Founded In    2003
Published   annually
Affiliated Organization   Polish Association for American Studies
     
Editorial Board

Managing Editor: Marek Paryz

Editorial Board: Zofia Kolbuszewska, Zuzanna Ladyga, Pawel Stachura, Patrycja Antoszek, Karolina Krasucka

Advisory Committee: Andrzej Dakowski, Joanna Durczak, Jerzy Kutnik, Zbigniew Mazur, Zbigniew Lewicki, Elzbieta Oleksy, Agata Preis-Smith, Agnieszka Salska, Piotr Skurowski, Tadeusz Slawek

Submission Guidelines and Editorial Policies

Articles should not exceed 5,000 words, and reviews of current publications 3,000 words.

Please follow the MLA bibliographical convention

Please submit printouts and texts on diskettes in Microsoft Word to:

Marek Paryz
American Literature Department
University of Warsaw
ul. Nowy Swiat 4
00-497 Warszawa, Poland
E-mail: m.a.paryz@uw.edu.pl

Deadline for each year’s submissions is open.
Authors of accepted papers will be notified of the publication date.

     

» Polish Journal for American Studies

New issue of Polish Journal for American Studies.

Polish Journal for American Studies

Thanks to the generous support of the Polish-American Fulbright Committee, Polish Association for American Studies is pleased to announce that starting with the year 2003 Polish Journal for American Studies will be published as an annual academic periodical devoted to various aspects of American civilization and culture. Each issue will include articles and reviews of publications in the fields of American Studies and American literature.

 

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Polish Journal for American Studies, Volume 8 2014, Volume 8

Selection of Polish research in American literature and American studies from 2014

Can Poetry Save the Earth? An Interview with Gary Snyder


Julia Fiedorczuk interviews Gary Snyder, a poet and essayist as well as a social and environmental activist.

Sarah Pogson's The Female Enthusiast (1807) and American Republican Virtue


"Sarah Pogson's five-act romantic tragedy dramatizes the story of Charlotte Cor- day's arrest and execution for the murder of Jean Paul Marat. Romantic in style, replete with melodramatic conventions and abounding in stilted language, the play focuses upon a highly controversial historical moment of the French Revolution and an equally controversial historical figure. Although there is little evidence that Pogson's play was ever produced and rather contradictory assumptions by contemporary scholars, it has been tempting to explore its dramatic merit and political significance at a time when the American nation was struggling to define and secure its identity both internally and externally."

Melville's Typee: Toward the Poetics of Hybridity


"Viktor Shklovsky, in Theory of Prose, stated that "the content (hence 'the soul') of a literary work is the sum total of its stylistic devices" (qtd. in Fokkema and Bosch 17). Drawing on this formalist assumption, I will argue that the key role played by hybrid characters as well as the peculiar use of narrative techniques which undermine the traditional basis of travel writing -- the genre Melville wanted his book to belong in -- conflate to make "the soul" of Typee significantly hybrid, and this quality in turn yields new ways of representing the encounter between Europeans and primitive populations."

Black Radicalism and Black Conservatism as Complementary and Mutually Reinforcing: The Political Pragmatism of Martin R. Delany


The article discusses Dalaney as a Black conservatist and Black radicalist. "Delany embraced the tenets of moral suasion which became his guiding philosophy as he immersed himself in the abolitionist movement. He joined Frederick Douglass in the late 1840s to launch a vigorous, moral suasion abolitionist crusade spearheaded by The North Star and, as the paper's co-editor and roving lecturer, Delany became the standard bearer of moral suasion to free black communities across the Mid-West and North-East (Adeleke, Booker T. Washington)."

Henry James, Charles Nordhoff, and the Peculiarities of Christian Communes


The article discusses James's interest in American progressive politics, which he expressed in his book review, written for The Nation, of Charles Nordhoff's book on communist societies. "Charles Nordhoff's The Communistic Societies of the United States elicited James's nearly enthusiastic response. His 1875 Nation review is detailed, lengthy, and in itself very absorbing. James appears fascinated with Nordhoff's material: he describes the various religious communes, provides the reader with multiple examples of their peculiarities, and treats Nordhoff -- the author him- self -- with seriousness and respect."

Cross-Pollination of Crime and Gothic Fiction in Edith Wharton's "Mr. Jones"


"I would like to prove that (...) crime fiction, and specifically one of its earliest and most popular genres -- the detective story -- did affect Gothic genres, such as Edith Wharton's "Mr. Jones". Establishing a chronological sequence of all the literary influences exceeds the scope of this essay, and for that reason, I decided to discuss this generic cross-pollination as a series of intensities and flows rather than clear-cut cause-and-result movements."

Under Kilimanjaro: Homesickness for the Wild and Hemingway's African Dressing Gown


Under Kilimanjaro (2003) is Hemingway's last, unpublished African manuscript. The article discusses the text in terms of possible parallelism or influence with Nietzsche's work. "Had they been read, talked or thought about in Africa or in Havana, Cuba, where Hemingway began to work on his African memoir, they would, most probably, have found their way there to keep company with references to Virgil, Machiavelli, Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, Simenon, Proust, Fitzgerald, Orwell, Whitman and oth- ers. Reference to Nietzsche's thought in this article is not a return to critical discussions of its relevance to Ernest Hemingway's work, the relevance which, as such readings when given to any of his texts admit, could be speculated on in terms of possible parallels but not demonstrated in terms of direct influence."

