Papers by Agnieszka Soltysik
Victorian literature and culture, Mar 1, 2008
The Turn of the Screwwas published in five authorized forms during Henry James&#3... more The Turn of the Screwwas published in five authorized forms during Henry James's life: as a serial inCollier's Weeklyearly in 1898, as one of two tales in a “duplex” edition published simultaneously in America and England in October 1898, as the second of four works in a volume of the New York Edition in 1908, and as the first volume ofThe Uniform Tales of Henry James, edited by Martin Secker in 1915. The first version, in addition to the frame narrative and twenty-four chapters, was divided into twelve installments and five “Parts.” The version published in the duplex edition under the titleThe Two Magicswas altered to suppress these “Parts,” delete the ending of one chapter, raise Flora's age, and place “more focus. . . on the governess,” among other minor alterations (James,The Turn of the Screw87). The New York Edition underwent even more substantial alterations.
Comparative American Studies, Jun 1, 2005
Although the first accounts of the Spanish-American War in 1898 were written by journalists, incl... more Although the first accounts of the Spanish-American War in 1898 were written by journalists, including the novelist Stephen Crane, book-length memoirs such as Theodore Roosevelt's The Rough Riders (1899) and fiction novels such as Kirk Munroe's Forward, March! (1899) were not far behind. The war was quickly won but the battle over how to narrate, represent, and remember it raged in full force during the years that followed. The stakes were high: not only the question of foreign policy and America's right to control Caribbean territories, but the definition of American nationhood itself seemed bound up with the issue of American men's performance in battle. Race was a major axis of debate and ideological pressure, but class was also important as a vector of ideological tension and containment.1 Appearing at nearly the same time as Roosevelt's, Forward March! narrates the exploits of the Rough Riders, but in a fictionalized form written for young readers and focusi...
Since Edgar Allan Poe's work is generally associated with crime, horror, and the macabre, one mig... more Since Edgar Allan Poe's work is generally associated with crime, horror, and the macabre, one might reasonably expect to find the devil in it. There are in fact two stories with the word "devil" in their titles, "Devil in the Belfry" (1839) and "Never Bet the Devil Your Head" (1841), and two more that feature Satan as protagonist, or more accurately, antagonist: "Bon-Bon" (1832) and "Le Duc de L'Omelette" (1832). 1 Finally, there is a short "arabesque" about a Demon, "Silence-A Fable" (1932). 2 All date from Poe's earliest work, and, with the possible exception of the latter, all are satires, as can be guessed from their titles. The Devil essentially disappears from Poe's later work except as an occasional figure of speech. 3 Although the Devil was a popular subject for stories in Poe's time, he had come down in the world considerably from when the Puritans imagined he reigned over the entire continental wilderness. In antebellum fiction, the Devil is often frustrated by quick-witted Americans, and Poe's devils are similarly unlucky at least half the time. In addition to being physically comic, either very short or very tall and shabbily or oddly dressed, they are often handicapped, with a limp or 1 Some readers have taken the "imp" in "The Imp of the Perverse" as a kind of devil, but the story makes clear that the "imp" is not a real demon but a trope for the narrator's repressed conscience. Similarly, the animal described in "The Black Cat" is diabolical mainly from the disturbed and unreliable narrator's point of view. In both of these cases, the point is to show how narrators attempt to externalize evil impulses that are generated by their own diseased minds. 2 "Arabesque" is Poe's term for the early stories he wrote in an Oriental pastiche style, many of which were published in the 1840 collection, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. 3 Of which probably the most famous and memorable is in "The Raven" (1845), where the bird is compared to a "fiend" and his eyes to a "demon's that is dreaming" (PT 86). The last stanza reveals however that the raven itself is only a conceit for the grief of the speaker.
