Streszczenie

Lydia Davis is an American treasure, best known for her short fiction and translations of Proust, Flaubert, Blanchot, and other French classics. Born in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1947, she grew up there and in Vermont and New York. In several interviews, she mentions that music was her first love and that she played violin before switching to piano. Her writing accolades include a Whiting Award, the 2013 Man Booker International Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship. The last one has been dubbed the “genius grant,” which in Davis’s case is more than appropriate. With her erudite mind and sharp pen, Davis spans multiple traditions, but, somewhat ironically, the chief trademarks of her writing are precision and brevity, both of which situate it in the flash fiction genre, of which she is one of the most acclaimed practitioners. Those new to her work could do worse than to seek out The Collected Stories (2009), whose pieces range in length from several sentences to half-dozen pages. The more ambitious might consider reading the stories alongside Davis’s most recent publications, the two volumes of literary essays, personal sketches, introductions and talks, called—what else?—Essays One (2020) and Essays Two (2021)

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Appalachia |the Hillbilly stereotype |white trash |working-class whites |class mobility |American dream |mobility studies

Streszczenie

This paper examines J. D. Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (2016a), hereafter HE, as a narrative of upward mobility, which invokes Vance himself as a hillbilly character, who achieves to move out from the secluded Appalachian cities of Middletown, Ohio and Jackson, Kentucky to the more symbolically, intellectually and socio-economically central and emancipating settings such as the US Marine Corps, Ohio State University, Yale Law School and Silicon Valley investment firm. I will discuss how Vance offers a rugged, alienating, and agitated reading of his mobility and thereby complicates, deepens, and adds new angles to the concept of mobility. At the same time, I will analyze how Vance’s memoir asserts the capability of a hillbilly to be an economically, socially, and intellectually mobile subject, steering his destiny. Namely, Appalachians are not necessarily the stagnant and regressive other of white America as they can exist beyond the “poor, backward, lazy, violent and alcoholic” hillbilly stereotype. Thus, Vance, to some extent, achieves to show that the gap between the upper-class urban US and working-class rural Appalachia can be bridged. Ultimately, with specific attention to Vance’s mobility and the direct confrontation of discourses of poor white trash, hillbilly and Appalachia, this article reveals how Vance’s memoir marks a significant and unique attempt to complicate the pathological elements of the region’s master-images and show how poor white people should be viewed with the potency to move and venture beyond the prescribed boundaries of the worlds to which they are bound.

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gender |Mohja Kahf |Laila Halaby |patriarchy |Arab American identity

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This essay looks at the troubled representations and complex status of women in Arab American fiction produced by women authors, namely Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006) and Laila Halaby’s West of the Jordan (2003). I argue that Arab fiction in the US diaspora is not only about questioning the clash between the two cultures – Arab and American – in post-9/11, but also about shedding the light on women’s issues and concerns in both the diaspora and homeland. This particular ethnic fiction discusses sensitive topics in the Arab context such as traditional patriarchies, women’s rights in Islam, and domestic violence. The analysis of the novels, and the arguments that stem from it, are supported by a socio-cultural constructivist approach based on perspectives of prominent critics and scholars such as Fadia Faqir, Henri Tajfel, and Carol Fadda-Conrey, to name just a few.

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Ann Radcliffe |Gothic romances |the sea |seascapes

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Biographical materials and the writer’s journals show that Ann Radcliffe had some personal knowledge of the sea and to some extent of sailing. She was also a lover of nature, an enthusiast of 17th-century landscapists, a connoisseur of Pre-Romantic poetry, who was also familiar with contemporary esthetic tastes and theories. In this context, the article analyzes seascapes, maritime and nautical references, motifs of storm and shipwreck in Radcliffe’s Gothic romances, including some poetical lines inspired by the sea with which The Mysteries of Udolpho is interspersed. The writer’s descriptions of the sea and her use of this element in her works are discussed in relation to her fictional characters and plots.

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identity |space |Winton |place |non-place |postcoloniality

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One of the major issues addressed by postcolonial literature is identity crisis. In Australia, a multicultural country and a former settler colony, where the sense of belonging is particularly troubling, this literary theme has been exploited by writers to address the ambiguity of home and belonging. This article attempts to examine Tim Winton’s fiction and show how the writer explores the concepts of place and space to set his protagonists’ shattered selves in the postcolonial geography. The analysis of his fiction from the perspective of humanistic geography, Edward Relph’s concept of placelessness, and Marc Auge’s idea of non-place reveals that a simple categorization of Winton’s settings into oppressive places and liberating spaces may be insufficient to analyze his characters’ experience of displacement and the uncanny for, as the third category – the postmodern notion of non-place – enters the scene, a stable sense of identity seems unattainable.

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America |Maxine Hong Kingston |The Woman Warrior |Chinatown |Chinese American immigrants |white people

Streszczenie

The article traces mixed affiliations of the narrator of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976), permanently split between the world of Chinatown and broader American society outside Chinatown, both places crucial for the narrator in the ongoing process of subjectivity construction. While both of these worlds constantly interpellate her, each of them entails a fair measure of hindrance and empowerment. The article undermines the criticism leveled at Kingston’s The Woman Warrior by a section of the Chinese American community represented primarily by Frank Chin. Chin accused Kingston of pandering to white tastes and white readers’ expectations of Chinese American authors. That, according to Chin, was achieved through the estrangement of Chinatown and its inhabitants as well as the criticism of the Chinese American community. I illustrate in the article that the narrator’s pronouncements on Chinatown or broader America outside Chinatown are neither equivocal nor arrived at without tension, internal struggle or misgiving at choosing one world and at least partly leaving the other one behind.