American Novel

Our time is characterized by a crisis of representational
practice, fuelled by unprecedented technological and economic changes on a global level. Narrative, therefore, takes a wide variety of forms. This course examines the aesthetics and techniques of film and literature from around the world, and analyses the masters of each art form. Through short stories and plays, we will study different ways a story can be told and the many exciting ways embedded "narratives" (or discourses) can be framed. Similarly, through films and film adaptations of great literary masterpieces, we will study how visual elements challenge the reader's imagination.


Specifically, we examine the relationship between meaning
and narrative structure. The course considers the tensions
between claims for originality and poetic license, between
producers and audiences, between fiction and reality, narrative and history, memory and representation. We will study representative theorists of narratology, such as J. Hillis Miller, Wolfgang Iser and Hayden White. Cutting-edge scholarship on film and the new media will also be introduced, such as Seymour Chatman, Rey Chow, as well as Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin's Remediation. In addition to becoming familiar with major issues in film studies and East-West comparative studies, students will acquire a working knowledge of narrative theory.

The completely changing nature of American life and the vigorous versatility and all-encompassing spread of a written record are the marks of American Literature. It is an accepted fact that social forces do make a distinct imprint on literature, especially in America where the democratic processes bring the people into immediate familiarity with cultural forces and American literature has responded admirably to such pressures. The immensity of the American geography has meant that American literature has largely developed a regional pattern such as the southern writers, New England writers, Western and Mid-Western writers. The hybrid nature of American racial heritage has been a prominent factor in America"s cultural life and literature. A continuous critical assessment of factors in American culture has given American literature a self-conscious self-criticism.

“Nowe przygody Królewny Śnieżki. Donald Barthelme i jego szalona bajka” (“New Adventures of Snow White. Donald Barthelme and His Fairy Tale Gone Mad”), afterword to the Polish edition of Donald Barthelme, Królewna Śnieżka (Snow White), Poznań: Dom Wydawniczy Rebis, 1999, pp. 194-201.
“Nowe przygody Królewny Śnieżki. Donald Barthelme i jego szalona bajka” (“New Adventures of Snow White. Donald Barthelme and His Fairy Tale Gone Mad”), posłowie tłumacza do Donald Barthelme, Królewna Śnieżka (Snow White), Poznań: Dom Wydawniczy Rebis, 1999, pp. 194-201.

Suddenly Don Quijote doubts his squire’s embassy. It would be miraculous for Sancho to have returned in just over three days because El Toboso is more than thirty leagues away, seventy-five miles or one hundred and twenty-five kilometers from where Don Quijote was in the Sierra Morena.

In this essay, we attempt to trace the themes of alterity and tragic sensation in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. We offer a parallel study of the two works with an emphasis on the (anti)heroes’ struggles with time and the other human as metaphors of “alterity.” We present a thematic reading and discuss that as Macbeth is preoccupied with his imaginatively fabricated future (time) and tries to execute anyone (the other) who jeopardizes the totality of that ideal space, Gatsby is also preoccupied with his past (time) and tries to retrieve Daisy (the other). Tragedy, we argue, is a result of these struggles. We suggest that Fitzgerald’s work generally shares the similar theme of alterity with Shakespeare’s Macbeth and somehow modernizes the similar tragic sensation we witness in the latter.

The main aim of this paper is to retrieve and analyze some literary “memories as projections of the future” belonging to the core ideological point, a few decades ago, in which Sci-Fi started to offer, thanks to the development of cyberpunk, glimpses of the new and problematic articulation of being as a conflicting processor of painful information
and forerunner of a languishing traumatized humanity. More
specifically, this paper centers on the first story ever published by William Gibson, the well-known guru of cyberpunk, and on his presentation there of the first posthuman character in his fiction.

In this article I trace numerous similarities in plot, setting, characters and motif in two novels. The approaching European war and holocaust in Israel Joshua Singer's novel The Family Carnovsky and the brutality of the Vietnam War of Roth's novel American Pastoral serve as the dreadful conditions which trigger the half-Jewish teenage child in each novel to revolt against the assimilating Jewish father figure and commit subversive acts against the U.S. government. I argue that the numerous similarities are not merely coincidental in this intertextual study, but that Roth has most likely updated Singer's depiction of a pre-WWII refuge family to America's next major crisis, namely the Vietnam era in the 1960s and 1970s.

