Pub Date : 2019-10-15DOI: 10.7311/pjas.13/1/2019.09
S. Rosenberg
The article presents an analysis of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels as modern literary fairy-tales. To this end, the discussion will refer to structuralist critics, and identify “narrative functions” from folktales (stock images and episodes, stock character functions, characteristic sequences of episodes), used by Meyer in her vampire novels. As it turns out, Meyer modified folklore material to sustain a long and variously themed narrative: by embedding numerous subplots, by rearranging functions between characters, and creating composite and collective characters that combine contradictory functions. The author transformed several folktales into a series of four novels about coming of age in the twenty-first-century United States. A detailed analysis of Meyer’s modifications of the folktale partially corroborates the feminist critique of Meyer’s representation of the protagonists as reinforced versions of cultural stereotypes and gender roles. However, some transformations, especially Meyer’s assignment of the hero-function to the female protagonist Bella, seem to suggest just the opposite, thus leading to the conclusion that the Twilight novels reflect the confusion caused by contradictory role-models and aspirations, the confusion that seems to be inherent in a coming-of-age novel.
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Pub Date : 2019-10-15DOI: 10.7311/pjas.13/2/2019.10
Josepha Kuhn
This article tries to show how James Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) and Erskine Caldwell in his fiction from the Depression years–especially the little-known novella, The Sacrilege of Alan Kent (1930)–used a discourse of the sacred to represent the strange otherness of the Depression South. They particularly drew on the “left hand sacred” (of taboo, repulsiveness and sacrifice) as distinct from the “right hand sacred” found in institutional religion. The article argues that a theoretical understanding of Agee and Caldwell’s use of the sacred may be provided by Georges Bataille. It seems particularly appropriate to invoke Bataille since he was concerned with the political elements of the sacred and sought to mobilize these elements during the 1930s when liberal democracy was thought by many leftist writers on both sides of the Atlantic to have failed. Bataille provides a productive analogue to the two southerners, who shared this perception of liberal democracy, because he tried to articulate a radical path in this decade that was not Marxist. Agee and Caldwell, although notionally Communist, were dissatisfied with Marxism because they saw it as another version of a utilitarian or restricted economy. They looked instead to the sacred as a discourse of transgression–a discourse that was rooted in what Bataille called a general economy or the deeper organization of collective life around ecology and the gift.
{"title":"Bataille in the South: James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Erskine Caldwell’s Depression Fiction","authors":"Josepha Kuhn","doi":"10.7311/pjas.13/2/2019.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7311/pjas.13/2/2019.10","url":null,"abstract":"This article tries to show how James Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) and Erskine Caldwell in his fiction from the Depression years–especially the little-known novella, The Sacrilege of Alan Kent (1930)–used a discourse of the sacred to represent the strange otherness of the Depression South. They particularly drew on the “left hand sacred” (of taboo, repulsiveness and sacrifice) as distinct from the “right hand sacred” found in institutional religion. The article argues that a theoretical understanding of Agee and Caldwell’s use of the sacred may be provided by Georges Bataille. It seems particularly appropriate to invoke Bataille since he was concerned with the political elements of the sacred and sought to mobilize these elements during the 1930s when liberal democracy was thought by many leftist writers on both sides of the Atlantic to have failed. Bataille provides a productive analogue to the two southerners, who shared this perception of liberal democracy, because he tried to articulate a radical path in this decade that was not Marxist. Agee and Caldwell, although notionally Communist, were dissatisfied with Marxism because they saw it as another version of a utilitarian or restricted economy. They looked instead to the sacred as a discourse of transgression–a discourse that was rooted in what Bataille called a general economy or the deeper organization of collective life around ecology and the gift.","PeriodicalId":384144,"journal":{"name":"Polish Journal for American Studies","volume":"147 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121500440","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}
Pub Date : 1900-01-01DOI: 10.7311/pjas.11/1/2017.11
J. Durczak
Sally Mann’s autobiography Hold Still is a rare book which examines from the point of view of a photographer the way literature and photography complement each other in creating complex artistic visions. At the same time, it is not merely a famous artist’s autobiography, but an artful literary creation in its own right. The paper examines the nature of relations between literature and Sally Mann’s photography.
