Janusz Semrau Pořadí knih

This book is a collection of critical essays on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) – one of the most influential American works of fiction. The presented interpretations deal not only with the principal characters of the novel, but also with «The Custom-House», the Spanish sailors, the Book of Revelations, and the artist as adulterer. The critical tools employed include allegory, the Biedermeier , hermeneutical exposition, semiosis of the infans , and triangular desire. This publication is dedicated to the memory of Andrzej Kopcewicz (1934-2007), the first professor ordinarius of American literature in the history of English studies in Poland, on the tenth anniversary of his death.

This collection of essays is a tribute to Andrzej Kopcewicz, the first professor ordinarius of American literature in the history of English studies in Poland. It coincides with the centenary of Imagism and what would have been Professor Kopcewicz’s 80th birthday. The title alludes to his first book which was devoted to the image and the objective correlative in early 20th-century Anglo-American poetry. Image in Modern(ist) Verse opens with a revised and abridged version of that publication. Kopcewicz’s study can be still read as a useful historical, theoretical, and practical introduction to modern poetry. The bulk of the volume is made up of contributions by contemporary academics – Paulina Ambroży, Joseph Kuhn, Paweł Stachura, Jørgen Veisland, and Miłosz Wojtyna – who discuss various facets, strands and sub-strands of Imagism, as well as its ongoing legacy.

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s status as an artist rests as much on The Scarlet Letter as on his short fictions. It is both telling and appropriate that academic research in the short story should be dated to Mary Rohrberger’s study Hawthorne and the Modern Short Story, published in 1966. The present volume adds to this discourse with contributions by Paulina Ambroży, Katarzyna Kuczma, Joseph Kuhn, David Malcolm, Marek Paryż, Janusz Semrau, Paweł Stachura, and Marek Wilczyński. Represented here are some of the most widely-known stories, such as «My Kinsman, Major Molineux», «Wakefield», «Roger Malvin’s Burial», «Ethan Brand», «The Great Stone Face», and some of the less widely-known ones, such as «Legends of the Province-House», «The Haunted Mind», «The Threefold Destiny», «Foot-prints on the Sea-shore». The individual essays discuss Hawthorne’s texts in quasi-generic terms, through some persistent American themes and motifs, as well as for their aesthetic, philosophical, and existential meanings. The readings draw ideological and theoretical support from the thought of Emerson, Hegel, Trilling, de Certeau, Freud, Heidegger, Lacan, and Derrida.

Inspired by Martin Heidegger’s notion of being-in-the-world, this study presents a quasi-phenomenological close reading of Herman Melville’s most famous novella Bartleby the Scrivener and Mark Twain’s most famous novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It is meant as a broad critique of both cultural and intellectual rhetoric of recalcitrance, estrangement and awayness that has long predominated within interpretations of American literature. The study refers selectively to the works of such classic authors as James F. Cooper, Washington Irving, R. W. Emerson, H. D. Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Robert Frost, James Joyce, and Donald Barthelme. As an extended intertextual footnote, Transcribing the Territory advances also a more positive existential appreciation of the ostensibly forbidding landscape of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s most famous romance The Scarlet Letter .

There is no record of anything Herman Melville (1819–1891) may have thought or said about «Bartleby the Scrivener. A Story of Wall-Street», his single most famous tale, published just over 150 years ago today. It is actually for a whole gamut of reasons that the text is unlikely to ever yield an interpretive consensus gentium, the insights of such magisterial figures as F. O. Matthiessen, Ralph Ellison, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, or Slavoj Žižek notwithstanding. The volume adds to the nearly global ‘Bartleby Industry’ with contributions by Andrzej Kopcewicz (Poznań), Joseph Kuhn (Poznań), Marek Paryż (Warsaw), Tadeusz Rachwał (Warsaw), Janusz Semrau (Poznań), Tadeusz Sławek (Katowice), and Marek Wilczyński (Gdańsk). Written independently over a period of time, the readings range from circumferentially intertextual to intra-textually semiotic-medical to post-psychoanalytical to post-post-modern to re-de-constructive to neo-classical-symbolic to jurisprudential-allegorical.