Polish Journal for American Studies Yearbook of the Polish Association for American Studies Vol. 11 (Spring 2017) AMERICAN STUDIES CENTER UNIVERSITY OF WARSAW INSTITUTE OF ENGLISH STUDIES UNIVERSITY OF WARSAW Polish Journal for American Studies Yearbook of the Polish Association for American Studies Vol. 11 (Spring 2017) Warsaw 2017 MANAGING EDITOR Marek Paryż EDITORIAL BOARD Izabella Kimak, Mirosław Miernik, Jacek Partyka, Paweł Stachura ADVISORY BOARD Andrzej Dakowski, Jerzy Durczak, Joanna Durczak, Andrew S. Gross, Andrea O’Reilly Herrera, Jerzy Kutnik, John R. Leo, Zbigniew Lewicki, Eliud Martínez, Elżbieta Oleksy, Agata Preis-Smith, Tadeusz Rachwał, Agnieszka Salska, Tadeusz Sławek, Marek Wilczyński REVIEWERS Lucyna Aleksandrowicz-Pędich, Paulina Ambroży, Tomasz Basiuk, Elżbieta Durys, Edyta Frelik, Jacek Gutorow, Janusz Kaźmierczak, Zofia Kolbuszowska, Grzegorz Kość, Jerzy Kutnik, Zbigniew Mazur, Elżbieta Rokosz-Piejko, Justyna Włodarczyk TYPESETTING AND COVER DESIGN Miłosz Mierzyński COVER IMAGE Jerzy Durczak, “Red door” from the series “Acoma Pueblo.” By permission. https://www.flickr.com/photos/jurek_durczak/ ISSN 1733–9154 Publisher Polish Association for American Studies Al. Niepodległości 22 02–653 Warsaw www.paas.org.pl Nakład: 120 egz. Printed by Sowa – Druk na życzenie phone: +48 22 431 81 40; www.sowadruk.pl Table of Contents INTERVIEW Julia Fiedorczuk “All of the Bees in a Hive Are Having Imagination”: An Interview with Brenda Hillman ..........................................................................................................7 ARTICLES Marek Wilczyński The Americanization of the Sublime: Washington Allston and Thomas Cole as Theorists of American Art............................................................................................... 19 Alicja Piechucka Possessed by Poe: Hart Crane’s Tribute to il Miglior Fabbro in a Symbolist-Modernist Context .................................................................................27 Edyta Frelik She Did Know a Few Things: Georgia O’Keeffe as an Intellectual .............................41 Ewa Ścibior The Representations of Drag Queen Characters in Pre-Stonewall Literature: John Rechy’s City of Night and Hubert Selby Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn .....................59 Justyna Wierzchowska Imaging, Desiring, Remembering Home: Home as a Locus of Meaning in the Works of Mary Kelly ........................................................................................................73 Jacek Partyka Between Nostalgia and Self-Hatred: The Problem of Identity in Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl ..........................................................................................85 Karolina Słotwińska-Pełka Apocalyptic Vistas in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis ..........................................................99 Jędrzej Tazbir From Hopeless Selfhood to Hopeful Otherness: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road ..................................................................................... 117 Małgorzata Rutkowska Dangerous Pets, Misguided Owners: The Pitfalls of Pet-Keeping in T.C. Boyle’s Stories ...................................................................................................133 Jerzy Durczak Between Pictures and Words: Sally Mann’s Hold Still ...............................................147 Kornelia Boczkowska Smooth, Bumpy and Ghostly Rides: (Re)Viewing the American Landscape and Travel Imagery in Bill Morrison’s Night Highway (1990), The Death Train (1993), City Walk (1999) and Ghost Trip (2000) ..........................163 Małgorzata Olsza “Running in Both Directions”: The Reflective Character of Single-Image Narratives in Joe Sacco’s Graphic Journalism ............................................................183 Steffen Wöll Exceptional Spaces: Pop-Cultural Debris and the Spatial (Re)Construction of American Exceptionalism in Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity ......................................203 REVIEW ESSAY Mirosław Aleksander Miernik Capitalism as a Cultural System: In Memory of Joyce Appleby ..............................223 REVIEWS Zbigniew Lewicki, Igrzyska demokracji. Amerykańska kultura wyborcza [Democracy Games: American Electoral Culture] (Justyna Fruzinska) ................231 Maureen Tuthill, Health and Sickness in the Early American Novel: Social Affection and Eighteenth-Century Medicine (Jarosław Milewski) ................232 Katja Kanzler, The Kitchen and the Factory: Spaces of Women’s Work and the Negotiation of Social Difference in Antebellum American Literature (Alicja Piechucka) .........................................................................................................236 Joe B. Fulton, Mark Twain Under