Colson Whitehead's Zone
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4 Introduction Tadeusz Rachwał 6 “Poor Naked Wretches” The Wound of the Ordinary Joseph Kuhn in Agee and Warren 16 At Home in Loneliness, Domesticity and the Early Loneliness at Home Short Stories of Richard Yates Karl Wood 28 Domestication of Foreigner’s Agnieszka Home in Toni Morrison’s Home Łobodziec 38 Southern Antebellum Plantation Home, Prison, Enterprise? Jerzy Sobieraj 48 Domesticating the Flâneur Colson Whitehead’s Zone One Karolina Słotwińska 56 Alienation and Dislocation Joanna Stolarek versus Homeliness and Norm in Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr Ripley 66 The Secret History A Study in Elitism and Evangelia of Hamden Campus Murder Kyriakidou 76 Out of the Ordinary The Event and its Repetition Priyanka in Paul Auster’s Prose Deshmukh 86 Exile in Julia Alvarez’s Aristi Trendel How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents 96 “It ghosts” Language as a Haunted Paulina Ambroży Dwelling in Selected Poems by Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore 110 “Why Am I Cold” Sylvia Plath’s English Agnieszka Home and the American Refrigerators Pantuchowicz 122 Other Presences Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetics Anna Warso of Hospitality 133 Tracing the Form of Compassion Homelessness in Leslie Małgorzata Myk Scalapino’s “bum series” 142 Abstracts Everyday Spaces 4 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55) Tadeusz Rachwał Everyday Spaces Introduction Everyday Spaces Tadeusz Rachwał Everyday Spaces 5 Tadeusz Rachwał The notion of the everyday can be easily conflated with what is routine, mundane, is professor of English usual, ordinary, perhaps also normal. The “where” of this normalcy, the space at University of Social or place of the everyday, seems to be a fairly complex issue, if only for the Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw. He published fact that the scene of the everyday may always be the same as the scene of books and articles on the unusual. Freud saw this duality at work in the German word unhemlich British and American in which the security of the homely is as it were haunted by the irreducible culture and literature, literary theory, and sense of the unhomely, the source of homesickness which he famously located cultural studies. His in the place of one’s “mother’s genitals or her body” (Freud, 245). From this academic interests concentrate on the perspective, anything beyond the body of the mother seems to be unhomely, cultural and ideological with the home of everyday life being a remainder of something lost. What aspects of labour and has thus always already been lost is the place where we are in an ordinary the metamorphoses of its ethos in different way, the place, or space where, as Maurice Blanchot phrases it defining the discursive formations. everyday, “[n]othing happens; this is the everyday” (Blanchot, 15). The everyday, for Freud and Blanchot, is a space of withdrawal and anonymity from whose perspective anything that happens, any event, may seem to be something unusual. If the “everyday is without event” (Blanchot, 17), as Blanchot has it, then any event is as it were eventful, something momentous and significant which evades the uneventful being of the everyday. The space of the everyday is not to be found at home for Blanchot, or indeed in any closed and regulated space. He sees the most uneventful of spaces outside, in the street of the city, in the environment of what seems to be fully constructed and controlled: The everyday is human. The earth, the sea, forest, light, night, do not represent everydayness, which belongs first of all to the dense presence of great urban centers. We need these admirable deserts that are the world’s cities for the experience of the everyday to begin to overtake us. The everyday is not at home in our dwelling- places, it is not in offices or churches, any more than in libraries or museums. It is in the street – if it is anywhere. (Blanchot, 17) The space of the everyday is, perhaps paradoxically, an unhomely space also exactly because it is a space rather than a place, it is an unmappable terrain which, however, haunts places with the impossibility of normalization. The essays included in this issue address the everyday and its spaces as it were tangentially, without bringing the notion to the fore and thus without concretizing it as an analytical category. Rather, they approach the everyday spaces as nostalgic constructions of home and homeliness away from the street, within the enclosures of domesticity from which the everyday inevitably slips away and opens them up to what Henri Lefebvre called everydayness (la quotidienneté), designating with this term the destructive attractiveness of the banality of repetitive life. The space of everyday le( quotidien), unlike the places of everydayness, is a polyrhythmic construct, a realization of “the multiplicity of rhythms and the uniqueness of particular rhythms” (Lefebvre, 16) to which everydayness is as it were deaf. Works Cited Blanchot, Maurice. “Everyday Speech.” Yale French Studies, No. 73 (1987), 12–20. Lefebvre, Henri. