Contemporary American Writers of Polish Descent. a Study of the Fiction of Anthony Bukoski and Stuart Dybek

FACULTY OF PHILOLOGY INSTITUTE OF ENGLISH CULTURES AND LITERATURES UNIVERSITY OF SILESIA Sonia Caputa, M.A. PhD Thesis Contemporary American Writers of Polish Descent. A Study of the Fiction of Anthony Bukoski and Stuart Dybek Supervisor: Professor Zbigniew Białas Katowice 2013 WYDZIAŁ FILOLOGICZNY INSTYTUT KULTUR I LITERATUR ANGLOJĘZYCZNYCH UNIWERSYTET ŚLĄSKI mgr Sonia Caputa Rozprawa doktorska Współcześni amerykańscy pisarze pochodzenia polskiego. Studium twórczości Anthony’ego Bukoskiego i Stuarta Dybka Promotor: prof. dr hab. Zbigniew Białas Katowice 2013 Składam wyrazy szacunku i serdeczne podziękowania za okazaną pomoc Pani prof. UŚ dr hab. Teresie Pyzik 2 Contemporary American Writers of Polish Descent. A Study of the Fiction of Anthony Bukoski and Stuart Dybek. INTRODUCTION In recent years ethnic issues and their embodiment in literature have commanded an inordinate amount of interest in both scholarly and public discourse. Although sociologists, historians and literary critics have written about literature and ethnicity for a long time, the boundaries between disciplines have often been blurred and, as Werner Sollors notices in his landmark study Beyond Ethnicity , “have sometimes had detrimental effects on some previous efforts of this sort.” 1 He clarifies his line of thought further: ethnicity specialists sometimes tend to misread literature or misinterpret it as a direct social and historical evidence, whereas literary critics in many cases have stayed away from newer sociological and anthropological approaches to ethnicity. 2 In the light of the above, there exist some problems with the way in which literature is viewed by the theoretical analysts of ethnicity, who have resorted to literary works so as to demonstrate their theses. Sollors, for instance, provides a telling example of Robert Park, the representative of the Chicago school of sociology readings, who managed to corroborate his sociological theory of “moral dichotomy and conflict” as a probable characteristic feature of “every immigrant during the period of transition” 3 by referring to American Jewish autobiographies. Using Ludwig Lewisohn’s Up Stream as social evidence, Parks vindicated his theory of a marginal man in the 1930s, and outlined his conclusions in the essay “Human Migration and the Marginal Man” regardless of 1 Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 9. 2 Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, p. 9. 3 Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, p. 9. 3 Contemporary American Writers of Polish Descent. A Study of the Fiction of Anthony Bukoski and Stuart Dybek. the fact that, as Sollors aptly observes, “Lewisohn never dwelled in any ghetto, warm or otherwise.” 4 One may encounter another weakness when confronted with literary criticism devoted to ethnic literature, for sociologists may often overestimate and even exoticize literature (in the narrow sense of belles letters) as supreme evidence while underestimating their own reliance on literary devices and story-telling techniques. Literary critics, on the other hand, tend to be either uninterested in anything but the leading American writers or unaware of the newer thinking on ethnicity. 5 Thomas J. Ferraro’s work Ethnic Passages: Literary Immigrants in Twentieth-Century America also convincingly demonstrates the problem with approaching ethnic literature by literary critics; in his words: such writing challenges the critic to determine how sociological inquiry and literary inventiveness serve one another; where local understandings face off against national constructions of individuality, family and community; and which strategies of minority-culture self-representation and majority-culture forms undergo reciprocal transformations. 6 In fact, the serious, considerable interest in ethnicity as a methodological approach to the study of American literature has started in the 1970s when MELUS, the Society for the Study of the Multi-ethnic Literature of the United States, began its mission to combine “the so-called ethnic works into a literary- historical discourse delimiting American literature.” 7 Even though the MELUS contribution to the study of ethnicity and its embodiment in literature may not be underestimated, Ferraro casts doubt on the early MELUS literary critics 8 who conducted an investigation into ethnic literature especially during the 1970s. On 4 Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, p. 9. Additionally, Sollors makes a comment upon the fiction of Richard Wright which is incorrectly but often invoked in sociological accounts of the ghetto. 5 Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, p. 10. 6 Thomas J. Ferraro, Ethnic Passages: Literary Immigrants in Twentieth-Century America (London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 3. 