Polish Journal for American Studies最新文献

{"title":"The Color of Avant-Garde: Kenneth Goldsmith’s “The Body of Michael Brown”","authors":"P. Marcinkiewicz","doi":"10.7311/pjas.12/1/2018.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7311/pjas.12/1/2018.15","url":null,"abstract":"In the following paper, I put forth a claim that literary works created according to the rules of conceptualism, seemingly devoid of expression, often reveal that values are inseparable from any textual operations. This is visible in Kenneth Goldsmith’s recent project, “The Body of Michael Brown,” which follows the format of Goldsmith’s previous book-Seven American Deaths and Disasters-a transcription of news reports of American national disasters, such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy or the attacks of 9/11. The text rewrites the autopsy report issued by the St. Louis County Coroner’s Office on the shooting of Michael Brown, an African-American teenager shot and killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. The problem with the new conceptual art practice is that it disregards the ethical dimension of creation. For Goldsmith, ethical issues in art are limited to the question of “faithful” copying/rewriting, regardless of the fact that an appropriated text always reflects editorial manipulation and politics behind it. Goldsmith thinks of himself as a daring disciple of Duchamp, but he fails to understand that his text propagates racist violence, performing anew the autopsy’s latent, institutional racism. In terms of methodology, I rely in my analyses on Marjorie Perloff’s understanding of the concept of avant-garde and refer to the theories about literature and ethics emerging from recent writings by Cathy Park Hong and Jacques Ranciére.","PeriodicalId":384144,"journal":{"name":"Polish Journal for American Studies","volume":"87 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":"121603230","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":"Decentering America: Visual Intertextuality and the Quest for a Transnational American Studies","authors":"R. Kroes","doi":"10.7311/pjas.12/1/2018.02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7311/pjas.12/1/2018.02","url":null,"abstract":"The planned removal of a Civil War monument in Charlottesville, Virginia, was the pretext for a white supremacist rally there in August 2017. It brought American fascists back into the streets, marching under the banner of a virulent nativism, of a vicious fear of being removed from the pedestal of their proper place in society. It also brought to the minds of people watching these images on TV older visual repertoires dating back to Nazi-Germany, fascist Italy, and similar racist clashes elsewhere. In such a stream of consciousness, such a chain of visual recollections, national settings—American or otherwise—are transcended. The wandering—and wondering—mind of the observer moves in a space naturally trans- national. The following essay considers the implications of such mental processes for the established forms of discourse among historians.","PeriodicalId":384144,"journal":{"name":"Polish Journal for American Studies","volume":"14 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":"115614800","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":"Plus ça change? Translating William Gibson into Polish: “The Gernsback Continuum” and The Peripheral","authors":"Anna Krawczyk-Łaskarzewska","doi":"10.7311/pjas.12/2/2018.07","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7311/pjas.12/2/2018.07","url":null,"abstract":"This article has been inspired by the most recent Polish edition of William Gibson’s 1986 collection of short stories Burning Chrome. By focusing on the new Polish translation of one of Gibson’s earliest tales, “The Gernsback Continuum,” and juxtaposing it with the Polish version of his latest novel, The Peripheral, I intend to comment on the reception of his prose (both by the source culture and the target culture readers) and its translatability. Apart from the idiosyncratic aspects of Gibson’s work in general, various extraliterary factors will also be taken into account in order to elucidate the context in which Polish translations of his works continue to be created, distributed and assessed.","PeriodicalId":384144,"journal":{"name":"Polish Journal for American Studies","volume":"17 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":"128890325","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":"Ecological Recentering in William Gibson’s The Peripheral","authors":"Katherine E. Bishop","doi":"10.7311/pjas.12/2/2018.05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7311/pjas.12/2/2018.05","url":null,"abstract":"William Gibson’s response to the rise of computing established him as a pioneering voice in twentieth-century science fiction, his finger not just on but shaping the pulse of his time. Gibson’s novel The Peripheral (2014) is no different. It responds to current, rising anxieties pertaining to climate change, shifting from his earlier ecoperipheral cyberpunk purview to a more holistic one, in which ecology is at least as much at the forefront of the future as is technology. This article draws on and expands Bakhtin’s chronotope to investigate how Gibson uses ecological time, particularly plant time, to reorient the trajectory of future imaginings. In doing so, he enmeshes that which had previously been