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. Transl. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore. London and New York: Continuum 2004. “Poor Naked Wretches” 6 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55) Joseph Kuhn “Poor Naked Wretches”: The Wound of the Ordinary in James Agee and Robert Penn Warren DOI: 10.5604/01.3001.0012.0566 “Poor Naked Wretches” Joseph Kuhn “Poor Naked Wretches” 7 Joseph Kuhn teaches In 1930 a group of twelve Southerners, in a collection of essays entitled I’ll American literature Take My Stand, tried to establish in their region a set of agrarian principles at Adam Mickiewicz that were, on the face of it, counter-historical and utopian. The conservative University in Poznań. He is the author of metaphysics of the soil that underlies these essays was hardly restricted to these Allen Tate: A Study Nashville Agrarians. Such a metaphysics may be found, in less theoretical of Southern Modern- language, in works of Southern modernism ranging from Faulkner’s paean to ism and the Religious Imagination (2011) and the mule in Flags in the Dust (1927) to Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke- has published articles in White’s photo-essay You Have Seen Their Faces(1937). One consequence of this The Southern Quarterly, Notes and Queries and conservative metaphysics was, as may be seen in Ransom’s poem “Antique Journal of American Harvesters” (1923), that the “harvester” (Ransom’s archaic term for the ten- Studies (forthcoming). ant or small farmer) became abstracted from the mechanisms of the market. In 2016 – 2017 he received a research fellowship It does not really matter that Ransom’s harvesters raised a crop that was only to study the manu- a “meagre hill of kennels, a runnel of juice” (Ransom 1952, 50) because the aim scripts of James Agee at the Harry Ransom of the harvester was to turn labour into a “form”, a form that was comparable Center in the University to the aesthetic forms of literature and manners (Ransom 1938, 30). Similarly, of Texas, Austin Andrew Lytle observed in “The Hind Tit”, his contribution to the Agrarian anthology, that: “A farm is not a place to grow wealthy: it is a place to grow corn” (205). But as the Depression continued into the mid-1930s this key figure in earlier Agrarian aesthetics—the Southern farmer—began to unravel and to turn into the cotton tenant depicted in James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) or, further down the socio-economic scale, the tramp who walks off in Robert Penn Warren’s short story “Blackberry Winter” (1946). Robert Penn Warren was later to say that the project of Agrarianism that began in 1930 with I’ll Take My Stand “seemed irrelevant” by the late 1930s and he and some other Southerners now placed the farmer within the framework of an international economic crisis and chose rougher naturalisms to describe him (Warren 1980, 22). The intention of this essay is to track this process of transmutation of “har- vester” to impoverished tenant or tramp in Agee and Warren: from figure of natural or autochthonous wealth to one who was emptied out by the historical processes at work in the Depression South. Agee’s strange angle of vision on agricultural life in Alabama seems especially subversive of the conservative metaphysics of the soil that prevailed in the discourses of southern modernism. Agee dissented from the Agrarian adaptation of T.S. Eliot’s notion of the tradition to the South and his radicalism brought him close to being a Marxist writer. But in the end his sensuous receptiveness to creaturely life—or, put more philosophically, his overwhelming phenomenalism of the object and its “cruel radiance” (Agee 1966, 11)—prevented easy short cuts to the ideological formula. The result was a type of Southern literary radicalism that was unique to Agee, although it had certain affinities to Georges Bataille’s theory of the sacred community in interwar France. Agee came to his work on Praise with a certain bias toward documentary naturalism that was common in the 1930s. In this decade the appropriate mode of representation for the dispossessed “harvester” seemed that of quasi- photographic exactitude (“the camera seems to me … the central instrument of our time”, Agee said [ Agee 1966, 11 ]). The assumption lying behind the works of the writers associated with the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and Farm Security Administration (FSA) was that a scrupulous documentation of poverty could be the foundation for effective state intervention. When Agee was commissioned in 1936 to undertake the cotton tenants’ project by the business magazine Fortune he perhaps first intended to follow this path: he initially described what he was going to do to his friend Father Flye as 8 kultura popularna 2018 Nr 1 (55) “a study of Farm Economics in the South” (Agee 1962, 92).