{"title":"What Is “New” in Faulkner Criticism?","authors":"Zbigniew Maszewski","doi":"10.7311/pjas.12/1/2018.16","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7311/pjas.12/1/2018.16","url":null,"abstract":"A review essay concerning approaches Faulkner’s fiction as a response to Taylor Hagood’s Following Faulkner: The Critical Response to Yoknapatawpha’s Architect.","PeriodicalId":384144,"journal":{"name":"Polish Journal for American Studies","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115792858","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Other Exceptionalism: A Transnational Perspective on Atheism in America","authors":"Florian Zappe","doi":"10.7311/pjas.12/1/2018.06","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7311/pjas.12/1/2018.06","url":null,"abstract":"The United States constitutes an exceptional case in the complex discourse of unbelief in the Western world. Its providential founding myth of being “God’s own country” established an idiosyncratically American social imaginary molded by what Robert Bellah has defined as the “American civil religion”: a pervasive ideological nexus between the narratives of religion and national identity. This essay shows, on the one hand, how a transnational perspective can contribute to an understanding of the development of this idiosyncrasy. On the other hand, it retraces the distinctly transnational trajectory of some early manifestations of atheist thought in the United States.","PeriodicalId":384144,"journal":{"name":"Polish Journal for American Studies","volume":"74 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132584498","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Detective, Historian, Reader: Alternate History and Alternative Fact in William Gibson’s The Peripheral","authors":"Glyn Morgan","doi":"10.7311/pjas.12/2/2018.04","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7311/pjas.12/2/2018.04","url":null,"abstract":"Alternate history is on one level liberated from the narrative of history and verifiable fact, but it is also mercilessly reliant upon that narrative for its effectiveness. This paper analyses how William Gibson’s The Peripheral subverts familiar elements of the alternate\u0000history genre, combining it with similarly distorted conventions from detective fiction, manipulating the reader’s response, and causing them to question accepted truths, realities and roles, problematizing narratives of history and justice.","PeriodicalId":384144,"journal":{"name":"Polish Journal for American Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128860361","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Heterotopic Domestic Spaces in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping","authors":"Elżbieta Horodyska","doi":"10.7311/pjas.12/1/2018.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7311/pjas.12/1/2018.11","url":null,"abstract":"This essay proposes to read Marilynne Robinson’s 1981 novel Housekeeping as a depiction of an imaginary journey that the protagonists undertake in search of habitable domesticity adaptable to change. In a sequence of stages, the house, physically and symbolically, undergoes radical transformation from a solid edifice, firmly rooted in cultural and societal structures, into a mobile Foucauldian heterotopic space (a ship), where boundaries between the inside and the outside, nature and civilization, place and placelessness, presence and absence collapse. Each stage of the transformation is linked to a hero who interacts with the spaces of the house creating, in each case, a unique interconnectedness reminiscent of Bachelard’s poetics of nests and shells. I argue that the tension between permanence and transience in the novel is resolved in the bond which the two main characters forge in the course of their journey.","PeriodicalId":384144,"journal":{"name":"Polish Journal for American Studies","volume":"215 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121942262","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction. Transnational American Studies: Histories, Methodologies, Perspectives","authors":"A. Graff, Tomasz Basiuk, Karolina Krasuska","doi":"10.7311/pjas.12/1/2018.01","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7311/pjas.12/1/2018.01","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":384144,"journal":{"name":"Polish Journal for American Studies","volume":"60 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121492433","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Defamiliarizing Blackness and Whiteness in Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills","authors":"Klara Szmańko","doi":"10.7311/pjas.12/1/2018.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7311/pjas.12/1/2018.12","url":null,"abstract":"Gloria Naylor defamiliarizes in Linden Hills (1985) both white and non-white racial categories, in this case blackness and whiteness, both of which emerge as largely performable identities. The defamiliarization of blackness is fairly direct, unfolding mostly through the predominantly negative portrayal of Linden Hills residents and the male line of the Nedeed dynasty, especially Luther Nedeed IV. The defamiliarization of whiteness is mostly indirect, taking place primarily through the exposure of Linden Hills residents imitation of whiteness, in particular, the pursuit of what is presented as the negative paradigm of the white materialistic success and the disastrous consequences that stem from it. Upper class African Americans from the well-off neighborhood of Linden Hills are of ethnographic interest to less prosperous African Americans, many of whom envy Linden Hills residents and some of whom look down on them as presumable sell-outs and traitors of black people. Much of the defamiliarization of prosperous black residents of Linden Hills by lower class African Americans happens through visual exchanges between both groups. While whiteness is not on most occasions a part of these exchanges, it is still alluded to time and again as a pivotal factor that comes into play and that determines the rules of the game.","PeriodicalId":384144,"journal":{"name":"Polish Journal for American Studies","volume":"43 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131292667","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Adapting, Remaking, Re-visioning: Alex Haley’s Roots in a Triangular Relationship with Its Two Television Adaptations","authors":"Elżbieta Rokosz-Piejko","doi":"10.7311/pjas.12/1/2018.