Contemporary American Writers of Polish Descent. A Study of the Fiction of Anthony Bukoski and ...

232 Pages·2014·2.52 MB·English

FACULTY OF PHILOLOGY
INSTITUTE OF ENGLISH CULTURES AND LITERATURES
UNIVERSITY OF SILESIA

Sonia Caputa, M.A.

PhD Thesis

Contemporary American Writers of Polish Descent. A Study of the Fiction of
Anthony Bukoski and Stuart Dybek

Supervisor: Professor Zbigniew Białas

Katowice 2013
WYDZIAŁ FILOLOGICZNY
INSTYTUT KULTUR I LITERATUR ANGLOJĘZYCZNYCH
UNIWERSYTET ŚLĄSKI

mgr Sonia Caputa

Rozprawa doktorska

Współcześni amerykańscy pisarze pochodzenia polskiego. Studium twórczości
Anthony’ego Bukoskiego i Stuarta Dybka

Promotor: prof. dr hab. Zbigniew Białas

Katowice 2013

Składam wyrazy szacunku i serdeczne podziękowania za okazaną pomoc
Pani prof. UŚ dr hab. Teresie Pyzik

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Contemporary American Writers of Polish Descent. A Study of the Fiction of Anthony Bukoski and
Stuart Dybek.

INTRODUCTION

In recent years ethnic issues and their embodiment in literature have
commanded an inordinate amount of interest in both scholarly and public
discourse. Although sociologists, historians and literary critics have written about
literature and ethnicity for a long time, the boundaries between disciplines have
often been blurred and, as Werner Sollors notices in his landmark study Beyond
Ethnicity, “have sometimes had detrimental effects on some previous efforts of
this sort.”1 He clarifies his line of thought further:
ethnicity specialists sometimes tend to misread literature or misinterpret it as
a direct social and historical evidence, whereas literary critics in many cases
have stayed away from newer sociological and anthropological approaches
to ethnicity.2

In the light of the above, there exist some problems with the way in which
literature is viewed by the theoretical analysts of ethnicity, who have resorted to
literary works so as to demonstrate their theses. Sollors, for instance, provides a
telling example of Robert Park, the representative of the Chicago school of
sociology readings, who managed to corroborate his sociological theory of
“moral dichotomy and conflict” as a probable characteristic feature of “every
immigrant during the period of transition”3 by referring to American Jewish
autobiographies. Using Ludwig Lewisohn’s Up Stream as social evidence, Parks
vindicated his theory of a marginal man in the 1930s, and outlined his
conclusions in the essay “Human Migration and the Marginal Man” regardless of

1 Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1986), p. 9.
2 Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, p. 9.
3 Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, p. 9.
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Contemporary American Writers of Polish Descent. A Study of the Fiction of Anthony Bukoski and
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the fact that, as Sollors aptly observes, “Lewisohn never dwelled in any ghetto,
warm or otherwise.”4
One may encounter another weakness when confronted with literary criticism
devoted to ethnic literature, for
sociologists may often overestimate and even exoticize literature (in the
narrow sense of belles letters) as supreme evidence while underestimating
their own reliance on literary devices and story-telling techniques. Literary
critics, on the other hand, tend to be either uninterested in anything but the
leading American writers or unaware of the newer thinking on ethnicity.5

Thomas J. Ferraro’s work Ethnic Passages: Literary Immigrants in Twentieth-Century
America also convincingly demonstrates the problem with approaching ethnic
literature by literary critics; in his words:
such writing challenges the critic to determine how sociological inquiry and
literary inventiveness serve one another; where local understandings face off
against national constructions of individuality, family and community; and
which strategies of minority-culture self-representation and majority-culture
forms undergo reciprocal transformations.6

In fact, the serious, considerable interest in ethnicity as a methodological
approach to the study of American literature has started in the 1970s when
MELUS, the Society for the Study of the Multi-ethnic Literature of the United
States, began its mission to combine “the so-called ethnic works into a literary-
historical discourse delimiting American literature.”7 Even though the MELUS
contribution to the study of ethnicity and its embodiment in literature may not be
underestimated, Ferraro casts doubt on the early MELUS literary critics8 who
conducted an investigation into ethnic literature especially during the 1970s. On

4 Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, p. 9. Additionally, Sollors makes a comment upon the fiction of Richard Wright
which is incorrectly but often invoked in sociological accounts of the ghetto.
5 Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, p. 10.
6 Thomas J. Ferraro, Ethnic Passages: Literary Immigrants in Twentieth-Century America (London: The
University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 3.
7 Jelena Sesnić, From Shadow to Presence: Representations of Ethnicity in Contemporary American literature
(Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2007), p. 10.
8 Ferraro comments upon the achievements of MELUS critics, who worked in the 1970s in the shadow of
the new ethnicity.
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Contemporary American Writers of Polish Descent. A Study of the Fiction of Anthony Bukoski and
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the one hand, the author gives credit to their “indispensable contributions to
bibliography, biography and republishing,” but, on the other hand, suggests that
their analyses were inaccurate as “they relied, by and large, on sociological
positivism, [mainly underscoring] the inherent value of each group and its
struggle against discrimination.”9 Ferraro also challenges the achievements of the
early 1980s ethnic literary critics, implying that “they […] failed to address the
conventionality of ethnic writing, including its dependence on stereotypes, [and]
neglected to pursue the departures ethnic writing made from conventionality, its
subversion of convention, its determined creativity.”10 The author of Ethnic
Passages justifies his strong dissatisfaction with the early 1980s literary critics’
approach to ethnic literature stating that individual critics were not imaginatively
engaged in their work, refused to make aesthetic judgments and “lacked interest
in the deeper ambitions and larger receptions of individual texts.”11
While addressing the question of ethnic literary criticism, the author of Beyond
Ethnicity reaches a conclusion that until 1986 (the year of publication of his
seminal study) “scholarship of American ethnic writing [showed] comparatively
little theoretical interest in American-made ethnicity.”12 Literary critics, Sollors
continues, had a tendency to approach ethnic literature with well-intentioned
optimism, or focused on close readings of texts taking into consideration “static
notions of descent, and […] primordial, organicist, sometimes even biological –
but in all cases largely unquestioned – concepts of ethnic-group membership.”13
What literary critics often avoided was to indulge themselves into a full
appreciation of texts in the context of newer theories of ethnicity. What is more,
Sollors draws attention to the fact that instead of overemphasizing or
exaggerating the ethnic dimensions of the literary texts,
works of ethnic literature – written by, about, or for persons who perceived
themselves, or were perceived by others, as members of ethnic groups –