Instead of focusing on all the symbols in the great Gatsby in a superficial way, this article mainly analyses the symbolic significance of the Doctor T.J Eckleburg in different perspectives. based on my researches about the main symbols in The Great Gatsby, the eyes Doctor T.J Eckleburg is the one symbol that I think illustrates all the central themes and the intended meanings of the plot that Fitzgerald employs in the book. The looming eyes that stares on an old dusty advertising billboard in a desolate area that is called valley of ashes right between the west and east egg. The plot revolves in front of his eyes and although his eyes are inanimate in reality, he can observe everything, such as the change in the American societal values, materialism, moral decay, lack of self-knowledge, corruption, success and illusioned hopes.

An analysis on alternate histories/realities in five novels by Dick, i.e. The Cosmic Puppets, Time Out of Joint, The Man in the High Castle, The Simulacra and The Penultimate Truth, aiming at enhancing Carlo Pagetti's critical approach based on the interplay of three texts co-existing in the same novel.

A comparative study analysis: The Painted Veil (Novel & Film) using Feminist Film Theory. Both novel and film are interesting to analyze. How Kitty Fane, struggling to break female stereotypical roles prevailed at that time led her to a pity romance life. This is a comparative study to reveal the strengths and weaknesses from each literary work.

Popularno-naukowe opracowanie dotyczące życia i twórczości amerykańskiego pisarza i malarza Williama Whartona (Albert du Aime, 1925-2008). William Wharton zdobył międzynarodową sławę i popularność swoim debiutem zatytułowanym 'Birdy' (1979). Jego popularność wzmocniła publikacja kolejnych dwóch powieści 'Dad' i 'Midnight Clear', wszystkie trzy zostały w krótkim czasie zekranizowane. Popularność ta osłabła w latach 1990 w USA, a jego kolejne książki nie spotkały się z równie entuzjastycznym przyjęciem, ale Wharton znalazł wiernych czytelników w wielu innych krajach ('Birdy' został przełożony na 19 języków) i popularność ta trwała również po śmierci pisarza. Mimo tego Wharton pozostaje dla krytyków i historyków literatury pisarzem mało znanym i dostrzeganym, brak opracowań krytycznych, na które z pewnością zasługuje. Niniejsza książka to pierwsza próba opisu jego biografii i twórczości, a także recepcji.
Wharton nie mieści się w żadnej szufladce, stąd zapewne brak jego nazwiska w opracowaniach naukowych. Po części winna jest jego odmowa przyłączenia się do literackich grup czy pokoleń (Wharton został kiedyś nazwany “bitnikiem spóźnionym o ćwierć wieku”) a także niezgoda na udział w promocji własnej twórczości. Być może zmarnował swoją szansę na literacką wielkość, odkładając debiut do pięćdziesiątki, trzeba jednak przyznać, że pozostawił po sobie kilka wartych uwagi książek, które zapewniły mu pod koniec życia międzynarodową sławę i popularność.

The book is a popular Polish-language monograph study in the life and works of the American novelist and painter William Wharton (Albert du Aime, 1925-2008). William Wharton gained international fame and popularity with his first awarded novel 'Birdy' (1979), his popularity was furthered strengthened by such books as 'Dad' and 'Midnight Clear', all of which were made into movies, while 'Birdy' was also made into a play. Although in the 1990s his popularity in the United States gradually decreased and his later books were not received so well, at the same time Wharton started to enjoy an immense popularity in numerous non-English speaking countries ('Birdy' alone has been translated into 19 foreign languages) which has continued even after his death as new translations are still published. And yet Wharton still remains something of a secret writer with a cult following as available critical sources are minor and often incomplete while the author deserves a critical monograph. My book will be the first attempt in English to deal with this task, offering an evaluation of a critically neglected novelist.
Wharton could not be easily put in a cathegory and he escaped the attention of American and British literary scholars. Among reasons one must list here his refusal to adhere to any literary group or generation (Wharton was once defined as “a beat novelist quarter of a century late”) and his adamant refusal to become involved in any public activities or promotion. He may have missed his chance to become a first rate novelist also by delaying his debut until his fifties, still, his oeuvre includes several novels worthy of intrest which brought him an impressive international popularity which amply justifies publication of a critical monograph study.