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Pub Date : 1900-01-01DOI: 10.7311/pjas.11/1/2017.13
Małgorzata Olsza
This article examines single-image narrative forms, demonstrating how they inform and problematize Joe Sacco’s works of graphic journalism. I analyze three different single-image narratives, the splash page, the spread, and the bleed, originally found in superhero and adventure comics, and show how they function in Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Goražde, The Fixer, and Palestine. Single-image narrative forms problematize visual reporting as suspended between involvement and distance. I investigate how Joe Sacco, a graphic artist and a journalist in one person, manipulates images which were originally conceived as “attention grabbers” for the comics reader so that they become a commentary on the ethics of journalism
{"title":"“Running in Both Directions”: The Reflective Character of Single-Image Narratives in Joe Sacco’s Graphic Journalism","authors":"Małgorzata Olsza","doi":"10.7311/pjas.11/1/2017.13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7311/pjas.11/1/2017.13","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines single-image narrative forms, demonstrating how they inform and problematize Joe Sacco’s works of graphic journalism. I analyze three different single-image narratives, the splash page, the spread, and the bleed, originally found in superhero and adventure comics, and show how they function in Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Goražde, The Fixer, and Palestine. Single-image narrative forms problematize visual reporting as suspended between involvement and distance. I investigate how Joe Sacco, a graphic artist and a journalist in one person, manipulates images which were originally conceived as “attention grabbers” for the comics reader so that they become a commentary on the ethics of journalism","PeriodicalId":384144,"journal":{"name":"Polish Journal for American Studies","volume":"105 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128122114","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}
Pub Date : 1900-01-01DOI: 10.7311/pjas.11/1/2017.09
Jędrzej Tazbir
The article examines the existential perspective and its development of the main character in Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road. Its protagonist is a man who, having witnessed the near total obliteration of the reality he was born into, struggles to find meaning in a world which continually reminds him of the debasement that the very notion of meaningfulness has undergone. In the apparent absence of any other available goals or social relations, ensuring the survival of his young son remains his sole guiding imperative, informed by the old concepts of filial duty and ethical standards, both interlinked with his faith, now deprived of all its affirmatory aspects. This cluster of moral motivations also compels him to assume an increasingly belligerent stance towards the “godless” outside reality. His radicalism is met with opposition from the son, whose own manner of being envisions empathy and hospitality where the father’s sees only potential confrontation. The man gradually realizes the unbridgeable disparity between his own haunted psyche and the post-apocalyptic new identity of the boy, whose nature inspires defiant hope in the seemingly hopeless circumstances. McCarthy will eventually confront his protagonist with the necessity of making a choice which entails a major shift in his system of beliefs. It is only by electing to act in a manner which is absurd by his standards that the protagonist stands a chance of saving his entire struggle from sinking into meaninglessness.
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Pub Date : 1900-01-01DOI: 10.7311/pjas.11/2/2017.10
Marianne Olholm
A characteristic feature of contemporary poetry is the interaction with other, non-literary discourses. In conceptual works, material is adopted from external sources and the artwork is extended to include the surroundings in what Nicolas Bourriaud has termed “relational aesthetics.” Christian Bök’s writing can be seen as a continuation of avant-garde practices concerned with the medium and materiality of the literary text. In Crystallography (1994), elements from scientific discourse such as tables, graphs and fractal geometry are incorporated into concrete poems and in his most recent project The Xenotext (Book 1) (2015) the interaction with other forms is taken a step further as Bök moves the text away from the literary medium and into the field of biotechnological research. A matrix sonnet is encoded into the DNA of a bacterium, and the protein of the bacterium produces a new text in the form of a sequence of amino acids. This process makes the resulting text inaccessible to the general reader who is left with the description of the work in the accompanying book and the project thus radically challenges the status of the literary artwork.
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Pub Date : 1900-01-01DOI: 10.7311/pjas.11/2/2017.04
T. Pióro
The article begins with a description of The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, which was written by ten Language poets from San Francisco, focusing on the paradoxes implied by “collective autobiography.” It then proceeds to close readings of three contributions to this work, by Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian, examining the relations between poetics, politics, gender and ideology their texts bring to the fore. Harryman anecdotally describes her critical stance towards the Romantic lyric and its enduring influence on some avant-garde American poets (Robert Creeley is the victim in question), while Hejinian, combining personal reminiscences of political protest with attempts at situating it within a tradition of critical thought, from Adorno through Said to Debord, makes a case for the relevance of Language writing to a future remaking of the polis. The article is, in the main, descriptive, not critical or polemical; the only doubt I voice in it concerns the difficulty involved in reading Language poems and the uncertain status of pleasure such difficulty implies, for surely it is for the sake of future pleasures we would like to have the polis reinvented, or at least improved?
