Janusz Semrau - Böcker

This volume is a posthumous revised edition of selected papers by Andrzej Kopcewicz on intertextual transactions in classic works of American and Irish fiction, published originally between 1992 and 2005. The book opens with a theoretical essay and proceeds with individual analyses of the interrelatedness, overlappings, entanglements, and reciprocities of some of the best-known works by Paul Auster and Herman Melville – Henry Adams, Frank R. Stockton and Thomas Pynchon – Donald Barthelme and James Joyce – James Joyce, Flann O’Brien and Gilbert Sorrentino. The chapters lend themselves to being read in any order, selectively, and in isolation. Given a literal perspective by incongruity, however, the Joycean premise of the book is that a commodius vicus of recirculation (type by tope, letter from litter, word at ward) may bring the reader in any case (back) to the beginning.

There is no record of anything Herman Melville (1819–1891) may have thought or said about «Bartleby the Scrivener. A Story of Wall-Street», his single most famous tale, published just over 150 years ago today. It is actually for a whole gamut of reasons that the text is unlikely to ever yield an interpretive consensus gentium, the insights of such magisterial figures as F.O. Matthiessen, Ralph Ellison, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, or Slavoj Žižek notwithstanding. The volume adds to the nearly global ‘Bartleby Industry’ with contributions by Andrzej Kopcewicz (Poznań), Joseph Kuhn (Poznań), Marek Paryż (Warsaw), Tadeusz Rachwał (Warsaw), Janusz Semrau (Poznań), Tadeusz Sławek (Katowice), and Marek Wilczyński (Gdańsk). Written independently over a period of time, the readings range from circumferentially intertextual to intra-textually semiotic-medical to post-psychoanalytical to post-post-modern to re-de-constructive to neo-classical-symbolic to jurisprudential-allegorical.

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s status as an artist rests as much on The Scarlet Letter as on his short fictions. It is both telling and appropriate that academic research in the short story should be dated to Mary Rohrberger’s study Hawthorne and the Modern Short Story, published in 1966. The present volume adds to this discourse with contributions by Paulina Ambroży, Katarzyna Kuczma, Joseph Kuhn, David Malcolm, Marek Paryż, Janusz Semrau, Paweł Stachura, and Marek Wilczyński. Represented here are some of the most widely-known stories, such as «My Kinsman, Major Molineux», «Wakefield», «Roger Malvin’s Burial», «Ethan Brand», «The Great Stone Face», and some of the less widely-known ones, such as «Legends of the Province-House», «The Haunted Mind», «The Threefold Destiny», «Foot-prints on the Sea-shore». The individual essays discuss Hawthorne’s texts in quasi-generic terms, through some persistent American themes and motifs, as well as for their aesthetic, philosophical, and existential meanings. The readings draw ideological and theoretical support from the thought of Emerson, Hegel, Trilling, de Certeau, Freud, Heidegger, Lacan, and Derrida.

This collection of essays is a tribute to Andrzej Kopcewicz, the first professor ordinarius of American literature in the history of English studies in Poland. It coincides with the centenary of Imagism and what would have been Professor Kopcewicz’s 80th birthday. The title alludes to his first book which was devoted to the image and the objective correlative in early 20th-century Anglo-American poetry. Image in Modern(ist) Verse opens with a revised and abridged version of that publication. Kopcewicz’s study can be still read as a useful historical, theoretical, and practical introduction to modern poetry. The bulk of the volume is made up of contributions by contemporary academics – Paulina Ambroży, Joseph Kuhn, Paweł Stachura, Jørgen Veisland, and Miłosz Wojtyna – who discuss various facets, strands and sub-strands of Imagism, as well as its ongoing legacy.