This reappraisal of American literary naturalism connects late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century fiction to its romantic, urban gothic roots and to discussions of the sublime in postmodern theory. The essay focuses on aspects of naturalist novels—their use of hyperbole and hysteria, of the grotesque and the abject, of uncanniness and mesmerism—that have often been left in the periphery of naturalist discourse. It is argued that the urban environment, like the postmodern information society, cannot easily be reduced to the simplicity of a realist chart because it constitutes to a large extent a network of relationships in absentia. Naturalist texts therefore do not limit themselves to mapping the urban field by means of the documentary strategies often considered definitional for this literary movement. They also attempt to evoke the city’s elusive totality and the defamiliarizing symptoms of its social dysfunctions by means of a discourse of sublimity borrowed from the romantic depiction of nature and from mid-nineteenth-century urban gothic. The essay examines to what extent this naturalist sublime contributes to the representation of economic processes, urban populations, political oratory, and artistic practice. Through readings of Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Frank Norris, Willa Cather, Jane Addams, Abraham Cahan, and Ernest Poole, this comprehensive re-evaluation of naturalism leads the author to redefine the features of naturalism as a genre, and to sketch out how a realist and naturalist apprehension of the social field have coexisted from the mid-nineteenth-century to the present.

This Companion examines the full range and vigor of the American novel. From the American exceptionalism of James Fenimore Cooper to the apocalyptic post-Americanism of Cormac McCarthy, these newly commissioned essays from leading scholars and critics chronicle the major aesthetic innovations that have shaped the American novel over the past two centuries. The essays evaluate the work, life, and legacy of influential American novelists including Melville, Twain, James, Wharton, Cather, Faulkner, Ellison, Pynchon, and Morrison, while situating them within the context of their literary predecessors and successors. The volume also highlights less familiar, though equally significant writers such as Theodore Dreiser and Djuna Barnes, providing a balanced and wide-ranging survey of use to students, teachers, and general readers of American literature.



Table of Contents

Introduction Timothy Parrish
1. James Fenimore Cooper Stephen Railton
2. Nathaniel Hawthorne Robert Milder
3. Herman Melville Clark Davis
4. Harriet Beecher Stowe Arthur Riss
5. Mark Twain Peter Messent
6. Henry James Thomas J. Otten
7. Edith Wharton Pamela Knights
8. Theodore Dreiser Clare Eby
9. Willa Cather Timothy Parrish
10. F. Scott Fitzgerald Ruth Prigozy
11. Ernest Hemingway Eugene Goodheart
12. William Faulkner Philip Weinstein
13. Henry Roth Hana Wirth-Nesher
14. Djuna Barnes Alex Goody
15. Zora Neale Hurston Lovalerie King
16. Richard Wright William Dow
17. Raymond Chandler Leonard Cassuto
18. Ralph Ellison David Yaffe
19. J. D. Salinger Sarah Graham
20. Patricia Highsmith Joan Schenkar
21. Vladimir Nabokov Julian W. Connoly
22. Jack Kerouac Joshua Kupetz
23. Saul Bellow Victoria Aarons
24. Kurt Vonnegut Todd Davis
25. John Updike James Schiff
26. Thomas Pynchon David Seed
27. Toni Morrison Valerie Smith
28. Philip Roth Debra Shostak
29. Don DeLillo Thomas Heise
30. Cormac McCarthy Brian Evenson
Guide to further reading
Index.

The goal of this volume of edited essays is to fill a gap on the comparativist chart. The volume came about as a result of a joint effort at a bifocal reflection of the international community of Melvilleans and Conradians in Szczecin, Poland, in August, 2007. What became clear in formal and informal discussion among the participants of that international gam was that Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad Korzeniowski shared the intuition that the essential liquidity of the existential human condition necessitates a “universal squeeze of the hand.” This idea, beautifully conceptualized by Melville in chapter 94 of Moby-Dick, caused both writers to examine in their complex narratives the ways in which various kinds of oppression prevent this desired possibility. The argument of this volume begins with three essays describing enslavement and race in key Melville and Conrad works: “Babo’s Shadow: Tropes of Enslavement/Visions of Race. In the next group of essays, “Playing in the Dark: Otherness in Postcolonial Perspectives,” the reader is invited to revisit both writers’ stances on othering and otherness, especially in the light of postcolonial studies. Such background knowledge is then deepened by two chapters on the interactions between the literary texts and imperial politics: “Cold Empires: Imperial Politics and the Space of Literature.” Essays on systematic oppression, predictably, lead to reflection offered by the authors of chapters making up Part Four: “Making Sense of Sukering: The Smoldering of Human Existence.” They investigate individual metaphysical or existential suffering, for which the oppressive cultural practices are responsible. The final two chapters of the book sublimate some of the conclusions of the earlier sections by exploring the unsettling oppressiveness of the Unheimlich.

