Search results

1

The Limitations of Theory: A Response to Ulrich Reichardt’s “Theories of the global, Global Literature, and American Literature in a Globalizing Age”

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Camboni M.

Review of International American Studies

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2017

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vol. 10

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issue 1

EN

Marina CamboniDipartimento di Lingue Mediazione Lettere FilosofiaStudi UmanisticiUNIVERSITÀ DEGLI STUDI DI MACERATAThe Limitations of Theory: A Response to Ulrich Reichardt’s “Theories of the global, Global Literature, and American Literature in a Globalizing Age”A Response to Ulrich Reichardt’s “Theories of the global, Global Literature, and American Literature in a Globalizing Age.” (In the present issue of RIAS). Keywords: Limitations of theory, globalization, global literature, American literature

2

Figuring Atlantic Legacies: Impossible Archives, Missing Histories, Literary Counter-Memories

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Iuli C.

Review of International American Studies

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2017

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vol. 10

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issue 1

EN

Cristina IuliUniversità degli Studi del Piemonte Orientale, Dipartimento di Studi UmanisticiFiguring Atlantic Legacies: Impossible Archives, Missing Histories, Literary Counter-MemoriesAbstract: This paper considers how neo- or trans- Atlantic studies conceives of the Atlantic and its legacies in relation to the idea of the archive, that is, of a body of works related to traces of a trans-Atlantic American past, to its principle of organization and analysis for literary studies, and to the critical descriptions of American Cultures in the context of a long trans-Atlantic network. It addresses how recent works on critical race studies and decoloniality, on performativity and memory and on comparative circum-Atlantic spectrality frame an original way to address how the literary imagination challenges the historical voids produced by modern Western amnesia. Keywords: trans-Atlantic; archive; critical memory; American literature

3

Identity Formation in Paul Auster’s Fictional Urban Space

100%

Boettcher N.

Romanian Journal of English Studies

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2013

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vol. 10

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issue 1

221-228

EN

How does the contemporary self depicted in Paul Auster’s fiction constitute himself in the metropolis New York City? I will investigate the extent to which New York City influences the shaping of a metropolitan identity in two selected literary works by Paul Auster: City of Glass and Sunset Park

4

Literacki głos pokolenia X? David Foster Wallace wobec popkultury

88%

Gutowska S.

Jednak Książki. Gdańskie Czasopismo Humanistyczne

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2017

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issue 8 "Jak czytać (pop)literaturę?"

201-212

EN

The article treats on the life and work of American postmodern writer David Foster Wallace. The subject is undertaken in context of appearance of his writing in the Polish translation (by Jolanta Kozak). The author aims to present Wallace as a potentially interesting writer in the field of Polish literary studies. Next to describing him as a popcultural phenomenon, she puts stress on matters of the texts themselves, such as postmodern irony and psychological issues, corresponding with the writer’s actual experience.

5

The thousand and one tries: Storytelling as an art of failure in Rabih Alameddine’s Fiction

88%

Tabačková Z.

Journal of Language and Cultural Education

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2015

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vol. 3

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issue 3

112-124

EN

The paper discusses experimental fiction of Rabih Alameddine, an American writer of Lebanese origin, whose literary pursuits subvert Orientalist discourse based on the East/West dichotomy by focusing on the commonalities of the two. The recurring motif of searching for one’s identity (while being trapped in-between two mutually distant and at the same time similar worlds) is reflected in the subversion of the traditional understanding of the narrative which is destined to a constant failure. Alameddine’s storytelling is, in reality, a “story-trying.“ By employing multiple narrators, intertwining plots, genres and languages, the author is striving hard to tell “hisstory” about American homophobia, Lebanese sectarianism as well as the physical and psychological outcomes of war - a story which turns up to be a narration of the thousand and one failed beginnings.

6

“I Want To Be Nothing”. Challenging Notions of Culture, Race and Identity

88%

Lubowicka A.

