Managing Editor: Marek Paryż Editorial Board: Paulina Ambroży-Lis, Patrycja Antoszek, Zofia Kolbuszewska, Karolina Krasuska, Zuzanna Ładyga Advisory Board: Andrzej Dakowski, Jerzy Durczak, Joanna Durczak, Jerzy Kutnik, Zbigniew Lewicki, Elżbieta Oleksy, Agata Preis-Smith, Tadeusz Rachwał, Agnieszka Salska, Tadeusz Sławek, Marek Wilczyński Reviewers for Vol. 5: Tomasz Basiuk, Mirosława Buchholtz, Jerzy Durczak, Joanna Durczak, Jacek Gutorow, Paweł Frelik, Jerzy Kutnik, Jadwiga Maszewska, Zbigniew Mazur, 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, Poznań 2011 Cover design: Ewa Wąsowska Production editor: Elżbieta Rygielska ISBN 978-83-232-2284-2 ISSN 1733-9154 WYDAWNICTWO NAUKOWE UNIWERSYTETU IM. ADAMA MICKIEWICZA 61-701 POZNAŃ, UL. 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LUBOŃ, UL PRZEMYSŁOWA 13 Table of Contents Julia Fiedorczuk The Problems of Environmental Criticism: An Interview with Lawrence Buell ......... 7 Andrea O’Reilly Herrera Transnational Diasporic Formations: A Poetics of Movement and Indeterminacy ...... 15 Eliud Martínez A Writer’s Perspective on Multiple Ancestries: An Essay on Race and Ethnicity ..... 29 Irmina Wawrzyczek American Historiography in the Making: Three Eighteenth-Century Narratives of Colonial Virginia ........................................................................................................ 45 Justyna Fruzińska Emerson’s Far Eastern Fascinations ........................................................................... 57 Małgorzata Grzegorzewska The Confession of an Uncontrived Sinner: Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” 67 Tadeusz Pióro “The death of literature as we know it”: Reading Frank O’Hara ................................ 79 Agnieszka Kotwasińska The Road to the Losers’ Club: Hunter S. Thompson and the Canon of American Literature ..................................................................................................................... 87 Aneta Dybska Gentrification and Lesbian Subcultures in Sarah Schulman’s Girls, Visions and Everything .................................................................................................................... 99 Kacper Bartczak Technology and the Bodily in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist and Cosmopolis ......... 111 Marek Paryż Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America: Transgressive Historical Fiction ................ 127 3 Nina Czarnecka-Pałka Mentioning the Unmentionable: Sex and the City and the Taboos about Female Sex- uality ........................................................................................................................... 139 David A. Jones and Joanna Waluk Polish and American Diplomatic Relations since 1939 as Reflected in Bilateral Am- bassadorial Policies ..................................................................................................... 153 REVIEWS Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, eds., A New Literary History of America (Marta Kmiecik) ..................................................................................................................... 167 Zbigniew Mazur, The Power of Play: Leisure, Recreation and Cultural Hegemony in Colonial Virginia (Michal Jan Rozbicki) ................................................................ 170 Marta Skwara, “Polski Whitman”: o funkcjonowaniu poety obcego w kulturze naro- dowej [“The Polish Whitman”: The Functioning of a Foreign Poet in National Cul- ture] (Krystyna Mazur) ............................................................................................... 173 Marek Paryż, Figures of Dependence, Figures of Expansion: Representations of the Postcolonial and Imperial Experience in the Discourse of American Transcenden- talism (Jennifer Ryan) .................................................................................................. 179 Karsten Fitz, The American Revolution Remembered, 1830s to 1850s. Competing Images and Conflicting Narratives (Marek Paryż) ..................................................... 181 Eva Boesenberg, Money and Gender in the American Novel, 1850-2000 (Justyna Włodarczyk) ................................................................................................................ 185 Janet Floyd, Alison Easton, R.J. Ellis, Lindsey Traub, eds., Becoming Visible. Wom- en’s Presence in Late Nineteenth-Century America (Justyna Włodarczyk) ............... 188 Astrid Franke, Pursue the Illusion: Problems of Public Poetry in America (Grzegorz Kość) ........................................................................................................................... 