Topic
Poetics as Urban Architecture: Global and Hungarian Modernist Cities
This paper examines how modernist poetry constructs cities as alternative spaces that both represent and shape urban experience. Drawing on Baudelaire, T. S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams, as well as Hungarian modernist poets such as Kosztolányi and Babits, it argues that literary depictions of the city function bidirectionally: poetic space frames and actively directs perception of urban life. In Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, for example, the streets and rooms structure experience through movement and linguistic rhythm, guiding both temporal and spatial understanding. Williams’ Paterson integrates urban and natural landscapes into a dynamic environment in which ideas, material objects, and human activity interconnect, showing that poetics can extend beyond representation to influence lived perception. Similarly, Hungarian poets like Kosztolányi’s and Babits’ urban poems negotiate modern cityscapes through associative imagery and reflective engagement, creating alternative frameworks for memory, social interaction, and identity. By comparing these literary traditions, the paper establishes a transnational perspective on the modernist city, highlighting convergences and contrasts in how cities are imagined, inhabited, and mediated through poetry. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of heterotopia and Soja’s Thirdspace, the investigation focuses on cities in modernist poetry are not merely settings but performative spaces: they shape the horizon of urban experience, mediate social and temporal perception, and become arenas for aesthetic and philosophical inquiry. Ultimately, the analysis demonstrates that modernist poetics transforms the city into a site where literature actively participates in the construction of both individual and collective urban consciousness.
Gábor Bednanics (Eszterházy Károly Catholic University)
Gábor Bednanics is a professor at Eszterházy Károly Catholic University, Eger, Hungary. He was born in 1976, Budapest, received his PhD at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, 2007, habilitated at University of Debrecen, 2013, and received his higher doctoral promotion from Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, 2024. He is interested in turn-of-century poetry, modernism, and connections between literature and philosophy. Among multiple papers he published four books about Modernism, the last one in 2016: Modern Myths and the Possibilities of Rewriting.