Text Matters 12, 2022
BACK to the stone Age? This volume grew out of a collaboration between a literature scholar and a... more BACK to the stone Age? This volume grew out of a collaboration between a literature scholar and a social scientist who discovered a rich common ground of concern about our planetary future and our terrestrial present. The specific topic was sparked by something that may seem trivial on the surface, but that rests on a bedrock of cultural assumptions that this volume aims at least in part to examine and dismantle-namely, the assumptions that generate the common reaction which greets almost any concrete proposal for changing today's society along ecological principles: "You want to take us back to the Stone Age!" The underlying fear, it seems, is that ecological concerns will lead to people being asked or forced to "give up" civilization itself, or at least "modernity." Thus, environmentalists are frequently described and dismissed as antimodern, naïve, and wanting to go "backward" in time, like adults wishing to be children once more. To those who react in this way, it feels as if the very meaning of being "human" is under siege; they seem to believe that a desolate future of returning to cave dwellings and bloodthirsty pagan rites is always lurking behind any talk of sustainability and ecological transition. This volume-starting with this Introductionintends to delve into these assumptions, fantasies and fears about socalled modernity, to contest and demystify them and to show how in response to the ecological crisis a range of artists, writers, philosophers and social scientists have been rethinking modernity's temporality, its deeply ingrained dualisms and the human/non-human split that lies at its very heart. While the initial impetus for the volume came from our perplexity about the assumption that thinking and acting ecologically necessarily implied some sort of historical regression or retreat, it is also true that the entire field of contemporary environmental humanities is shot through
is regarded as among America's most important Naturalists, especially for his first novel Maggie:... more is regarded as among America's most important Naturalists, especially for his first novel Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), which was set in the Bowery district of New York. The same attention to realistic detail, dialect, and environmental forces impacting individual lives that characterized Maggie is also present in The Red Badge of Courage (1895), his second and most famous work. Critics often supplement the term "naturalist" with another-"impressionist"-when discussing Crane's specific style, in an attempt to account for Crane's bold range of metaphors, his reliance on color to create mood and his tendency to evoke emotion when describing settings. It would be more accurate to say, however, that Crane's work is indebted to the gothic, a fact that has been overlooked due to a tendency to see realism and the gothic as polar opposites on a stylistic spectrum. This essay examines Crane's use of gothic imagery and rhetoric in a range of texts from Maggie to later stories, poems and newspaper articles. Of these, The Red Badge of Courage is Crane's single most densely gothic text, though The Monster also explicitly borrows its title and key trope from the gothic tradition. Although Crane was influenced by Ambrose Bierce's gothicism, the uses to which he put this mode were significantly different and uniquely his own. I will show that the single most important image in Crane's gothic repertoire is the face that has lost its human appearance and has become uncanny-through strong emotion, mutilation or death. Crane's fiction returns time and again to two main themes, death and a condition I will call for now the estranged self; both are figured by this trope in his work. Both of these themes are also strongly linked to violence and warfare, brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk
Gustav Hasford is the author of two important Vietnam War novels: The Short-Timers (1979), which ... more Gustav Hasford is the author of two important Vietnam War novels: The Short-Timers (1979), which was adapted by Stanley Kubrick into Full Metal Jacket (1987), and The Phantom Blooper (1990), its sequel. Relentlessly critical of the war that destroyed his generation, Hasford uses an array of Gothic themes, tropes and figures - such as the werewolf, vampire, and ghost - to describe the transformation of men into monsters that begins with basic training and can never be reversed. These and other Gothic devices allow Hasford to demystify and disenchant the Vietnam War, to strip it of euphemisms and official myths, and to reveal the violence that lays beneath. Unlike other well-known writers of the same generation, such as Michael Herr and Chris O'Brien, Hasford eschews postmodern techniques in order to pursue a rhetorical strategy of horror combined with black humor. The results are two novels of extraordinary ferocity, critical acumen and wit. The chapter concludes with an analysis...
The essays in Writing American Women offer a sustained investigation of what writing has meant fo... more The essays in Writing American Women offer a sustained investigation of what writing has meant for North American women authors from the earliest captivity narratives to Kym Ragusa's acclaimed recent memoir, The Skin Between Us (2006). By focusing on women rather than the more porous category of gender, contributors offer a meaningful survey of the issues that have shaped women's writing in America. Some of the questions that emerge with particular force include the fraught relationship of women authors to the institutions of literary production, their complex geographical and cultural self-definition, and the special place of autobiography in their work. Combining historical, literary, institutional, and theoretical considerations, this volume bringsinto focus the rich nuances and heterogeneity of contemporary American studies as well as the vital contributions of women writers to American literature. Writers discussed in this book include Mary Rowlandson, Lucy Larcom, Amy ...