relegated to the margins in his work, both socially and environmentally.","PeriodicalId":384144,"journal":{"name":"Polish Journal for American Studies","volume":"110 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":"124078550","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":"Louisa May Alcott’s “Behind a Mask, or a Woman’s Power”: The Woman as an Actress, Femininity as a Mask","authors":"Karolina Korycka","doi":"10.7311/pjas.12/1/2018.07","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7311/pjas.12/1/2018.07","url":null,"abstract":"This essay discusses the ways in which Louisa May Alcott?s 1866 novella “Behind a Mask, or a Woman?s Power” expresses the author’s frustration with her familial, social, and cultural reality. It explains the numerous feminist implications of the Gothic tale, in which Alcott, more or less directly, tackles the issue of female labor in post Civil War America, mocks the basic assumptions of the sentimental revolution and challenges contemporary notions regarding femininity.","PeriodicalId":384144,"journal":{"name":"Polish Journal for American Studies","volume":"23 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":"126787833","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":"Performance and Theatrical Awect in Steven Millhauser’s Short Story “The Knife-Thrower”","authors":"Paulina Ambroży","doi":"10.7311/pjas.12/1/2018.13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7311/pjas.12/1/2018.13","url":null,"abstract":"Audiences and performances figure prominently in Steven Millhauser’s short stories whose plots are often structured around some form of public entertainment (e.g. magic or freak shows, museum displays or automaton dramas). “The Knife Thrower,” “August Eschenberg,” “The New Automaton Theater” or “The Dream of the Consortium,” to name only a few of his numerous “theatrical” pieces, use performance to explore the relation between the figure of a charismatic artist and his spectators. As will be shown in close reading of “The Knife Thrower,” the writer’s representation of a magician’s performance is complexified through his choice of a plural narrative voice which creates a unique subject position for his fictional audiences. Another aspect of the theatrical mode in Millhauser’s story is that the narrative is informed by the tension between stage and offstage realities, with the dramas often “bleeding” into reality and contaminating the characters’ everyday lives. The aim of my inquiry is to look into the aesthetic and moral implications of Millhauser’s use and abuse of performative codes, with a special focus on the role of the collective narrator, the relation between production and reception of art and dramatizations of the porous boundaries between performance and life. The methodological angle adopted for the analysis derives from affective studies of theatrical experience.","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":"126746370","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 U.S.-Mexico Border as a Palimpsest in Ana Teresa Fernández’s Art","authors":"Ewa Antoszek","doi":"10.7311/pjas.12/1/2018.14","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7311/pjas.12/1/2018.14","url":null,"abstract":"The question of land has always been crucial to Latinos/as living in the U.S., due to the series of historical events that resulted in “[t]erritorial dispossession and dislocation” (Pérez 147) that have particularly influenced this ethnic group and relegated them both literally and metaphorically towards the margin-the border. Consequently, the border has played a significant role in the Latinx discourse for a long time. The complexity of spatial-social relations increased with subsequent waves of immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American states. However, as Monika Kaup notes, being both “natives of the Southwest before the American conquest” and immigrants, Latinos/as in the U.S. constitute “a charter as well as an immigrant group” (Kaup 26). This double status of the group is reflected in Chicano/a literary and cultural productions through nation-based and immigrant paradigms (Kaup 26) that have been constructed in direct reference to the border, since “[b]eneath the surface of these models lie two different concepts of the border” (Kaup 10). Combined with the transformations in the discourse on space the concept of the border has undergone several re-definitions and the changing role of the border-from the demarcation line to more porous and permeable space has been reflected in numerous artistic productions by Latinx authors and artists. Those artistic productions illustrate the transformations of the space and address the aforementioned interplay between indigenous and immigrant paradigms often present in the discourse on the Mexican-American border. The purpose of this article is to analyze how the space of the border is (re-)visioned by Latina artist Ana Teresa Fernández, turning the border into a cultural palimpsest. It focuses mainly on Fernández’s Erasing the Border/Borrando La Frontera (2013), together with the community project of the same title, and selected paintings from her series Foreign Bodies (2013) and Pressing Matters (2013) in order to examine the aforementioned redefinitions of the border and its multiple roles. Fernández’s revisionist performances of the border both contribute to the ongoing debate on the still urgent and pressing problem of the U.S.