Studia Humanistyczne AGH

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2011

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vol. 10

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issue 2

75-83

EN

This article tackles the issue of “hyphenated identities” in Heidi W. Durrow’s novel The girl who fell from the sky (2010), whose main topic is growing up as a girl of mixed race in a dominant black culture. This article examines how Rachel Morse, the main character in the novel, challenges racism and the essentialist notion of identity. Firstly, Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy’s approaches to that issue are introduced and discussed. Then in relation to their theories an interpretation of Durrow’s fictional character is delivered. As the third part of the article, elements of Danish culture appearing in Durrow’s are presented and analyzed as well as the novel’s explicit intertextual references to Nella Larsen’s authorship, another mulatto woman writer of half-Danish origin. In accordance with Gilory’s theory, the article’s aim is to show that Rachel’s identity is born in the process of self-reflection where Danishness becomes her ‘crossroads’ and thus to confirm that such phenomena as culture, ethnicity and identity are constantly constructed and altered.

7

Communality and the Individual in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

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Tazbir J., University of Łódź, Jędrzej Tazbir has defended his BA and MA theses at the University of Łódź. The broadly considered English-language prose represents his main field of interest and scholarly work w. t. e. o. t. A. n. b. f. t. m. e. I. r. a. a. l. t. h. i. i. t. s. f. p. a. p. t. A. i. i. t.

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2016

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vol. 4

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issue 1

EN

The subject of the article is the analysis of the notion of communality in the relation between the two protagonists of The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Traversing the post-apocalyptic landscape populated mostly by wretched savages harbouring ill intent towards other human beings, the heroes ostensibly seek a place where establishing a sustainable society composed of the “good guys” can still be possible. However, while for the young son this goal implies the necessity of maintaining a sense of openness and hospitality towards the other, for the father it is the matter of day-to-day survival that takes precedence, which leads to repeated instances of withdrawing help from destitute survivors and avoiding human contact. The boy objects to this behavior, despite being wholly dependent on his father, as his sense of responsibility seems innate and unconditional. The man, on the other hand, gradually recognizes that he was so profoundly afflicted by the experience of losing his world that he cannot overcome his radical pessimism and distrust of the other. Therefore, when the man arrives at the end of his life, he comes to understand that it is only without him at his side that the son can enter a larger community.

8

Edgar Allan Poe: A question of sport

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Mazurkiewicz M.

Literatura i Kultura Popularna

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2017

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vol. 23

199-206

EN

The above-presented analysis demonstrates that Edgar Allan Poe — just like numerous other writers — was not indifferent towards sport. Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Sport has a great power of influence. It permeates different spheres of life and constitutes an important segment of culture. It creates a fragment of the world of literature as well. Sport has always occupied an important place in American society. The nineteenth century laid the foundations as far as creation of American sports landscape is concerned.34 This was the time when Poe lived and worked. Paradoxically, the writer whose best work is mostly concerned with terror and sadness, quite often — especially in his youth — abandoned himself to a life of pleasure and sports. The research also touched the question of Poe’s legacy in contemporary world, which is not only visible in literary works or films, but also in the sports realm, namely at American football stadiums. Hopefully, the paper is an eye-opener showing that Edgar Allan Poe, “one of the most controversial figures in American literature” 35 had many faces, and exploring his complex personality and rich legacy lets one convince oneself that sport constitutes a part of them. Thanks to the recent rise of interest in sport among scholars in the humanities and social sciences, there has been a steady growth in the number of academic publications dealing with the subject of connections between literature and sport. Only selected aspects of this relation could be described in this article. Obviously, there is a need for further research as far as the presence of sport both in literature and in biographies of writers is concerned.

9

Sicily, Not Italy

75%

Salmeri C.

