“An exemplary stenographer at a cotton and cotton textiles export house:” Written threads in Alicja Stern’s prose

Abstract

This article is an attempt to interpret Alicja Stern’s novel Ciała się oddalają [Bodies Are Moving Away], which was published in 1931 in six installments in the weekly feminist magazine for Jewish women Ewa [Eve]. The author of the article attempts to analyze the text as one of the few feminist literary responses to futurist slogans, ideas, and rhetoric in Poland. The parodic frame of the novel is emphasized. The article argues that thanks to parody Alicja Stern could both critique conservative romance formulas from a feminist perspective and ironically re-evaluate avant-garde postulates. References to the New Woman and critical intertextual games with stereotypical notions of female subjectivity and sexuality are also identified and discussed.