American Studies in Poland: A Collective Enterprise

[...]confirmed in my first reaction to Dickinson by Charles Anderson's admirable study Emily Dickinson's Poetry: Stairway of Surprise (1960), I produced an MA thesis on Dickinson's idea of poetry. The evolution of my scholarly itinerary since then was a combination of luck and negotia...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inText matters (Łódź) Vol. 5; no. 5
Main Authors Maszewska, Jadwiga, Maszewski, Zbigniew
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Lódz University of Łódź 01.11.2015
Subjects
American literature
Attitudes
Careers
College professors
Councils
Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)
Dissertations & theses
Learned societies
Negotiation
Novels
Poetry
Politics
Scholars
Women
Writers
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Summary:[...]confirmed in my first reaction to Dickinson by Charles Anderson's admirable study Emily Dickinson's Poetry: Stairway of Surprise (1960), I produced an MA thesis on Dickinson's idea of poetry. The evolution of my scholarly itinerary since then was a combination of luck and negotiations between personal interests and the needs of the Department which I joined in 1964 as a young assistant, having for a year taught English in a high school in Łódź. [...]Polish Americanists had yet to be educated. [...]my Ph.D. dissertation, motivated perhaps by the orderly desire "to begin at the beginning," was focused on Puritan and colonial poetry; more specifically-on the issue of its relation to the evolution of political and aesthetic concepts of independence. A year later, in response to the proposal I submitted of revising and developing my Dickinson-Whitman book, the American Council of Learned Societies offered me a Fellowship. Questions can be asked from different perspectives of American Studies: by literary scholars investigating forms and manners of revitalization and transformations of the historical novel, by sociologists enquiring what present social and cultural anxieties or attitudes trigger the rise of historical interest, by historians looking at how the past is being (re)shaped by present historical writers and so on. In 1994-95 she held the fellowship of the American Council of Learned Societies with affiliation at Harvard University, and in 2004 she spent a semester at the University of Texas at El Paso on Fulbright Fellowship.
ISSN:2083-2931
2084-574X