Tomasz Basiuk - Böcker

This short collection of essays engages with queer lives and activism in 1970s Poland, illustrating discourses about queerness and a trajectory of the struggle for rights which clearly sets itself apart, and differs from a Western-based narrative of liberation.Contributors to this volume paint an uneven landscape of queer life in state-socialist Poland in the 1970s and early 1980s. They turn to oral history interviews and archival sources which include police files, personal letters, literature and criticism, writings by sexuality experts, and documentation of artistic practice. Unlike most of Europe, Poland did not penalize same-sex acts, although queer people were commonly treated with suspicion and vilified. But while many homosexual men and most lesbian women felt invisible and alone, some had the sense of belonging to a fledgling community. As they looked to the West, hoping for a sexual revolution that never quite arrived, they also preserved informal queer institutions dating back to the prewar years and used them to their advantage. Medical experts conversed with peers across the Iron Curtain but developed their own "socialist" methods and successfully prompted the state to recognize transgender rights, even as that state remained determined to watch and intimidate homosexual men. Literary critics, translators, and art historians began debating—and they debate still—how to read gestures defying gender and sexual norms: as an aspect of some global "gay" formation or as stemming from locally grounded queer traditions.Emphasizing the differences of Poland’s LGBT history from that of the "global" West while underscoring the existing lines of communication between queer subjects on either side of the Iron Curtain, this book will be of key interest to scholars and students in gender and sexuality studies, social history, and politics.

This short collection of essays engages with queer lives and activism in 1970s Poland, illustrating discourses about queerness and a trajectory of the struggle for rights which clearly sets itself apart, and differs from a Western-based narrative of liberation.Contributors to this volume paint an uneven landscape of queer life in state-socialist Poland in the 1970s and early 1980s. They turn to oral history interviews and archival sources which include police files, personal letters, literature and criticism, writings by sexuality experts, and documentation of artistic practice. Unlike most of Europe, Poland did not penalize same-sex acts, although queer people were commonly treated with suspicion and vilified. But while many homosexual men and most lesbian women felt invisible and alone, some had the sense of belonging to a fledgling community. As they looked to the West, hoping for a sexual revolution that never quite arrived, they also preserved informal queer institutions dating back to the prewar years and used them to their advantage. Medical experts conversed with peers across the Iron Curtain but developed their own "socialist" methods and successfully prompted the state to recognize transgender rights, even as that state remained determined to watch and intimidate homosexual men. Literary critics, translators, and art historians began debating—and they debate still—how to read gestures defying gender and sexual norms: as an aspect of some global "gay" formation or as stemming from locally grounded queer traditions.Emphasizing the differences of Poland’s LGBT history from that of the "global" West while underscoring the existing lines of communication between queer subjects on either side of the Iron Curtain, this book will be of key interest to scholars and students in gender and sexuality studies, social history, and politics.

Reading Literature and Theory at the Intersections of Queer and Class focuses on the crossover of queer and class, examining a range of texts across languages and genres and spanning nearly a century.This collection of chapters considers the intersection of queer and class in relation to literary aesthetics, a locus in which the interaction between sexuality and class is rendered with lucidity. Each chapter puts forward class and its manifestations as central to queer analysis of literary and cultural texts in historical and contemporary contexts. The readings adopt Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectional paradigm by pointing to its activist as well as literary precedents and elaborations.These chapters emerged from a long-standing collaboration among three Central European universities whose faculty and graduate students established a joint queer literature and theory research seminar. They are supplemented by a roundtable discussion in which the contributing authors and their colleagues discuss how the concepts of queer and class in theory and (academic) practice have informed their current and previous work.Reading Literature and Theory at the Intersections of Queer and Class is intended for scholars in gender and queer studies.The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC-BY-SA) license.

Reading Literature and Theory at the Intersections of Queer and Class focuses on the crossover of queer and class, examining a range of texts across languages and genres and spanning nearly a century.This collection of chapters considers the intersection of queer and class in relation to literary aesthetics, a locus in which the interaction between sexuality and class is rendered with lucidity. Each chapter puts forward class and its manifestations as central to queer analysis of literary and cultural texts in historical and contemporary contexts. The readings adopt Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectional paradigm by pointing to its activist as well as literary precedents and elaborations.These chapters emerged from a long-standing collaboration among three Central European universities whose faculty and graduate students established a joint queer literature and theory research seminar. They are supplemented by a roundtable discussion in which the contributing authors and their colleagues discuss how the concepts of queer and class in theory and (academic) practice have informed their current and previous work.Reading Literature and Theory at the Intersections of Queer and Class is intended for scholars in gender and queer studies.The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC-BY-SA) license.