190 Andrew S. Gross and Susanne Rohr, Comedy—Avant-Garde—Scandal: Remember- ing the Holocaust after the End of History; Sophia Komor and Susanne Rohr, eds., The Holocaust, Art and Taboo: Transatlan- tic Exchanges on the Ethics and Aesthetics of Representation (Holli Levitsky) ......... 193 Joanna Durczak, Rozmowy z ziemią: tradycja przyrodopisarska w literaturze amerykańskiej [Conversations with the Earth: The Tradition of Nature Writing in American Literature] (Julia Fiedorczuk) ..................................................................... 196 Sascha Pöhlmann. Pynchon’s Postnational Imagination (Zofia Kolbuszewska) ....... 200 4 Dominika Ferens, Ways of Knowing Small Places. Intersections of American Litera- ture and Ethnography since the 1960s (Agata Preis-Smith) ....................................... 205 Aneta Dybska, Black Masculinities in American Social Science and Self-Narratives of the 1960s and 1970s (Anna Pochmara) .................................................................. 210 Christopher Garbowski, Pursuits of Happiness: The American Dream, Civil Society, Religion, and Popular Culture (Jacek Romaniuk) ...................................................... 214 CONTRIBUTORS ...................................................................................................... 217 5 6 Julia Fiedorczuk The Problems of Environmental Criticism: An Interview with Lawrence Buell Lawrence Buell (b. 1939) is currently a Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Lite- rature at Harvard University. His scholarly interests include nineteenth-century Ameri- can literature, postcolonial Anglophone literatures and literature and the environment. One of the most outstanding researchers of American Transcendentalism and a pioneer of ecocriticism, Buell has published six books, the most recent of which is The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (Blackwell, 2005), an important study marking the author’s shift from first-wave to second-wave ecocritical analysis. His book on Emerson (Emerson, Harvard University Press, 2003) earned him the Warren-Brooks Award for outstanding literary criticism and Writing for an Endangered World (Harvard University Press, 2001) received the 2001 John G. Ca- welti Award for the best book in the field of American Culture Studies. Buell’s interest in environmental issues, considered especially in connection with the problem of American national identity, dates back to the beginnings of his academic career. His first ecocritical book appeared in 1995 under the title The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing and The Formation of American Culture (Har- vard University Press). Buell’s erudite knowledge of Anglophone literature, combined with his impassioned search for what he describes as ―mature environmental aesthetics‖ , contribute to the body of work that is eminent in its scope and profundity and that consti- tutes a challenge to the dominant ways of thinking about the relationship between the environment, culture and politics. *** JULIA FIEDORCZUK: What is ecocriticism? LAWRENCE BUELL: The so-called ecocritical movement is still only a dozen years old. So perhaps I should start with a definition. For more detail, please see my book The Fu- ture of Environmental Criticism (2005). Ecocriticism is an interdisciplinary movement The Problems of Environmental Criticism: An Interview with Lawrence Buell Lawrence with of Environmental Problems Criticism:The An Interview committed not to any one methodology but to a particular subject: the subject of how literature and other media express environmental awareness and concern. 7 [email protected] For at least two reasons, ―ecocriticism‖ is a somewhat confusing and inadequate term. For one thing, ―eco‖ suggests a specifically biotic or ―natural world‖ emphasis, too nar- row to encompass the broad range of environmental interests actually pursued by self- identified ecocritics, many of whom are at least as concerned with the built environment and its effects on both human and non-human life forms. And secondly, many literary scholars who are passionately concerned with environmental issues—including two of the three scholars whose work I am about to discuss—would object to the label of ―eco- critic‖ as excessively restrictive, because ―ecocriticism‖ in the first instance was used especially to designate a particular kind of literary criticism that focused preeminently on nature writing and post-Wordsworthian nature poetry with a view to emphasizing its potential for reconnecting people to nature. Hence I myself prefer the less familiar but more capacious