Louisa May Alcott’s work is among the best known and most loved in American literature, especiall... more Louisa May Alcott’s work is among the best known and most loved in American literature, especially Little Women and its spirited and unconventional Jo March, a fiction-writing tomboy representing Alcott herself. Almost as well known nowadays is Alcott’s sensational fiction, such as “Behind a Mask,” which has been widely anthologized since being first published to widespread surprise and delight in the 1970s. While feminists have written much about the ambivalent gender politics in Little Women as well as the racy potboilers, and recently queer critics have begun to claim Jo as one of their own, this essay explores what feminism and queer theory reveal together and can say to each other along the way as they are brought to bear on Alcott’s lesser known work, including notably the two novels that do not fall in either category of sentimental nor sensational fiction, Moods and Work. The essay demonstrates that both approaches bring slightly different issues and details into focus and can benefit from a combined reading.
Digital Horror, 2016
Horror films often play with shadows, darkness and nightscapes. One need only to think of Nosfera... more Horror films often play with shadows, darkness and nightscapes. One need only to think of Nosferatu's silhouette creeping along the wall in F.W. Murnau's classic film from 1922 or just the title of the 2007 vampire film Thirty Days of Night (David Slade, 2007) to appreciate the central place of light and especially its absence in this genre. Night vision brings a whole new visual rhetoric to the horror film, however, where the play is no longer with shadows but with eerie surfaces, unnatural colours and uncanny reflections. One of the most immediately striking things about night vision is the eerie green glow that turns people into uncanny figures with opaque and shiny eyes. In a medium like film, where the gaze has often been regarded as a central site of human agency, subjectivity and desire, this transformation is all the more disturbing. In this chapter, I will argue that the night vision aesthetic – both in the recent spate of found footage and mockumentary films and in more conventional narrative fiction films – represents a new visual language for anxiety about the status of human agents in the current global economy and more specifically registers an unease with the treatment of civilians in the recent wars defending and expanding that system. It is no accident that night vision capability is a key feature of the post 9/11 British and U.S. military, and the signature aesthetic of the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, with filmed sequences of night raids and house searches
Haunted Nature, 2021
The original version of chapter 6 “Alligators in the Living Room: Terror and Horror in the Capita... more The original version of chapter 6 “Alligators in the Living Room: Terror and Horror in the Capitalocene” was previously published non-open access.
Few moments in history are so intensely associated with widespread drug use as the 1960s in the U... more Few moments in history are so intensely associated with widespread drug use as the 1960s in the United States. The American counterculture scene is unimaginable without its defining attitudes towards and sustained practice of smoking marijuana and “dropping acid,” i.e. taking LSD (other drugs were used but none became as foundational to the counterculture lifestyle and ethos as these two). Yet, regrettably, these psychedelic experiences produced relatively little memorable literature as much of the creative energy of the drug movement went into the visual arts, music, guerrilla theater and experimental performance art. Although the Beats (Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs) engaged with drug use in their literary work of the 1950s, they referred mainly to heroine, marijuana and amphetamines. In the 1960s, the few authors of what we could call a literature of psychedelic experience are Hunter S. Thompson, Ken Kesey, Tom Woolf (writing about Ken Kesey), and the anthropologist (and possibly ...
The Journal of Popular Culture, 2018
This essay focuses on the adventure mode in relation to Clint Eastwood's American Sniper ... more This essay focuses on the adventure mode in relation to Clint Eastwood's American Sniper (2014). It argues that adventure is one the dominant narrative forms used to organize war stories in American culture today and that American Sniper exemplifies its structure and most common conventions. Adventure as a mode is characterized by a fascination with the pleasurable aspects of violence; however, in US culture, this blatant pleasure in killing is often in tension with the preference of American audiences for a distinctly righteous violence necessitated by religious or moral imperatives. Eastwood's film combines the pleasures of the adventure mode with the moral dictates of righteous violence by focusing on the hero's own suffering of PTSD and on the enemy's irredeemable savagery.