This collection of essays in American Studies investigates how American cultural production intersects with public memory. The contributions present the results of diverse fields of research. While most are literary analyses, others focus on film, art works, monuments, and other means by which public memory is shaped. The essays in this collection also analyze travel writings, records of political history, and the ways American agricultural landscape preserves traces of the country’s past.

The question of identity has been present in Chicana literature since its beginnings and the second part of the 20th century witnessed proliferation of works by Chicanas addressing this issue. Those recent works differ significantly from the earliest representations of Chicana self-definition processes. The aim of this work is to identify and describe novel approaches to Chicana identity and identity formation as presented by Denise Chávez, Sandra Cisneros, and Mona Ruiz. Therefore, the book analyzes both similarities and differences between various representations of this topic. In addition, it examines the dynamics of interaction between multiple factors influencing the processes of Chicana identity formation presented in the analyzed texts, with a particular focus on the spatial valence which has been disregarded for a long time.

This book explores the recurrence of Apocalyptic motifs and imagery in blues and spirituals recorded by blues musicians. It looks at the ways in which Black Americans portray Apocalypse ideas about the Last Judgement from the Book of Revelation. It also focuses on how literary themes in spirituals and blues depict the destruction of the world, death, Christian judgement, heaven and catastrophic events in personal lives of African Americans that result in loss. Selected blues lyrics and texts of spirituals show the persistence of these themes. The book was written with a broad potential audience in mind especially among those interested in religion, eschatology, spirituals, blues and African American studies.

The book is the first monograph which examines the correspondences between the oeuvre of Jack Kerouac and the thought of Jacques Lacan, the two apparently incompatible worlds which prove to be complementary when taking a closer look. The study demonstrates a number of points. Firstly, with Jacques Lacan as a silent partner, it helps to better understand why psychoanalysis won Kerouac’s enmity in the mid-1950s. It also delves into Lacan’s reflections on spontaneous free-association to prove their convergence with Beats’ literary tactics. In its final part, by employing Lacanian theory, the book offers an extensive insight into Kerouac’s oeuvre to excavate the problematic status of the father figure, a crucial matter not yet given a rigorous critical attention.

The author frames her reconstruction of the Bay Area poet, scholar, and experimental prose writer Leslie Scalapino’s transmedial poetics in the context of Scalapino’s published writings, available criticism of her works, as well as previously unpublished archival materials located among The Mandeville Special Collections and Archives at UC San Diego. Scalapino’s poetics are reconsidered here along the lines of new materialist modes of inquiry as well as contemporary new realist and speculative approaches that continue to grapple with the tension between thought and the social realm.«This is a pioneering attempt at grasping the ways in which Scalapino’s oeuvre radically transforms our apprehension of the notion of reality.» — Professor Zofia Kolbuszewska, University of Wroclaw

The book examines the modalities of witnessing in the works of Charles Reznikoff. Associated with the so-called “Objectivist” group created in New York in the early 1930s, Reznikoff is often called a poet-witness because the material he draws on in his poetry and, to a lesser extent in prose, comes from his observations of urban life and from authentic testimonies he found in archives. Yet, the process of turning eye-witnessed situations and contents of depositions given by other witnesses into literary texts is far from objective. In particular, Reznikoff’s use of archival material is informed by subtly camouflaged manipulation. To demonstrate various degrees of this change, the book centers on a comparative juxtaposition of the poet’s works with the original documents.

Based on the theory and methodology of transcultural memory, this book describes and analyzes the fictional representations of memory and forgetting and the multiple roles they play in identity construction of immigrants and exiles. It focuses on fiction by contemporary American writers of East-Central European descent: Askold Melnyczuk, Domnica Radulescu, and Aleksandar Hemon. The analysis of selected novels highlights a distinct historical slant with elements of generational memory, memory of places, rememory, and postmemory. The author introduces and develops the concept of post-immigrant ethnic fiction and identifies a mnemonic pattern characteristic of American post-immigrant ethnic and exile writing.

The idea of freedom, changed and contested throughout the ages, has become the staple of liberal democracies and a beacon of hope amidst dark tendencies that endanger the future. This books offers an analysis of freedom in the context of its historical significance for the Western civilization, newly emerging socio-political trends, and the proliferation of innovative technologies that all converge to shape human life in the nearest future. All of these prolific topics permeate modern literature, and in particular the work of American dystopian writers who convey visions of the future where profound refiguration of freedom and the whole democratic paradigm is inevitable.