9 Thomas J. Ferraro, Ethnic Passages: Literary Immigrants in Twentieth-Century America, p. 4.
10 Ferraro, Ethnic Passages, p. 4.
11 Ferraro, Ethnic Passages, p. 5.
12 Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, p. 10.
13 Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, p. 11.
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Contemporary American Writers of Polish Descent. A Study of the Fiction of Anthony Bukoski and
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may thus be read not only as expressions of mediation between cultures but
also as handbooks of socialization into the codes of Americanness.14

The major focus of Werner Sollors, thus, was not on the ethnic experience itself,
but “[on] the mental formations and cultural constructions (the codes, beliefs,
rites and rituals) which were developed in America in order to make sense of
ethnicity and immigration in a melting-pot culture.”15 Sollors’s work, as well as
Mary V. Dearborn’s seminal study Pocahontas’s Daughters (published in 1986) and
William Boelhower’s Through a Glass Darkly16 (published in 1987) were quickly
acknowledged by many scholars as presenting a significant challenge to the
accepted view of ethnicity, mainly because they stood in opposition to the
“separatist and ‘mirror into social history’ approaches of the preceding decade.”17
Beyond Ethnicity, however, “has proved to be the most illuminating and
controversial of these works,”18 especially taking into account the fact that
Werner Sollors differentiated between “consent,” i.e. contractual, self-made and
“descent,” i.e. hereditary, ancestral. As Sollors remarks in his book:
American identity alone may take the place of a relationship “in law” (like
“husband, wife, step-, -in law, etc.”), leaving ethnicity to fill the place of
relationships “in nature” (“the natural child, the illegitimate child, the natural
mother, etc.”). In American social symbolism ethnicity may function as a
construct evocative of blood, nature, and descent, whereas national identity
may be relegated to the order of law, conduct, and consent.19

14 Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, p. 7.
15 Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, p. 9.
16 William Boelhower breaks new ground and provides a model for an understanding of American texts,
which discourages the readers to differentiate between the ‘mainstream’ and ‘ethnic’ texts because they
cannot be meaningfully separated: “the ethnic sign is everywhere, and ethnic writing is American writing.”
(William Boelhower, Through a Glass Darkly: Ethnic Semiosis in American Literature, New York, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 3). Among various premises of his study, the author underscores the
significance of Puritan origins and biblical texts for American “ethnogenesis” – the becoming of the
American nation and its subjects. While outlining the process of identity formation, Boelhower notices
that what is constitutive of the American national character is the Indian. (Jelena Sesnić also comments
upon Boelhower’s study in: From Shadow to Presence, p. 17.)
17 Thomas J. Ferraro, Ethnic Passages: Literary Immigrants in Twentieth-Century America, p. 5.
18 Ferraro, Ethnic Passages, p. 5.
19 Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, p. 151.
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Contemporary American Writers of Polish Descent. A Study of the Fiction of Anthony Bukoski and
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The conflict between consent and descent, the clash between two definitions of
American identity, in Sollors’s view, is “at the root of the ambiguity surrounding
the very terminology of American ethnic interaction [and constitutes] the central
drama in American culture.”20
Additionally, Sollors emphasizes the fact that one may understand the essence of
Americanness via analysing the literary texts created by writers of ethnic descent,
who aspired to assimilate in the American culture. This idea seems to lie behind
the following passage:
By looking at the texts produced by and about people who were descended
from diverse backgrounds but were, or consented to become, Americans
[…] we may learn something about how Americanness is achieved, […] and
how it is established again and again as newcomers and outsiders are
socialized into the culture – a process which inevitably seems to revitalize
the culture at the same time.21

Nevertheless, Sollors points out that there is a widespread belief among critics to
evaluate literature “against an elusive concept of authenticity” and “to stress
descent at the expense of consent,”22 which suggests that only biological insiders
can fully appreciate and understand the literature of race and ethnicity.
What seems to be significant to notice is the fact that the notion of ethnicity as
invention pivots on the already mentioned two points of conflict (consent against
descent) as “ethnicity typically emerges not as a thing (let alone a static,
permanent or “pure” thing) but as the result of interactions,”23 which leads one
to a conclusion that “ethnicity is a process.”24
Sollors explains that the traditional way of looking at ethnicity rests on an
assumption that “ethnic groups [are] natural, real, eternal, stable and static

20 Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, pp. 5-6.
21 Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, p. 7.
22 Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, p. 11.
23 Werner Sollors, ed., The Invention of Ethnicity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. xix.
24 Sollors, The Invention of Ethnicity, p. xiv.