Katowice Interdisciplinary and Comparative Studies – serie

As Wallace Stevens once wrote, «a poem should be part of one’s sense of life». This book provides a record of readerly and critical explorations of the poems and life of the American poet. The author reads Stevens’s poems in the context of both the existing critical works and the commentaries provided by the poet himself (essays, letters, occasional notes and posthumous texts), and aims to prove that his artistic development was informed by two contradictory existential projects: teleological, based on Stevens’s assumption of a higher self which in its turn helps to illuminate the meaning and dynamics of the actual existence, and critical, appearing at the very moment when one questions his or her identity and assumes life to be an open and unfinished process.

The volume is an attempt to read William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury while bearing in mind three phenomenological philosophies of death as proposed by Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, and Emmanuel Levinas. The literary analysis mainly reveals how Benjy senses Scheler’s intuitive certainty of death, and presents Jason as the Schelerian dweller of the West who uproots the thought of finitude out of his awareness. Despite the committed suicide, Quentin Compson represents the embodiment of Heidegger’s Dasein, realizing both the authentic and inauthentic Being-towards-death. Lastly, Caddy’s fecundity and Dilsey’s responsibility for the Other exemplify what Levinas regards as victory over death, and demonstrate the infinity the French philosopher describes.

Dwight Macdonald was the most prominent excoriator of mass culture in the 1950s and ’60s. Since that time his reputation has not fared well. Derided as elitist and passé, his tracts now represent everything wrong-headed about mid-century cultural criticism. Nonetheless, Macdonald remains relevant and deserves reconsideration. His detractors, though uncovering many of Macdonald’s failings, have in part misunderstood him, while the field of cultural studies has misclassified his essays in the radical rather than conservative tradition of criticism. Dwight Macdonald on Culture seeks to amend previous misconceptions, offering new perspectives on a figure who grappled with issues of culture that remain ever-pertinent.