Tytus Czyżewski from 1921, inspiring such Polish Constructivists as Henryk Berlewi, Mieczysław Szczuka, Teresa Żarnowerówna, as well as Władysław Strzemiński, the latter author deserving special attention. Contemporarily in the 21st century, the works of Piotr Kowalczyk are renowned for a similar treatment of “the isolated word”. Kowalczyk, who works under the pseudonym of Nick Name, is the author of such works as: iPhone Stories, Twitter Fiction, Tech Quotes, Transtories, as well as Short stories for geeks.}