Description

Issue 10 (2020), entitled “Literature Goes Pop” and edited by the journal’s editor-in-chief, Dorota Filipczak, revolves around the encounters between literary intertexts/conventions/genres and the visual/digital modes. Although the volume opens with a critical essay on Pamela Sue Anderson’s philosophy, the next sixteen scholarly texts explore a wide range of topics demonstrating close ties between literature and widely understood pop culture: film, music videos, the blogosphere, biographies of iconic poets, the realm of cyberpunk, video games, and even memes, as demonstrated by the article on online humor responding to the global crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The next section, playfully named “Literar(t)y Matters,” deals with the following subjects: sensorial aesthetics in modernist fiction, Hart Crane’s and Yvor Winters’s interactions with Emily Dickinson’s poetic legacy, the cosmic sublime in Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars, the depiction of racial issues in contemporary US in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. An American Lyric, the portrayal of 19^th-century America in Frances Wright’s works, Wallace Stevens’s ties to philosophy, a morphogenetic perspective on intertextuality, Thomas William Robertson’s well-made plays, and wartime propaganda and gender in Ahmad Mahmoud’s The Scorched Earth.