Fifteen Minutes of Fame, Fame in Fifteen Minutes: Andy Warhol and the Dawn of Modern-Day Celebrity Culture


"The aim of this essay is to analyze Warhol's portraits of famous people in terms of how they anticipate the celebrity-obsessed culture in which we now live. I shall consider various aspects of the paintings in question, such as the categories into which Warhol's sitters fall, the particular nature of Warhol's creative process, his technique, as well as the formal and visual characteristics of the representations. I shall also attempt to demonstrate how all these features correspond to or reflect the key characteristics of celebrity culture as we now know it."

Truman Capote's In Cold Blood between Document and Metaphor


"This article analyzes the novel in terms of its genre(s) and the consequences of the generic tension. I claim that In Cold Blood is an essentially a hybrid literary form, combining the traditions of non-fiction (documentary) writing and the Gothic. This generic instability manifests itself in the literary techniques employed, as well as in the treatment of both form and subject matter, thus transforming a narrative of a singular event into a work of a universal dimension."

"A Bridge That Seizes Crossing": Art, Violence and Ethnic Identity in Meena Alexander's Manhattan Music


"My analysis of Alexander's Manhattan Music will be informed by recent theories concerning the spatial construction of ethnic identity, for Alexander presents her characters as evolving not only through time, but also, perhaps primarily, through the traversing of space."

Paul Fleischman's Seedfolks: Community Gardening and Urban Regeneration


"Paul Fleischman's 1997 short novel for young adults, Seedfolks, seems to be a literary response to the promise of urban regeneration brought on by the community gardening movement. Among other children's books published in the 1990s that deal with urban farming are City Green (1994) by DyAnne DiSalvo-Ryan and The Gardener by Sarah Stewart (1997). Their protagonists are young resolute girls who beautify their drab urban neigh- borhoods with flowers, herbs, and vegetables. City Green is similar to Seedfolks in that it is set contemporaneously and makes a community garden a source of neighborhood transformation."

Autofiction and New Realist Prose: Jonathan Franzen's Freedom


"Jonathan Franzen's Freedom (2010), a bestseller written in the style of psychological realism, presumably marking a retreat from postmodernist literary experimen- tation, is not related to life-writing in any way other than in that it employs the structure of an autobiographical account; the present article is an attempt at identifying the life-writing-related tropes used in the novel."

John Ashbery's Quick Question and Its Forms of Inventiveness


A detailed discussion of rhetoric devices in Ashbery's 2012 collection.

"It Is Beautiful Country Jim": The Art of Ernest Hemingway's Letters


Review essay on the first two volumes of Ernest Hemingway's collected letters, published in 2011 (edited by Sandra Spanier, Robert W. Trogdon) and 2013 (edited by Sandra Spanier, Albert J. DeFazio III, Robert W. Trogdon). The author discusses the style of the letters and its relation to Hemingway's fiction.

Peter Pope and Shannon Lewis-Simpson, eds. Exploring Atlantic Transitions: Archaeologies of Transience and Permanence in New Found Lands. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2013. 353 pages.


Book review.

Susan Hardman Moore. Abandoning America: Life-Stories from Early New England.


Book review

Mita Banerjee. Color Me White: Naturalism/Naturalization in American Literature.


Book review

Birte Christ. Modern Domestic Fiction: Popular Feminism, Mass-Market Magazines, and Middle-Class Culture, 1905-1925.


Book review

Florian Freitag. The Farm Novel in North America: Genre and Nation in the United States, English Canada and French Canada, 1845-1945.


Book review.

Lucyna Aleksandrowicz-Pędich. Memory and Neighborhood: Poles and Poland in Jewish American Fiction after World War Two.


Book review.

Tadeusz Pióro. Frank O'Hara and the Ends of Modernism.


Book review.

Izabella Kimak. Bicultural Bodies: A Study of South Asian American Literature.


Book review

Grzegorz Maziarczyk. The Novel as Book: Textual Materiality in Contemporary Fiction in English.


Book review

Carmen Birkle and Johanna Heil, eds. Communicating Disease: Cultural Repre- sentations of American Medicine.


Book review

Ewa Antoszek, Katarzyna Czerwiec-Dykiel, and Izabella Kimak, eds. Inne bębny: różnica i niezgoda w literaturze i kulturze amerykańskiej.


Book review.

Buelens, Gert, Sam Durrant, and Robert Eaglestone, eds. The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism.


Book review.

Kacper Bartczak and Małgorzata Myk, eds. Theory that Matters: What Practice After Theory.


Book review

Other Issues

January 2015, 9
, Volume 7
Polish Journal for American Studies 4 2010, 4
Polish Journal for American Studies 3 2009, 3
January 2008, 2
January 2004, 1
Polish Journal for American Studies 5 2011, 5
2012, 6