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Pub Date : 1900-01-01DOI: 10.7311/pjas.11/2/2017.03
Mikołaj Wiśniewski
In his essay Mikołaj Wiśniewski presents an unpublished 1962 diary entry and two chapters from an unfinished novel found by the author when conducting research in the James Schuyler archive of the Mandeville Special Collections Library at UCSD. Wiśniewski goes on to show how Schuyler experimented with the diary form long before he started keeping a diary in the late 1960s (the published Diary of James Schuyler starts with 1967) and how the practice always served him as a starting point or “training ground” for other projects, be it a novel or the late long poems of the 1970s and 1980s. The author also comments on Schuyler’s poetics of the quotidian and the boring, contrasting it with Frank O’Hara’s focus on moments of exceptional emotional and perceptual intensity.
在他的文章Mikołaj Wiśniewski中，作者在加州大学圣地亚哥分校曼德维尔特别收藏图书馆的詹姆斯·斯凯勒档案中进行研究时，发现了一篇未发表的1962年日记和一本未完成小说中的两章。Wiśniewski继续展示了斯凯勒早在20世纪60年代末开始写日记之前就开始尝试日记的形式(詹姆斯·斯凯勒的日记出版于1967年)，以及这种实践如何始终作为他其他项目的起点或“训练场”，无论是小说还是20世纪70年代和80年代的晚期长诗。作者还评论了斯凯勒对日常和无聊的诗学，并将其与弗兰克·奥哈拉(Frank O 'Hara)对特殊情感和感性强度的关注时刻进行了对比。
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Pub Date : 1900-01-01DOI: 10.7311/pjas.11/1/2017.14
Steffen Wöll
This paper discusses the cosmic setting of Alfonso Cuarón’s movie Gravity, taking into account its fictional population with the themes, tropes, myths, and symbols that have regularly been identified as exemplary for the composition of a uniquely American personal and national character. Making use of a deconstructive approach and a methodology that is informed by the theories of spatial turn scholarship in the humanities, the paper zooms in at the sociocultural dynamics, aesthetics, mise-en-scene, and key motifs of Cuarón’s representation of space in the movie, arguing that this representation in fact draws on, endorses, and positions itself firmly within the epistemological framework of American exceptionalism, which becomes visible mainly through the movie’s relationship to geography, technocracy, and popular culture.
{"title":"Exceptional Spaces: Pop-Cultural Debris and the Spatial (Re)Construction of American Exceptionalism in Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity","authors":"Steffen Wöll","doi":"10.7311/pjas.11/1/2017.14","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7311/pjas.11/1/2017.14","url":null,"abstract":"This paper discusses the cosmic setting of Alfonso Cuarón’s movie Gravity, taking into account its fictional population with the themes, tropes, myths, and symbols that have regularly been identified as exemplary for the composition of a uniquely American personal and national character. Making use of a deconstructive approach and a methodology that is informed by the theories of spatial turn scholarship in the humanities, the paper zooms in at the sociocultural dynamics, aesthetics, mise-en-scene, and key motifs of Cuarón’s representation of space in the movie, arguing that this representation in fact draws on, endorses, and positions itself firmly within the epistemological framework of American exceptionalism, which becomes visible mainly through the movie’s relationship to geography, technocracy, and popular culture.","PeriodicalId":384144,"journal":{"name":"Polish Journal for American Studies","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123995791","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}
Pub Date : 1900-01-01DOI: 10.7311/pjas.11/1/2017.10
M. Rutkowska
The present article is an attempt to look at the human-animal relationship in selected stories from T. Coraghessan Boyle’s two collections: Tooth and Claw (2006) and Wild Child (2010). In “Thirteen Hundred Rats,” “Tooth and Claw” and “Admiral” Boyle ponders on human motivations behind such controversial contemporary practices as keeping exotic pets, hoarding animals and cloning dogs. The stories focus on the dark side of pet-keeping, rarely touched upon in literary representations of this widespread social practice. Boyle seems to doubt the sincerity of human devotion to animal companions, presenting characters who acquire unusual or exotic pets for purely utilitarian or egotistical reasons. In Boyle’s stories human dominance over life and death of pets symbolizes human power over nature. Yet these fantasies of power prove illusionary when exotic or unusual pets (python, serval, rats) transform civilized domestic space of the characters’ homes into the uncivilized “jungle.” In a sense, abused animals take symbolic revenge on their irresponsible caretakers. Dog-cloning, in turn, is presented as a misguided attempt to combat death, a means to provide immortality for a dog, which is treated both as a surrogate child and a status symbol by his millionaire owners.
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