Review of International American Studies

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2017

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vol. 10

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issue 2

EN

Claudio SalmeriFaculty of PhilologyUniversity of Silesia in Katowice Sicily, Not Italy Abstract: Since the American continent became a part of the European imagination, it has always been seen to represent freedom. Especially after 1776, when the American democratic “experiment” giving rise to the United States proved durable, America became a source of social and political inspiration to generations of Europeans and non-Europeans alike. Unsurprisingly, also in the Italian context, the catalog of ways in which American values have been “translated into Italian” and adapted to Italy’s cultural space seems to be ever-growing. Yet, even though the cultural transfer dates back to Christopher Columbus, it is especially since the outbreak of World War II that Italy has been markedly influenced by intellectual and material values generated in the US. At some point, the fascination with the US soared to such a level that, incredibly as it may sound, one of the most iconic provinces of Italy would begin to imagine itself as the forty-ninth state of the US long before Alaska and Hawaii gained their present-day status: in Sicily, the American fascination seems never to abate.

10

Modes and Moves of Protest

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Paladin N.

Review of International American Studies

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2019

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vol. 12

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issue 2

103-118

EN

The role of mass protest has been recurrently central yet controversial in the American culture. Central because American history presents a constellation of significant collective protest movements, very different among them but generally symptomatic of a contrast between the people and the state: from the 1775 Boston Massacre and the 1787 Shays’s Rebellion, to the 1863 Draft Riots, but also considering the 1917 Houston Riot or anti-Vietnam war pacifist protests. Controversial, since despite-or because of-its historical persistence, American mass protest has generated a media bias which labelled mobs and crowds as a disruptive popular expression, thus constructing an opposition-practical and rhetorical-between popular subversive tensions, and the so-called middle class “conservative” and self-preserving struggle. During the 20th century, this scenario was significantly influenced by 1968. “The sixties [we]re not fictional”, Stephen King claims in Hearts of Atlantis (1999), in fact “they actually happened”, and had a strong impact on the American culture of protest to the point that their legacy has spread into the post 9/11 era manifestations of dissent. Yet, in the light of this evolution, I believe the very perception of protesting crowds has transformed, producing a narrative in which collectivity functions both as “perpetrator” and “victim”, unlike in the traditional dichotomy. Hence, my purpose is to demonstrate the emergence of this new and historically peculiar connotation of crowds and mobs in America as a result of recent reinterpretations of the history and practice of protest in the 1960s, namely re-thinking the tropes of protest movements of those years, and relocating them in contemporary forms of protest. For this reason, I will concentrate on Nathan Hill’s recent novel, The Nix (2016), and focus on the constant dialogue it establishes between the 1968 modes of protest and the Occupy movement.

11

“I’m a I’m a Scholar at the Moment”: The Voice of the Literary Critic in the Works of American Scholar-Metafictionists

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Drąg W.

American, British and Canadian Studies Journal

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2016

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vol. 26

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issue 1

36-51

EN

In her seminal book on metafiction, Patricia Waugh describes this practice as an obliteration of the distinction between “creation” and “criticism.” This article examines the interplay of the “creative” and the “critical” in five American metafictions from the late 1960s, whose authors were both fictional writers and scholars: Donald Barthelme’s Snow White, John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, William H. Gass’s Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, Robert Coover’s Pricksongs and Descants and Ronald Sukenick’s The Death of the Novel and Other Stories. The article considers the ways in which the voice of the literary critic is incorporated into each work in the form of a self-reflexive commentary. Although the ostensible principle of metafiction is to merge fiction and criticism, most of the self-conscious texts under discussion are shown to adopt a predominantly negative attitude towards the critical voices they embody – by making them sound pompous, pretentious or banal. The article concludes with a claim that the five works do not advocate a rejection of academic criticism but rather insist on its reform. Their dissatisfaction with the prescriptivism of most contemporary literary criticism is compared to Susan Sontag’s arguments in her essay “Against Interpretation.”

12

Alterity, First-Person Narratives and Memory in Paul Auster’s Works

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Kochbati M.

Lublin Studies in Modern Languages and Literature

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2016

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vol. 40

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issue 2

DE

Der Band enthält die Abstracts ausschließlich in englischer Sprache.

