“The city of their fathers”: Urban Space, Memory, and Language in Stuart Dybek’s Short Fiction

Kimak, Izabella

dc.contributor.author	Kimak, Izabella
dc.date.accessioned	2025-12-11T15:33:44Z
dc.date.available	2025-12-11T15:33:44Z
dc.date.issued	2025-11-28
dc.identifier.issn	2083-2931
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/11089/56917
dc.description.abstract	Stuart Dybek is a writer invariably associated with his neighborhood of Pilsen/Little Village on Chicago’s Lower West Side. Having grown up there as a descendant of immigrants from Poland, Dybek frequently “revisits” his old neighborhood in his writing. His texts showcase the changes of the urban space, narrated through references to the material, social, cultural, and linguistic environment. In this essay, I will analyze two of Dybek’s texts—the sequence “Hot Ice” from his second collection of stories The Coast of Chicago and the story “Qué Quieres” from I Sailed with Magellan—to probe the palimpsestic construction of urban space, whereby the past, present, and future of urban orders are narrated simultaneously. Both texts illustrate ethnic succession in the neighborhood—from Slavs to Hispanics—which finds its reflection in the linguistic layer of the stories and construes translation as an inevitable element of urban experience.	en
dc.language.iso	en
dc.publisher	Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego	pl
dc.relation.ispartofseries	Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture;15	en
dc.rights.uri	https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
dc.subject	Stuart Dybek	en
dc.subject	Chicago	en
dc.subject	literature of neighborhood	en
dc.subject	memory	en
dc.subject	multilingual city	en
dc.title	“The city of their fathers”: Urban Space, Memory, and Language in Stuart Dybek’s Short Fiction	en
dc.type	Article
dc.page.number	276-290
dc.contributor.authorAffiliation	Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin	en
dc.identifier.eissn	2084-574X
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dc.contributor.authorEmail	izakimak@gmail.com
dc.identifier.doi	10.18778/2083-2931.15.15

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