Managing Editor: Marek Pary Ŝ Editorial Board: Patrycja Antoszek, Zofia Kolbuszewska, Karolina Krasuska, Zuzanna Ładyga, Paweł Stachura Advisory Board: Andrzej Dakowski, Jerzy Durczak, Joanna Durczak, Jerzy Kutnik, Zbigniew Lewicki, El Ŝbieta Oleksy, Agata Preis-Smith, Tadeusz Rachwał, Agnieszka Salska, Tadeusz Sławek, Marek Wilczy ński Reviewers for Vol. 4: Lucyna Aleksandrowicz-Pędich, Jerzy Durczak, Joanna Durczak, Jacek Gutorow, Jerzy Kutnik, Jadwiga Maszewska, Agata Preis-Smith, Piotr Skurowski Polish Association for American Studies gratefully acknowledges the support of the Polish-U.S. Fulbright Commission in the publication of the present volume. © Copyright for this edition by Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, Pozna ń 2010 Cover design: Ewa W ąsowska Production editor: El Ŝbieta Rygielska ISBN 978-83-232-2171-5 ISSN 1733-9154 WYDAWNICTWO NAUKOWE UNIWERSYTETU IM. ADAMA MICKIEWICZA 61-701 POZNA Ń, UL. 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JACEWSKA 89 Table of Contents Alicja Piechucka Images and Ideas: Hart Crane’s and André Gide’s Readings of the Myth of Narcissus .................................................................................................................... 5 Agata Preis-Smith The Uncanny at the Heart of the Country Household: Gertrude Stein’s Blood on the Dining Room Floor ..................................................................................................... 17 Sostene Massimo Zangari Between Political Commitment and Literary Modernism: Michael Gold’s Jews Without Money ............................................................................................................ 33 Małgorzata Rutkowska American Travelogue Revisited: Henry Miller’s The Air-Conditioned Nightmare .... 45 Jarosław Kuczy ński The 1936 Map of Yoknapatawpha as an Ideological Space ........................................ 55 Justyna Rusak “Sheltered Existence” as a Way to Self-Discovery in the Life and Fiction of Ellen Glasgow ...................................................................................................................... 67 Michael J. Hoffman and Andrew S. Gross Holocaust Pornography: Obscene Films and Other Narratives ................................... 75 Paweł Stachura Who’s Controlling My Rocket? – Order and Disorder of Guidance in American Imaginary Rocketry .................................................................................................... 95 Marit J. MacArthur Questions of Travel: Elizabeth Bishop as a Tour Guide to Brazil .............................. 105 Tadeusz Pióro Beyond Parody: Literariness in John Ashbery’s Plays ............................................... 115 Janusz Ka źmierczak A Polish Writer’s Encounter with the United States: Andrzej Kijowski’s American Journey ........................................................................................................................ 125 Joanna Ziarkowska Dancing for Survival: Reinterpretations of the Ghost Dance in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes ..................................................................................... 135 3 REVIEWS Janusz Semrau, ed. American Literature in Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, 1968-2008 . A Selection of Articles ; Janusz Semrau, ed. “Will you tell me any thing about yourself?” Co-memorative Essays on Heman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” (Paweł J ędrzejko) ................ 145 Lucyna Aleksandrowicz-Pędich, ed. W kanonie prozy ameryka ńskiej. Od Nathaniela Hawthorne’a do Joyce Carol Oates . [Exploring the Canon of American Prose. From Nathaniel Hawthorne to Joyce Carol Oates]; Lucyna Aleksandrowicz-Pędich, ed. W kanonie prozy ameryka ńskiej. Z placu Was- zyngtona do Domu z li ści [Exploring the Canon of American Prose: From Washing- ton Square to The House of Leaves ] (Zofia Kolbuszewska) ....................................... 161 Ewa Łuczak and Andrzej Antoszek, eds. Czarno na białym . Afroamerykanie, którzy poruszyli Ameryk ę [In Black and White: African Americans Who Challenged America] (Anna Pochmara) ........................................................................................................ 167 Klaus Benesch and Meike Zwingenberger, eds. Scientific Cultures – Technological Challenges. A Transatlantic Perspective (Paweł Frelik) ............................................ 172 Zbigniew Lewicki, Historia cywilizacji Ameryki. Era tworzenia 1607-1789 [History of American Civilization. The Creation Era, 1607-1789] (Lucyna Aleksandrowicz- Pędich) ........................................................................................................................ 