EN

If the presence of extracts from the life of the author (Paul Auster) allows us to postulate the “autobiographical” project of the memorial writing, others on the contrary confer it with a fictive project. The use of a stratagem of increased self-distancing and the multiple “mise en abyme” of identities leaves us puzzled as to the existence of an autobiographical scheme specific to Auster’s creation. Through the many forms of auctorial disguises, games of duplication, selfreflective mirroring, identity usurpation and handwritten possession, memorial writing integrates the different autobiographies of others. These are transformed into a functionalized or “real” autobiography of a subject who is a narrator, a character and an author.

FR

Le numéro contient uniquement les résumés en anglais.

RU

Том не содержит аннотаций на английском языке.

13

Donald Trump and the American Literary Tradition

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Moseley M., Okuń-Jaśkowiak A., Głaz A., Kniaź-Hunek L., Bendrat A., Prażmo E., Terejko P., Szczypa P., Czemiel G., Antoszek E., Galant J., Komsta M., Frelik E., Waszkiewicz A., Oleszczuk A., Waszkiewicz A., Okuń-Jaśkowiak A.

New Horizons in English Studies

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2018

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issue 3

EN

Though in many ways the most unusual US president ever elected, both in experience and in character, Donald Trump is not entirely sui generis. This article strives to show that in some respects he is in the American tradition, as evidenced by his continuity with some classic American literary works. Characteristics which Trump shares with the American literary tradition include religiosity; egalitarianism, and its corollaries including anti-expertise, braggadocio, self-assurance and self-reliance; insularity and xenophobia; and American exceptionalism.

14

The Reception of the Life and Work of Franz Kafka in Philip Roth’s Non-Fiction Writings

75%

Sýkora M.

Slovo a smysl - Word & Sense

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2022

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vol. 19

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issue 39

241-249

EN

Philip Roth made no secret of his great admiration for the work of Franz Kafka, which ultimately brought him to Prague in the 1970s and fostered his interest in Czech culture. This contribution focuses on the reception of the personality and work of Franz Kafka in Philip Roth’s non-fiction writing. The first section focuses on Roth’s essential Kafkaesque essay ‘“I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting”; or Looking at Kafka’ from 1973, in which Roth combines an empathetic portrait of his favourite author with a counterfactual vision of Kafka’s life, in which the author of the Trial and the Castle did not die of tuberculosis and instead fled from the Holocaust to the United States, where he became Roth’s uncle. In the second section, based on Roth’s dialogue with Ivan Klíma from 1990, we document how Kafka serves Roth in his reflections on the position and role of the writer in society.

15

Rage and Rebellion in Louisa May Alcott’s “A Whisper in the Dark”

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Korycka K.

Anglica. An International Journal of English Studies

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2018

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issue 27/1

65-80

XX

This article discusses the feminist implications of Louisa May Alcott’s 1863 Gothic story “A Whisper in the Dark,” which not only expresses the anxieties that the author experienced in response to her upbringing and her social reality, but also provides an extensive critique of patriarchal culture. The essay explores the subversive nature of the story by presenting it as a dark double to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre as well as by showing how the author mocks nineteenth-century sentimentality throughout.

16

“My lot is cast in with my sex and country”: Generic Conventions, Gender Anxieties and American Identity in Emma Hart Willard’s and Catherine Maria Sedgwick’s Travel Letters

75%

Rutkowska M.

Anglica. An International Journal of English Studies

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2018

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issue 27/1

51-63

XX

The article analyses generic conventions, gender constraints and authorial self-definition in two ante-bellum American travel accounts – Emma Hart Willard’s Journal and Letters, from France and Great Britain (1833) and Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (1841). Emma Hart Willard, a pioneer in women’s higher education and Catharine Maria Sedgwick, an author of sentimental novels, were influential figures of the Early Republic, active in the literary public sphere. Narrative personas adopted in their travel letters have been shaped by the authors’ national identity on the one hand and by ideals of republican motherhood, which they propagated, on the other. Both travelogues are preceded with apologies filled with self-deprecating rhetoric, typical for women’s travel writing in the early 19th century and both are intended to instruct the American reader. Other conventional features of American antebellum travel writing include comparisons between British and American government and society with a view of extolling the latter as well as avid interest in social status and public activities of European women. Willard and Sedgwick deal with possible gender anxieties of their upper middle-class female readers by assuring them that following one’s literary or educational vocation in the public sphere does necessarily mean compromising ideals of true womanhood in private life.