Cunningham/A Companion to the War Film, 2016
Alif Journal of Comparative Poetics, 2011
This article contributes to the current transnational turn in American literary scholarship by ex... more This article contributes to the current transnational turn in American literary scholarship by examining the cross-cultural connections between several North and South American writers, beginning with Walt Whitman. The specific focus of this survey is on the notion of a queer literary network of allusion and intertextuality and, thus, begins with a critical assessment of existing models of literary influence. After sketching out the limitations of current models of textual interaction, the author examines the links between the work of Pablo Neruda, Federico Garcia Lorca, Hart Crane, Xavier Villaurrutia, and Adrienne Rich. Queer Intertextuality Transnationalism has become an important avenue of research in American Studies in recent years. In a reaction against the longstanding tradition of American exceptionalism as well as pressures from work in Postcolonial and Transatlantic Studies, literary scholarship in the Americas is slowly turning away from exclusively national paradigms. (1) In doing so, critics leave behind the notion of a "tradition" in order to map out new tropes of connection, contact, and continuity. For example, the trope of the "circuit," or alternatively the "network," figures relations between writers as complex configurations that transcend frontiers of national belonging. (2) This article sketches out one such circuit of connections, animated by the current of queer desire. Beginning with some methodological issues raised by the notion of a queer literary network, the essay traces the literary complicities between several writers, starting with Walt Whitman, who has figured as a pioneer of queer literary eroticism for several generations of Latin and North American poets, including Pablo Neruda, Federico Garcia Lorca, Hart Crane, Xavier Villaurrutia, and Adrienne Rich. In locating the origin of this particular network with Whitman, I do not mean to imply that Whitman is the only or the most important precursor to twentieth-century queer transamerican literature. Latin American poets have other major figures to read and write with, including the Spanish baroque poet Luis de Gongora y Argote (1561-1627), on whom Garcia Lorca delivered a lecture in 1927 explicating Gongora's poetry in a clearly queer-inflected way (Oropesa 176). Instead, I would like to show that this group of poets from different countries--and centuries--shares a surprisingly dense network of affiliations and inter-connections, with Whitman as one of many possible starting points. First, a few words about my choice of the term "queer" rather than the more neutral "homosexual" or familiar "gay and lesbian" (though I will occasionally use these in this article to avoid repetition). I am conscious of the fact that the word "queer" can appear to some as a trendy Anglo-American export that risks misreading the specific circumstances of gender and sexuality in Latin American cultural contexts. Nevertheless, the word "queer," like the term "Latin America" itself, can be useful precisely because of its foreignness--its very distance and awkwardness contributing to its utility, reminding users that it does not describe a natural fact but a tentative concept. (3) Similarly, "queer" has become the most useful umbrella term for the meanings covered by the medical term "homosexual" and the essentializing categories of "gay and lesbian," and for the persons, activities, and situations that previously might have been called "ambiguous" or "deviant." (4) Rather than specifying a stable identity or ontological category of people, "queer" functions more as a relative term positioned in opposition to what Adrienne Rich has called "compulsory heterosexuality" or what also goes by the term "hetero-normativity," the ideology and social practices enforcing heterosexuality as the norm (Rich, "Compulsory Heterosexuality" 229). ff Gay and Lesbian Studies listened for a homosexual voice speaking about homosexual themes, Queer Studies has calibrated its ear to listen to the silences, hesitations, stylistic devices, subtle allusions, and figures that characterize the often very coded nature of queer writing. …
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Papers by Agnieszka Soltysik
This book examines the portrayal of combat and military death in American culture from the flagraising on Iwo Jima to the Clint Eastwood film about Chris Kyle, showing how the genres of melodrama, adventure and horror shape the way we feel about war and its core themes of killing and dying.