Bücher der Reihe New Americanists in Poland

The essays included in this collection offer an overview of literary works, films, TV series, and visual art which reflect the current (post-)millennial fascination with theorizing ends and beginnings. Addressing a variety of media, the authors wonder at the ongoing spectacle of exhaustion and regeneration playing itself out on the American stage.

A collection of essays in American Studies that investigates how American cultural production intersects with public memory. It analyzes travel writings, records of political history, and the ways American agricultural landscape preserves traces of the country's past.

It is possible to identify ways of conceptualizing change in American democracy. In this book, change is seen as a product of development. Here change is linear, it signifies progress.

Aims to establish the applications and implications of involution: how it is used to subtly reformat a text and how it changes the meaning of a work, trapping and reinventing the reader. This work analyses the transgressive use of imagery, symbols, patterns and other textual devices.

The contributions of this book shed light on the wild zone. The term refers to the existence and experience of a group (ethnic, social, sub-cultural, sexual, religious, etc.) that, in some identifiable ways, is/was marginalized in American society.

The essays in this book offer an overview of literary works, films, TV series, and computer games, which reflect current social and political developments since the beginning of this century. The authors probe the many ways in which repression and expression are the primary keywords for understanding contemporary American life and culture.

This book offers broad contemporary perspectives with regard to Toni Morrison's fiction. The contributions engage on widely debated issues of current American discourse such as the ineradicability of historical memory, the intricacy of racial identity, and the role of literature in revealing profound truth.

This book explores the recurrence of Apocalyptic motifs and imagery in blues and spirituals recorded by blues musicians. It looks at the ways in which Black Americans portray Apocalypse ideas about the Last Judgement from the Book of Revelation, and how literary themes in spirituals and blues depict the destruction of the world.

The book examines American author Leslie Scalapino's avant-garde poetics as an experimental form of realism in the speculative mode. Scalapino's writings are considered here along the lines of the new materialist inquiry as well as new realist and speculative philosophical approaches.

The book examines the correspondences between the oeuvre of Jack Kerouac and the thought of Jacques Lacan. It sets off analyzing the reasons for Kerouac's aversion towards psychoanalysis, proceeds with discussing textual spontaneity, and concludes with a scrupulous analysis of the father figure(s) in Kerouac's cycle of the Duluoz Legend.

The monograph analyzes the fictional representations of memory and forgetting and the roles it plays in identity construction and in the adjustment of immigrants and exiles. It focuses on post-immigrant and exile fiction by contemporary American writers of East-Central European descent: Askold Melnyczuk, Domnica Radulescu, and Aleksandar Hemon.

The book examines the modalities of witnessing in the works of Charles Reznikoff, a Jewish American poet commonly associated with the so-called Objectivist group. It demontrates how the poet alters the contents of archival material to create his own, 'unoriginal' verse called 'recitative.'

The idea of freedom, changed and contested throughout the ages, has become the staple of liberal democracies and a beacon of hope amidst dark tendencies that endanger the future. This books offers an analysis of freedom in the context of its historical significance for the Western civilization, newly emerging socio-political trends, and the proliferation of innovative technologies that all converge to shape human life in the nearest future. All of these prolific topics permeate modern literature, and in particular the work of American dystopian writers who convey visions of the future where profound refiguration of freedom and the whole democratic paradigm is inevitable.

The sound of a city is a cultural phenomenon based on the characteristic relationship between music and the cultural specificity of a given urban area. It occurs when artists from a region create music, which is so unique, it becomes indisputably linked with its place of origin in the public discourse. The link becomes so strong, the phenomenon¿s name derives from the name of the city. There were numerous examples of such sounds in popular music history, including the Nashville Sound with its specific country music, the psychedelic rock of the San Francisco Sound, Prince¿s the Minneapolis Sound, or the Seattle Sound is also known as grunge. This publication explains the terms in which we should research, analyze, interpret, and define the sound of a city.