17

Genius, Appropriation and Transnational Collaboration in Ezra Pound’s Cathay

75%

Vali A.

Anglica. An International Journal of English Studies

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2018

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issue 27/1

97-110

XX

When we discuss the cross-cultural relationships of Euro-American modernists we often fall between the poles of either celebrating the ‘coming together of traditions’ or suspiciously decrying the power play involved. A case in point is the divergent critical understanding most often posited of Ezra Pound’s relationship to the materials he produced from Ernest Fenollosa’s notes – notably Classical Chinese poetry in the form of Cathay (1915). The first position is Hugh Kenner’s who holds that its meaning, its primary function, was as an anti-WWI volume, rather than as any representation of Chinese poetry or an extension of Imagism (1971, 202–204). In seeming opposition to this vision of an ideal aesthetic come at by the application of genius, we have those who highlight the source material of Fenollosa’s notes to discuss various modes of Pound as translator. Interestingly, these critics, who resist the Kennerian celebration of Poundian genius and insist that Pound is engaged here in an act of translation, “essentially [...] appropriative” (Xie 232), or otherwise, also reinforce a reading whereby “the precise nature of the translator’s authorship remains unformulated, and so the notion of authorial originality continues” (Venuti 6). This is the issue I wish to address when we study the disparities between Fenollosa’s notes and the Cathay poems, i.e. Pound’s own choices with regard to those poems’ content, as a key chapter in the study of transnational collaboration.

18

Burial Grounds and Dead Lovers: Places of Interment in the Gothic Modernism of the American South

75%

Redding A.

Avant

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2017

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vol. 8

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issue 2

EN

In Cities of the Dead, Joseph Roach speculates that “Modernity itself might be understood as a new way of handling (and thinking about) the dead” (1996: 48). Roach (following Foucault) argues that a whole array of rationalized spatial practices emerged during the Enlightenment designed to enforce policies of segregation and hygiene, demarcating the social and metaphysical lines that were necessary to distinguish black from white, civilization from nature, citizen from foreigner, past from present, reason from supernatural or folk forms of knowing, and-ultimately-living from dead. In this sense, “gothic” romanticism represented the development of a sort of unnatural chiaroscuro effect, whereby such boundaries and lines of distinction became blurred, where dead flesh becomes re-animated, where corpses risen from graves come to contaminate the spaces of the living. In contradistinction to formations that “view the dead as hermetically sealed off from contemporaneous life, quarantined into the past,” gothic cultural productions, as Eric Anderson et al. have argued recently in Undead Souths, reveal “how the dead contain cultural vibrancy in the present” (2015: 2). This essay, rethinking traditional understandings of “Southern Gothic” by emphasizing the world-making power of the dead, explores texts about burial grounds by modernist writers from the American South, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930) and Frances Newman’s Dead Lovers are Faithful Lovers (1928). En route, I consider Freudian and other understandings of mourning from a spatial perspective, focusing on variously abortive or failed funereal dramas of interment and burial.

19

Burial Grounds and Dead Lovers: Places of Interment in the Gothic Modernism of the American South

75%

Redding A.

