This study focuses on theatricality and melancholia in John Berryman's The Dream Songs, and proposes to view them as inherent in the American cultural experience. It discusses Berryman's work in the context of a larger debate on the significance of loss in the process of subject formation and its relation to language, with a commentary on the presences and absences found in the Polish translations of the poem. Revealing the mechanisms of staging the Self after loss, the Songs provide insight into the theatrical and dialogue-driven, context-dependent, intertextual and continuously rewritten character of the American subject.

This book addresses epistemological and political aspects of the discursive pursuit of authenticity and various ways in which the inauthentic is devalued and marginalized. The essays critically analyze various means by which the authentic is searched for, staged, admired, dismissed, replicated or simply taken for granted. What is at work in such discursive practices is a poetics of imitation. This is seen as a paradoxical kind of poetics which renounces the authenticity of the created text for the sake of its semi-religious offering to the origin. Such a divination of the Authentic posits translation as an idolatrous act accompanied by a suspicion of its simultaneously being iconoclastic.

This book offers an interdisciplinary rethinking of the role of translation in the perception and reception of cultural texts. It also discusses human everyday discursive practices at the time of fluctuation of meanings and the decline of the authentic. The authors focus critically on the phenomenon of imitative replacement by all sorts of simulacra. The essays are addressed to literary and translation scholars as well as to all those interested in finding keys to understating the complex relationship between languages and cultures.

Essays collected in this book discuss textual and discursive formulations of dominance and resistance. The authors analyze how they are narrated and re-narrated, framed and reframed in different social, political and language communities and realities, through different media and means, and translated into different contexts and languages. As the ways we name, rename, or label events, people and places have implications in the real world, the essays are also meant to investigate the ways in which we partake in negotiating its construction, its changing meanings and senses through the stories we tell and the practices we live by.