Fire: Reception and Reputation, Criticism and Controversy, 1851-2015 (Piotr Skurowski) .........................................................238 Anna Hartnell, Rewriting Exodus: American Futures from Du Bois to Obama (Anna Pochmara) ..........................................................................................................240 Peter Swirski, American Crime Fiction: A Cultural History of Nobrow Literature as Art (L. Atkins) ............................................................................................................242 Marek Paryż, ed., Bitnicy [The Beat Writers] (Paulina Ambroży) ..........................245 Philip Loeffler, Pluralist Desires: Contemporary Historical Fiction and the End of the Cold War (Justyna Kociatkiewicz) ..............................................251 Małgorzata Rutkowska, Koty, psy i ludzie. Zwierzęta domowe w literaturze amerykańskiej [Cats, Dogs, and People: Pets in American Literature] (Justyna Włodarczyk) ...................................................................................................253 Mita Banerjee, ed., Comparative Indigenous Studies (Ewelina Bańka) ...................256 Beata Zawadka, ed., Performing South: The U.S. South as Transmedial Message (Elżbieta Rokosz-Piejko) ..............................................................................................259 CONTRIBUTORS ........................................................................................................263 An Interview with Brenda Hillman 7 Julia Fiedorczuk “All of the Bees in a Hive Are Having Imagination”: An Interview with Brenda Hillman Brenda Hillman has published chapbooks with Penumbra Press, a+bend press, and EmPress; she is the author of nine full-length collections from Wesleyan University Press, the most recent of which are Practical Water (2009), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (2013), which received the International Griffin Poetry Prize for 2014. With Patricia Dienstfrey, she edited The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood (Wesleyan, 2003), and has co-translated Poems from Above the Hill by Ashur Etwebi and Instances by Jeongrye Choi. Hillman teaches at St. Mary’s College where she is the Olivia C. Filippi Professor of Poetry; she is an activist for social and environmental justice. Hillman’s poems draw on elements of found texts and documents, personal meditation, observation, and literary theory. Often described as “sensuous” and “luminescent,” her work investigates and pushes at the possibilities of form and voice, while remaining grounded in topics such as geology, the environment, politics, family, and spirituality. Large parts of this interview were recorded in Berkeley in March 2016, the conversation was continued through e-mail over the period of several months. *** Julia Fiedorczuk: I would like to start with a question that’s been on my mind for a long time. How does being a woman relate to one’s work as an avant-garde poet? Are women poets allowed to be experimentors? Is there a specifically feminist or feminine kind of experimental poetry? Brenda Hillman: My interests in experimenalism and innovative writing have always involved more than features of style or affinities with movements, they have always had to do with my experiences as a woman in western culture. I don’t think there is a “feminist” style or set of styles but there are styles that correspond to women’s expreriences and most recently this is true in experimental writing by women. Since the 70s in the Bay Area, women have played important roles in the development of the literary scene but we have also been trend-setters in breaking open form, in what is included in poetry. There were important women’s presses and publications started by women, including How (ever) and Kelsey Street Press. When I came to Berkeley in the mid-70s I thought a lot about writing in relation to the “outsider” traditions, and my experience as a woman writing poetry, especially as a young mother, felt “outside.” 8 Julia Fiedorczuk It seems to me that avant-garde movements have tended to betray women. They promised to open things up for experimental women poets but never kept the promise. There seems to be an assumption that if one is a woman, and if one writes poetry, one should at least write in a way that “schoolgirls can understand”—to use a phrase from your poem. I gravitate toward the poets who are rocky in relation to official avant gardes, like Michael Palmer. Very often groups that are self-proclaimed avant-gardes like Surrealism, Objectivism, Black Mountain School, Beat Poetry are understandably organized around friendship groups and common interests; in each of those groups there are usually only a few woman poets—Denise Levertov for Black Mountain writers, Lorine Niedecker for the Objectivists.