Avant

|

2017

|

vol. 8

|

issue 2

EN

In Cities of the Dead, Joseph Roach speculates that “Modernity itself might be understood as a new way of handling (and thinking about) the dead” (1996: 48). Roach (following Foucault) argues that a whole array of rationalized spatial practices emerged during the Enlightenment designed to enforce policies of segregation and hygiene, demarcating the social and metaphysical lines that were necessary to distinguish black from white, civilization from nature, citizen from foreigner, past from present, reason from supernatural or folk forms of knowing, and-ultimately-living from dead. In this sense, “gothic” romanticism represented the development of a sort of unnatural chiaroscuro effect, whereby such boundaries and lines of distinction became blurred, where dead flesh becomes re-animated, where corpses risen from graves come to contaminate the spaces of the living. In contradistinction to formations that “view the dead as hermetically sealed off from contemporaneous life, quarantined into the past,” gothic cultural productions, as Eric Anderson et al. have argued recently in Undead Souths, reveal “how the dead contain cultural vibrancy in the present” (2015: 2). This essay, rethinking traditional understandings of “Southern Gothic” by emphasizing the world-making power of the dead, explores texts about burial grounds by modernist writers from the American South, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930) and Frances Newman’s Dead Lovers are Faithful Lovers (1928). En route, I consider Freudian and other understandings of mourning from a spatial perspective, focusing on variously abortive or failed funereal dramas of interment and burial.

20

“We Make Our Own Familia” – The Transfer of Memory in Patricia Nell Warren’s Billy’s Boy (1997)

75%

Mętrak J.

Filoteknos

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2021

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issue 11

262-271

EN

This paper aims at analyzing Patricia Nell Warren’s 1997 coming-of-age novel Billy’s Boy. Using the concept of the family as a social framework for memory (Halbwachs), as well as highlighting the role of objects (Olsen, Pomian) and photographs (Hirsch) in the process of memorizing William’s late father, the author demonstrates the traumatic impact his death has on the protagonist’s biological and chosen family. The paper shows that in Billy’s Boy, the third volume in her Harlan’s Story trilogy, Warren presents the experience of marginalized youth in the 1990s and interweaves it with her own life experience. Having previously written about the difficulties of being pushed to society’s margins in the early 1970s, in this novel, Warren familiarizes the readers with the representation of the life of the LGBTQ+ community in the early 1990s. By doing so, she shows the social changes that have happened and points to the ongoing social inequalities and homophobia. Notably, while Warren writes about the individual experience of William, the novel can become the source of next-generation memory for contemporary young readers, familiarizing them with the history of American LGBTQ+ community.

Refine search results

The Limitations of Theory: A Response to Ulrich Reichardt’s “Theories of the global, Global Literature, and American Literature in a Globalizing Age”

Figuring Atlantic Legacies: Impossible Archives, Missing Histories, Literary Counter-Memories

Identity Formation in Paul Auster’s Fictional Urban Space

Literacki głos pokolenia X? David Foster Wallace wobec popkultury

The thousand and one tries: Storytelling as an art of failure in Rabih Alameddine’s Fiction

“I Want To Be Nothing”. Challenging Notions of Culture, Race and Identity

Communality and the Individual in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

Edgar Allan Poe: A question of sport

Sicily, Not Italy

Modes and Moves of Protest

“I’m a I’m a Scholar at the Moment”: The Voice of the Literary Critic in the Works of American Scholar-Metafictionists

Alterity, First-Person Narratives and Memory in Paul Auster’s Works

Donald Trump and the American Literary Tradition

The Reception of the Life and Work of Franz Kafka in Philip Roth’s Non-Fiction Writings

Rage and Rebellion in Louisa May Alcott’s “A Whisper in the Dark”

“My lot is cast in with my sex and country”: Generic Conventions, Gender Anxieties and American Identity in Emma Hart Willard’s and Catherine Maria Sedgwick’s Travel Letters

Genius, Appropriation and Transnational Collaboration in Ezra Pound’s Cathay

Burial Grounds and Dead Lovers: Places of Interment in the Gothic Modernism of the American South

Burial Grounds and Dead Lovers: Places of Interment in the Gothic Modernism of the American South

“We Make Our Own Familia” – The Transfer of Memory in Patricia Nell Warren’s Billy’s Boy (1997)