7 Jelena Sesnić, From Shadow to Presence: Representations of Ethnicity in Contemporary American literature (Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2007), p. 10. 8 Ferraro comments upon the achievements of MELUS critics, who worked in the 1970s in the shadow of the new ethnicity. 4 Contemporary American Writers of Polish Descent. A Study of the Fiction of Anthony Bukoski and Stuart Dybek. the one hand, the author gives credit to their “indispensable contributions to bibliography, biography and republishing,” but, on the other hand, suggests that their analyses were inaccurate as “they relied, by and large, on sociological positivism, [mainly underscoring] the inherent value of each group and its struggle against discrimination.” 9 Ferraro also challenges the achievements of the early 1980s ethnic literary critics, implying that “they […] failed to address the conventionality of ethnic writing, including its dependence on stereotypes, [and] neglected to pursue the departures ethnic writing made from conventionality, its subversion of convention, its determined creativity.” 10 The author of Ethnic Passages justifies his strong dissatisfaction with the early 1980s literary critics’ approach to ethnic literature stating that individual critics were not imaginatively engaged in their work, refused to make aesthetic judgments and “lacked interest in the deeper ambitions and larger receptions of individual texts.” 11 While addressing the question of ethnic literary criticism, the author of Beyond Ethnicity reaches a conclusion that until 1986 (the year of publication of his seminal study) “scholarship of American ethnic writing [showed] comparatively little theoretical interest in American-made ethnicity.” 12 Literary critics, Sollors continues, had a tendency to approach ethnic literature with well-intentioned optimism, or focused on close readings of texts taking into consideration “static notions of descent, and […] primordial, organicist, sometimes even biological – but in all cases largely unquestioned – concepts of ethnic-group membership.” 13 What literary critics often avoided was to indulge themselves into a full appreciation of texts in the context of newer theories of ethnicity. What is more, Sollors draws attention to the fact that instead of overemphasizing or exaggerating the ethnic dimensions of the literary texts, works of ethnic literature – written by, about, or for persons who perceived themselves, or were perceived by others, as members of ethnic groups – 9 Thomas J. Ferraro, Ethnic Passages: Literary Immigrants in Twentieth-Century America, p. 4. 10 Ferraro, Ethnic Passages, p. 4. 11 Ferraro, Ethnic Passages, p. 5. 12 Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, p. 10. 13 Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, p. 11. 5 Contemporary American Writers of Polish Descent. A Study of the Fiction of Anthony Bukoski and Stuart Dybek. may thus be read not only as expressions of mediation between cultures but also as handbooks of socialization into the codes of Americanness. 14 The major focus of Werner Sollors, thus, was not on the ethnic experience itself, but “[on] the mental formations and cultural constructions (the codes, beliefs, rites and rituals) which were developed in America in order to make sense of ethnicity and immigration in a melting-pot culture.” 15 Sollors’s work, as well as Mary V. Dearborn’s seminal study Pocahontas’s Daughters (published in 1986) and William Boelhower’s Through a Glass Darkly 16 (published in 1987) were quickly acknowledged by many scholars as presenting a significant challenge to the accepted view of ethnicity, mainly because they stood in opposition to the “separatist and ‘mirror into social history’ approaches of the preceding decade.” 17 Beyond Ethnicity , however, “has proved to be the most illuminating and controversial of these works,” 18 especially taking into account the fact that Werner Sollors differentiated between “consent,” i.e. contractual, self-made and “descent,” i.e. hereditary, ancestral. As Sollors remarks in his book: American identity alone may take the place of a relationship “in law” (like “husband, wife, step-, -in law, etc.”), leaving ethnicity to fill the place of relationships “in nature” (“the natural child, the illegitimate child, the natural mother, etc.”). In American social symbolism ethnicity may function as a construct evocative of blood, nature, and descent, whereas national identity may be relegated to the order of law, conduct, and consent. 19 14 Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, p. 7. 15 Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, p. 9. 16 William Boelhower breaks new ground and provides a model for an understanding of American texts, which discourages the readers to differentiate between the ‘mainstream’ and ‘ethnic’ texts because they cannot be meaningfully separated: “the ethnic sign is

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