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7311/pjas.12/1/2018.10","url":null,"abstract":"The 1977 television adaptation of Alex Haley’s family saga was an overwhelming (although rather unexpected) success, both in the United States and abroad. The 8-hour miniseries, aired first by the History Channel on Memorial Day 2016, is a new take on the adaptation of Haley’s text, advertised as a remake of the 1977 production. The article refers to the original success of Haley’s text, followed by numerous controversies, and then discusses the appropriation of the story for the 1977 mostly white television audience, to finish up with a discussion of the angle which the 2016 production took, engaging in dialogue with the “iconic” 1977 miniseries.","PeriodicalId":384144,"journal":{"name":"Polish Journal for American Studies","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115041435","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"William Gibson’s Debt to the Culture of Curiosity: The Wunderkammer, or, Who Controls the World?","authors":"Zofi Kolbuszewska","doi":"10.7311/pjas.12/2/2018.03","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7311/pjas.12/2/2018.03","url":null,"abstract":"The article discusses transformations in William Gibson’s employment of the theme and poetics of the Wunderkammer from his two early novels, Neuromancer (1984) and Count Zero (1987), to Zero History (2010), his last-but-one novel. The exploration of Gibson’s representations of various Wunderkammer collections and arrangements in these books reveals his ever more pronounced recourse, over time, to the culture of curiosity as a diagnostic instrument. By interrogating the changing function of the Wunderkammer in Gibsons’ oeuvre, along with all its early-modern and contemporary associations with curiosity, it is possible to tease out the complexity of the writer’s evolving view of the duality, and the fusion, of the digital and the material, as well as his keen understanding of how the late capitalist market functions. Through his diagnostic representations of various cabinets of curiosities, Gibson reverses tendencies governing the transformations of the Wunderkammer as a collection of curia from the 16th to the 18th century, as well as overturning the relationship between the collection as a representation of available knowledge and the desire to create synthetic life. Gibson’s novels, which represent postdigital reality by analogous means, can thus be designated as postdigital analog writings that, according to Michael Punt, give expression to contemporary consciousness formed “in the Wunderkammer.”","PeriodicalId":384144,"journal":{"name":"Polish Journal for American Studies","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133939568","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Enslavement to Philanthropy, Freedom from Heredity: Amelia E. Johnson’s and Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Uses and Misuses of Sentimentalism and Naturalism","authors":"Anna Pochmara","doi":"10.7311/pjas.12/1/2018.08","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7311/pjas.12/1/2018.08","url":null,"abstract":"The article analyzes dialogical relations between Amelia E. Johnson’s Clarence and Corinne, or God’s Way (1890), an evangelical conversion narrative of the Black Woman’s Era, and The Uncalled (1898), the first novel of Paul Laurence Dunbar. As both texts feature racially indeterminate protagonists, draw on the drunkard’s story, are set in small northern towns, and were published by African American writers within the space of less than a decade, they encourage an intertextual reading. Clarence and Corinne and The Uncalled recast the themes of reform, uplift, and charity and the ways in which these functioned in the sentimental and naturalist aesthetics. Representing the tension between the lower class and its reformers, Dunbar’s and Johnson’s narratives embrace social determinism and effectiveness of reform work yet they also demonstrate the limitations of sentimental empathy and problematize the opposition between the benevolent agency of the reformer and the helplessness of the brutalized victim.","PeriodicalId":384144,"journal":{"name":"Polish Journal for American Studies","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124649976","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Hyperbolic Bodies for Sale: The Figurative Representations of Prostitutes in Tennessee Williams’s Early Works","authors":"M. Choiński","doi":"10.7311/pjas.12/1/2018.09","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7311/pjas.12/1/2018.09","url":null,"abstract":"The article examines representations of prostitutes in the early works of Tennessee Williams. The characters of hustlers in two of his two short stories, “In Memory of an Aristocrat” (1940) and “One Arm” (1942-45) as well as one short drama, “Hello from Bertha” (1941), are discussed as representatives of Williams’s employment of the hyperbolic figuration. In the case of each of the three examined characters, Choiński discusses the excessive and contrastive elements of descriptions which allow Williams to investigate the grotesqueness of human physicality on sale.","PeriodicalId":384144,"journal":{"name":"Polish Journal for American Studies","volume":"53 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128064847","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}