175 Christopher Flynn, Americans in British Literature, 1770-1832. A Breed Apart (Marek Pary Ŝ) ............................................................................................................. 178 Fay Botham, Almighty God Created the Races: Christianity, Interracial Marriage, and American Law (Tadeusz Lewandowski) .............................................................. 182 Małgorzata Poks, Thomas Merton and Latin America: A Consonance of Voices (Wacław Grzybowski) ................................................................................................ 188 Kacper Bartczak, Świat nie scalony [A World Without Wholeness] (Anna Warso) .......... 190 CONTRIBUTORS ...................................................................................................... 193 4 Alicja Piechucka Images and Ideas: Hart Crane’s and André Gide’s Readings of the Myth of Narcissus When Hart Crane arrived in Paris in January 1929, he possessed two letters of in- troduction which were to facilitate his entrée into the milieu of Parisian literati. One of those letters was from the poet Laura Riding to Gertrude Stein; the other was from the critic Waldo Frank to André Gide, the famous French novelist and future Nobel Prize winner. As Crane’s biographer Clive Fisher notes, Frank had written to Gide “in the hope of doing more than merely projecting his friend into serious French literary cir- cles” (395). In fact, Crane’s friend acted as a matchmaker, believing Gide, whose ho- mosexual leanings were no secret, to be an ideal partner for the younger and undiscip- Narcissusof lined American poet. Eventually, however, nothing came of Frank’s plans, which Fisher puts down to Crane’s inability to speak French. Six months later, André Gide was among the French intellectuals who provided the Parisian police with character references after Crane had been arrested for starting a brawl at the famous Café Sélect (Fisher 406). A year before his arrival in Paris, Crane read The Counterfeiters , a novel which Gide had published in 1926. In his biography of the American poet, Fisher does not elaborate on Crane’s response to the novel, nor does he mention Crane’s familiarity with any other work by Gide. From Crane’s letter to Samuel Loveman, we do, however, learn that the American poet “immensely enjoyed” the English translation of the above-mentioned novel by Gide (Fisher 572). In another letter, this time to William Slater Brown, Crane used a Gidean analogy to comment on the wild ways of Los Angeles and Hollywood debauchery: “O Andre Gide! no Paris ever yielded such as this – away with all your counterfeiters!” (Fisher 573). Whatever other effect The Counterfeiters might have pro- duced on the future author of The Bridge , the fact remains that circa 1924-27 – in what might be seen as his most fruitful period – Crane wrote a poem revolving around the same motif which had preoccupied Gide several decades earlier. The Crane poem in question is “Mirror of Narcissus,” long unpublished and included for the first time in the André Crane’s and the Hart Readings of Gide’s Myth Library of America 2006 edition of Crane’s complete poems. The relevant text by Gide is his 1891 Le Traité du Narcisse . Both offer revealing interpretations of the ancient 5 [email protected] myth, simultaneously transcending it and turning it into a starting point for philosophi- cal, ontological and aesthetic reflections. The two texts are meditations on art and litera- ture, whose relationship with reality is opposed to their connection with the realm of the ideal. Gide and Crane also reflect on the role of the artist, author and thinker. At the same time, Gide’s essay helps to unravel a rather cryptic work by Crane, a famously difficult American poet. The affinity between Crane and the French symbolists is frequently pointed out. Commonly referred to as “the American Rimbaud,” the author of Voyages is known to have read – or at least been aware of – the work of other symbolist poets as well: Baude- laire, Laforgue, Mallarmé and Valéry. His scarce command of the French language did not preclude Crane from translating three Laforgue poems into English, an obviously painstaking task, performed with the help of a dictionary. Though associated mostly with prose, André Gide, one of the key figures of European modernism, also went through a symbolist phase in the early stages of his literary career (Rogozi ński ix; Lagarde and Michard 259). As a very young man, “Ami de Pierre Louÿs et de Paul Valéry, patronné par Mallarmé, il entre de plain-pied dans le monde du symbolisme” (“A friend of Pierre Louÿs and Paul Valéry, under the auspices of Mallarmé, he naturally enters the world of symbolism”) (Lagarde and Michard 259). The subtitle of Le Traité du Narcisse , one of the first works with which