-Mexico border and are also an apt reflection on the status quo of borders in general.","PeriodicalId":384144,"journal":{"name":"Polish Journal for American Studies","volume":"1997 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":"128214097","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 Future’s Overrated: How History and Ahistoricity Collide in William Gibson’s Bridge Trilogy","authors":"Lil Hayes","doi":"10.7311/pjas.12/2/2018.02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7311/pjas.12/2/2018.02","url":null,"abstract":"In 1988, Gibson “asserted his interest in the how’s and why’s of memory, the ways it defines who and what we are, in how easily it’s subject to revision” (qtd. in McCaffery 224). While this statement is a reflection on his appropriation of human memory in the Sprawl trilogy, it is also a useful standpoint from which to assess the interplay between history and memory\u0000in the Bridge trilogy. In my view, this trilogy is primarily concerned with the implications of postmodernization for historical perception. Moreover, it serves to explore how the proliferation of the spectacle has significant effects on social memory, the ramification of which is the eventual effacement of memory’s value, and its substitution by commodified images. Through a close assessment of Gibson’s architecturally familiar landscape and the perseverance of nostalgia in an ahistorical society, I argue that in this postmodern world, history as a concept is not obsolete despite the death of historical perspective that postmodernism ideologically affirms. In fact, by creating a world that simultaneously experiences the “abandonment of history” and the “false consciousness of time” (Debord 90), Gibson is able to convey the idea that historical perspective, no matter how unreliable, is the only means through which to fully understand not only the past, but also the present, and, indeed, the future.","PeriodicalId":384144,"journal":{"name":"Polish Journal for American Studies","volume":"311 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":"123219138","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":"Feel Like a Gringo: Transnational Consciousness in Los Angeles Punk Rock Songs","authors":"Grzegorz Welizarowicz","doi":"10.7311/pjas.12/1/2018.05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7311/pjas.12/1/2018.05","url":null,"abstract":"The essay analyzes four songs from the catalogue of the Los Angeles punk rock scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s. It is argued that the songs, written in response to the reality of the life in Los Angeles and in the Mexican-American borderlands, are expressive of transnational consciousness. Interpreted in this way, the songs are revealed as embodying the processes of distancing and then readjusting of oneself in relation to the dominant narrative of the US Nation and hence embody the idea of cosmopolitanization. The first two songs are by Chicano artists and express transnational anxieties as they are experienced by the artists and their communities within the U.S. The other two songs were selected because they record tiny personal impressions by white artists who, once they cross the border into Mexico, are faced with a nexus of transnational processes, which confront their certainties and affect their consciousness. The analysis makes use of the theory of affects (Tomkins), the theory of cosmopolitanism (Beck), as well as a selection of historical analyses and personal accounts by the artists.","PeriodicalId":384144,"journal":{"name":"Polish Journal for American Studies","volume":"55 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":"126443278","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":"“At the Western Palace”: The Dehumanization of Whiteness, Americanness, and Chinese-Americanness in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior","authors":"Klara Szmańko","doi":"10.7311/pjas.15/1/2021.07","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7311/pjas.15/1/2021.07","url":null,"abstract":"The dehumanization of whiteness in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976) inheres in the overarching ghosthood metaphor. While first generation Chinese American immigrants in The Woman Warrior attribute the power of transforming people into ghosts to the United States of America as a country, the questioning of a person’s humanity by calling them a “ghost” is not reserved for white people alone. Chinese American immigrants also run the risk of losing their humanity and becoming ghosts if they renounce their relatives and their heritage. The husband of the first-person narrator’s Chinese aunt, Moon Orchid, is an example of a Chinese American man, who turns into a ghost on account of swapping his Chinese wife for a much younger American one. The clinic in which Moon Orchid’s husband works, a chrome and glass Los Angeles skyscraper, becomes a vehicle for the metaphoric representation of the United States as the Western Palace – also the title of the fourth of the five chapters of The Woman Warrior, exemplifying narrative techniques employed by Kingston in order to render the above mentioned dehumanization.","PeriodicalId":384144,"journal":{"name":"Polish Journal for American Studies","volume":"110 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114258626","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}