Pub Date : 2022-04-30DOI: 10.7311/pjas.12/1/2018.15
P. Marcinkiewicz
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.
在接下来的文章中，我提出了一个观点，即按照概念主义的规则创作的文学作品，看似缺乏表达，往往揭示出价值与任何文本操作都是分不开的。这一点在肯尼斯·戈德史密斯最近的作品《迈克尔·布朗的尸体》中可见一见，该书遵循了戈德史密斯之前的著作《美国人的七个死亡和灾难》的格式——记录了美国国家灾难的新闻报道，比如约翰·f·肯尼迪遇刺或9/11袭击。这段文字改写了圣路易斯县验尸官办公室就密苏里州弗格森市一名白人警察枪杀非裔美国少年迈克尔·布朗(Michael Brown)一案发布的尸检报告。新观念艺术实践的问题在于它忽视了创作的伦理维度。对戈德史密斯来说，艺术中的伦理问题仅限于“忠实”复制/重写的问题，而不管一个被挪用的文本总是反映出编辑操纵和背后的政治。戈德史密斯认为自己是杜尚大胆的信徒，但他不明白他的文本宣扬种族主义暴力，重新演绎了尸检中潜在的制度性种族主义。在方法论上，我的分析依赖于Marjorie Perloff对先锋派概念的理解，并参考了Cathy Park Hong和Jacques ranci最近的著作中出现的文学和伦理理论。
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Pub Date : 2022-04-30DOI: 10.7311/pjas.12/1/2018.02
R. Kroes
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.
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Pub Date : 2022-04-30DOI: 10.7311/pjas.12/2/2018.07
Anna Krawczyk-Łaskarzewska
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.
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Pub Date : 2022-04-30DOI: 10.7311/pjas.12/1/2018.13
Paulina Ambroży
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.
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Pub Date : 2022-04-30DOI: 10.7311/pjas.12/1/2018.07
Karolina Korycka
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.
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Pub Date : 2022-04-30DOI: 10.7311/pjas.12/2/2018.05
Katherine E. Bishop
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.
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Pub Date : 2022-04-30DOI: 10.7311/pjas.12/1/2018.14
Ewa Antoszek
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.
土地问题对于生活在美国的拉美裔人来说一直是至关重要的，因为一系列的历史事件导致了“领土的剥夺和混乱”(prez 147)，这些事件特别影响了这个种族群体，并将他们从字面上和隐喻上都推到了边境的边缘。因此，在很长一段时间里，边界在拉丁语的话语中扮演着重要的角色。随着来自墨西哥和其他拉丁美洲国家的移民浪潮的到来，空间-社会关系的复杂性增加了。然而，正如莫妮卡·卡普(Monika Kaup)所指出的那样，作为“美国征服前西南部的原住民”和移民，拉丁美洲人在美国构成了“一个宪章和一个移民群体”(Kaup 26)。这一群体的双重地位反映在奇卡诺/a文学和文化作品中，通过以国家为基础的和移民的范式(Kaup 26)，这些范式是直接参照边界构建的，因为“在这些模型的表面之下存在着两种不同的边界概念”(Kaup 10)。结合空间话语的转变，边界的概念经历了几次重新定义，边界的角色变化——从分界线到更具渗透性和渗透性的空间——反映在拉丁作家和艺术家的许多艺术作品中。这些艺术作品说明了空间的转变，并解决了上述在墨西哥-美国边境话语中经常出现的土著和移民范式之间的相互作用。本文的目的是分析拉丁艺术家Ana Teresa Fernández如何(重新)构想边界空间，将边界变成文化的重写本。它主要关注Fernández的《擦除边界/Borrando La Frontera》(2013)，以及同名的社区项目，并从她的《异物》(2013)和《紧迫的事情》(2013)系列中选择画作，以审视上述对边界的重新定义及其多重角色。Fernández对边境的修正主义表现，既有助于对美墨边境这一仍然紧迫的问题的持续辩论，也恰如其分地反映了边境的总体现状。
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Pub Date : 2022-04-30DOI: 10.7311/pjas.12/2/2018.02
Lil Hayes
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 in 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.
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Pub Date : 2022-04-30DOI: 10.7311/pjas.12/1/2018.05
Grzegorz Welizarowicz
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.
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Pub Date : 2021-11-20DOI: 10.7311/pjas.15/1/2021.07
Klara Szmańko
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.
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