Bücher der Reihe Katowice Interdisciplinary and Comparative Studies

This book reads Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury with philosophies of death: Benjy senses Max Scheler's intuitive certainty of death, Jason is the Schelerian dweller of the West, Quentin the embodiment of Martin Heidegger's "Dasein", and Caddy's fecundity and Dilsey's responsibility for the "Other" exemplify Emmanuel Levinas's "victory over death".

Dwight Macdonald was the most prominent American excoriator of mass culture in the 1950s and '60s, but has since been derided as elitist and irrelevant. Dwight Macdonald on Culture argues against previous interpretations, offering new perspectives on a figure that grappled with issues of culture that remain ever-pertinent.

Motivated by such events as the election of the first African American president of the United States of America, the author focuses on slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the resulting segregation of the races. The postscriptum gives a brief picture of several American writers and their fiction during the Civil War and Reconstruction.