American Experience - The Experience of America

This volume comprises a collection of essays by Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Belarussian, and American scholars in the fields of American Studies, literary history, art history, and political science. It is focused on the topic of experience as a concept related to the United States and analyses US history, literature, film, art, politics, and society. The essays deal with a wide range of problems and types of representation, from experience as a component of various theoretical discourses through the experience of foreign visitors and recent immigrants for whom America has often been a place of the Other. The volume once again proves that experience has been one of the key categories of American cultural self-understanding.

Contents: Agnieszka Salska: «Several of Nature's People/I know and they know me»: How American Women Poets Keep Meeting Strange and Wonderful Animals - Joanna Durczak: American Nature Writing and the Urban Experience - Zofia Kolbuszewska: Forensic Imagination and the Materiality of Experience - Tadeusz Rachwal: Nearing Thoreau - Joseph Kuhn: Henry James and the Secret - Beata Williamson: Henry James, Francis Parkman, and the Jesuits - Bartosz Lutostanski: There is more than meets the (narratorial) I. On the narrator and the experience of fiction in Henry James's «Beast in the Jungle» - Grzegorz Kosc: Forms of Power. Frost's Potraits in North of Boston and Mountain Interval - Pawel Stachura: The American Sybils: Prophecy as a Mode of Fiction Writing - Katarzyna Kuczma: Desert(ed) Experience. John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley and Cormac McCarthy's The Road - Tomasz Basiuk: A Logic of Interruption. Experience and Witnessing in David Wojnarowicz's Close to the Knives - Monika Wojdan: Confronting the Loss of the Dearest: Mark Doty, Assotto Saint, and the AIDS Elegy - Lucyna Aleksandrowicz-Pedich: The End of Neighbourhood: From a Shtetl to New York in Bernard Malamud's and Chaim Potok's Fiction - Brygida Gasztold: Introducing New Jewish Immigrants: Natasha and Other Stories by David Bezmozgis - Izabela Filipiak: The Yiddish Policemen's Union: Alaska Made in Poland - Yuri Stulov: Traumas of the Past as the Experience of the Present - Agnieszka Lobodziec: Paule Marshall's Tripartite Experience in Triangular Road: A Memoir and Its Fictitious Reconstructions - Jørgen Veisland: Memory, Time and Transcendence in Toni Morrison's Beloved - Ewelina Banka: Indigenous Experience in the Americas: Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead and the Prophetic Retaking of Indian Country - Arkadiusz Misztal: Articulating the Time-Experience: Scientific and Parascientific Images of Time in Ratner's Star by Don DeLillo - Ivan Delazari: Suspension of Belief: Don DeLillo's 9/11 - Zuzanna Ladyga: Captured LIVE!: Perception, Corporeality and the Televisual Apparatus in the Work of David Foster Wallace - Marta Koval: America as Home and Experience: A New Immigrants' Story in Aleksandar Hemon's Novel The Lazarus Project - Milosz Wojtyna: «Delirious unknowing» - Periphery, Experience and Story-Telling in David Means's The Spot - Agnieszka Kaczmarek: Bill Bryson's Search for Amalgam in The Lost Continent: Experiencing America of the Late 1980s - Marcin Jauksz: Writers Abroad, Jesters Aboard. Mark Twain's and Henryk Sienkiewicz's Accounts of Their Journeys to Each Other's Continents - Yuliya Tkachuk: NYC by Dorota Maslowska and Janusz Glowacki: Discovered or Reproduced? - Filip Lipinski: The Hopperesque: A Pictorial Experience of America - Malgorzata Lisiewicz: Romantic View on Minimalism. American Art in the Context of American Experience - Justyna Kociatkiewicz: Reality as Fiction/Fiction as Reality: Larry Beinhart's Recording of the American Experience in Wag the Dog - Marek Paryz: Iron Man Saves the Afghans - Aleksandra M. Rózalska: Enemies, Tortures, and «Frontiersman» Heroes: Narrating the War on Terror in American Film and Television Series (The Kingdom, Rendition, and 24) - Grzegorz Welizarowicz: On Blues Axiology - David A. Jones/Joanna Waluk: The Monroe Doctrine Historically and Its Applications Today: Success or Failure?