The completely changing nature of American life and the vigorous versatility and all-encompassing spread of a written record are the marks of American Literature. It is an accepted fact that social forces do make a distinct imprint on literature, especially in America where the democratic processes bring the people into immediate familiarity with cultural forces and American literature has responded admirably to such pressures. The immensity of the American geography has meant that American literature has largely developed a regional pattern such as the southern writers, New England writers, Western and Mid-Western writers. The hybrid nature of American racial heritage has been a prominent factor in America"s cultural life and literature. A continuous critical assessment of factors in American culture has given American literature a self-conscious self-criticism.

The article presents biography and an outline of literary work of the American novelist and painter Albert du Aime (William Wharton). The text includes the writer's biography with a special stress on the biographical material included in the novels. Further part of the article presents basic assumptions of Wharton's work, enumerates recurrent motives and proposes a division of his literary output. Writer's opinions concerning society and ethics are presented in closer detail. The article end in an analysis of the writer's position on the literary market both in Poland and abroad. The original text is supplemented with a Bibliography of William Wharton (In Polish)
Artykuł prezentuje biografię i charakterystykę twórczości amerykańskiego powieściopisarza i malarza Alberta du Aime (William Wharton). Tekst uzupełnia Bibliografia Williama Whartona. Więcej informacji na temat pisarza znaleźć można w jego biografii "Bert" - tu opis: http://uw.academia.edu/KrzysztofFordonski/Books/168171/Bert._Szkic_do_portretu_Williama_Whartona

As before 1945, only a tiny percentage of the population had access to higher education, a novel set in a university only reflected a highly restricted class and gender privilege. In contrast, the postwar expansion of higher education in the anglophone world resulted in job openings at newly established universities and led to a new genre, the campus novel, or academic novel, whose focus was on professors rather than students. Currently, a new trend appears to be in progress in the United States, as the genre continues to flourish, but the distinction between the postwar professor-centered novels and the earlier student-centered ones no longer seems to apply. One of the major examples that illustrates this trend is Chad Harbach's bestselling debut novel The Art of Fielding (2011), set in a small liberal arts college in Wisconsin. Although one of the major characters is Guert Affenlight, a former Harvard professor and current president of the college, the novel centers on Henry Skrimshander, a freshman and a gifted baseball player. While The Art of Fielding has been called a novel about baseball and college life, as Guert finds himself attracted to a mixed-race male student and Henry strives to do his best on the team and fit into a new environment, the issues raised in the text move far beyond this simple description. Thus, I argue that as the percentage of Americans with some experience of higher education is increasing, the college campus has become a convenient space for the fictional representation of the diversity of contemporary American society.

The seventh year of the activities of the PJES brings a selection of four scholarly papers dealing with authors from Shakespeare to Markovits.
List of Contents
“The Rotten State of Denmark”: The Discourse of Reason of State in Shakespeare’s Hamlet by Amira Aloui
Bringing Ghosts Down to Earth: Depictions of Spiritualism in the Victorian Popular Press by Dorota Osińska
Postmodern Plague Narrative: The Representation of the Polio Epidemic in Philip Roth’s Nemesis by Michał Palmowski
No, We Can’t: Racial Tensions and the Great Recession in Benjamin Markovits’ “Obama-Era Novel” You Don’t Have to Live Like This by Ewa Kowal
The 29th PASE conference, Intersections: Linguistic, Literary and Cultural
Encounters in English Studies, 24-25 June 2021
Grzegorz Maziarczyk, Maria Curie-Skłodowska University of Lublin
32nd International Conference on Foreign and Second Language Acquisition (ICFSLA) Danuta Gabryś-Barker, University of Silesia