Dominika Ferens | University of Wroclaw (original) (raw)
Books by Dominika Ferens
Academic Journal of Modern Philology, 2024
This paper explores the role of affect in academic life, using as case studies three North Americ... more This paper explores the role of affect in academic life, using as case studies three North American campus novels narrated from undergraduate and graduate students’ perspectives. While the case studies – Sarah Henstra’s The Red Word (2018), Brandon Taylor’s Real Life (2020), and Juliet Lapidos’s Talent (2019) – include humorous elements, they tend to foreground the student-protagonists’ emotional responses to their precarious position in the competitive and hierarchical world of academia. In each novel, the emotional impact of academic life is additionally complicated by the students’ gender, class, race, and/or sexuality. Arguably, out of the many affects young people experience every day, two play a special role in academia: interest and shame. Referring to the affect theories of Silvan S. Tomkins (2008), Paul J. Silvia (2005, 2008), Pierre Bourdieu ([1994] 1998), and Ann Cvetkovich (2012), this paper attempts to show how writers tell emotionally charged stories about campus life, structured by the interplay
of interest and shame.
Why does a man with such great talent continually deny his sensitivity and overprotest his mascul... more Why does a man with such great talent continually deny his sensitivity and overprotest his masculinity? He is so virile and so vast-why does he waste his time roughhousing with playboys, trying to catch the biggest fijish, to bring that fijish in the fastest […]? -Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings on Ernest Hemingway (qtd. in Eby 94)
A Queer Mixture: Gender perspectives on Minority Sexual Identities. Co-editor, with Tomasz Basiuk and Tomasz Sikora. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Śląsk, 2002.
Edith and Winnifred Eaton: Chinatown Missions and Japanese Romances. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002.
Traveling Subjects: American Journeys in Space and Time. Co-editor, with Justyna Kociatkiewicz and Elżbieta Klimek-Dominiak. Kraków: Rabid, 2004.
Parametry pożądania: Kultura odmieńców wobec homofobii. [Parameters of Desire: Queer Culture vs. Homophobia]. Co-editor, with Tomasz Basiuk and Tomasz Sikora. Kraków: Universitas, 2006.
Out Here: Local and International Perspectives in Queer Studies. Co-editor, with Tomasz Basiuk and Tomasz Sikora. Amersham: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2006.
Ways of Knowing Small Places analyzes several responses to a crisis in American ethnographic and ... more Ways of Knowing Small Places analyzes several responses to a crisis in American ethnographic and literary representation that began roughly in the 1960s. Confronted by unprecedented social, economic, and epistemological change initiated by decolonization and the Civil Rights movement, American ethnographers and minority writers of fiction had to rethink their relation to the small places and cultures that had hitherto been central to their writing. Small, isolated places – particularly islands – had been key sites for studying non-western peoples through participant observation. In the 1960s, however, the natives of those small places usurped the right to represent themselves in social science and the literary marketplace. Meanwhile, many anthropologists resorted to more self-reflexive modes of writing, such as autobiography and fiction. Ways of Knowing Small Places brings to critical attention two bodies of writing: fiction conceived as a critique of/an alternative to ethnography and fiction by anthropologists. Underlying this project is a curiosity about what happens when literature acts like ethnography, or is mistaken for ethnography, or when ethnography acts like literature.
Papers by Dominika Ferens
Hinterlands: Literary and Cultural Perspectives, 2024
Contrary to the urban studies tradition of focusing on the densely populated and spatially bounde... more Contrary to the urban studies tradition of focusing on the densely populated and spatially bounded city, in the last decade Neil Brenner and Andy Merrifield, among others, have argued that there is nothing natural or inevitable about the growth of cities and that urban growth has depended on the systematic transformation of rural hinterlands "into zones of highintensity, large-scale industrial infrastructure-operational landscapes" (Brenner, "The Hinterland Urbanised" 124, italics in the original). This observation may seem trite, yet it signals a shift of attention from the city to other areas of the planet, where "colossal, if unevenly developed industrial and environmental upheavals" have taken place as a result of the widespread belief that urban growth is inevitable and desirable (123). Although the upheavals are there in plain sight, until recently, urban studies scholars took little interest in them, and neither were they fully visible to academics in the social sciences and humanities. Brenner therefore asks: "How can we visualize, and thereby politicize, the encompassing but generally invisible webs of connection that link our urban way of life to the silent violence of accumulation by dispossession and environmental destruction in the world's hinterlands and operational landscapes?" (126). Brenner attempted to make the webs of connection visible by means of NASA satellite maps of "operational landscapes", and by spearheading group projects like Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanism (2014). Three decades earlier, the Japanese American author Karen Tei Yamashita started writing fiction about "operationalized" landscapes and global "webs of connection". To her, such phenomena were perfectly visible because, though she was raised in Los Angeles, from 1974 to 1983 she had lived in Brazil, where she witnessed (to use Brenner's words) those "colossal … industrial and environmental upheavals" long before globalization got a bad name. Her first novel, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990), depicted rural Brazil as a hinterland radically transformed
Editorial #5
InterAlia, 2010
Ways of Knowing Small Places: Intersections of American Literature and Ethnography since the 1960s - Repozytorium Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego
Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 2010
Editorial #1
interalia: a journal of queer studies, 2006
Edith and Winnifred Eaton: Chinatown Missions and Japanese Romances
legacy, 2002
Edith &f Winnifred Eaton CHINATOWN-MISSIONS AND JAPANESE ROMA Dominika Kerens Daughters of a Brit... more Edith &f Winnifred Eaton CHINATOWN-MISSIONS AND JAPANESE ROMA Dominika Kerens Daughters of a British father and a Chinese mother, Edith and Winnifred Eaton pur-sued wildly different paths. While Edith wrote stories of downtrodden Chinese im-migrants under the ...
Big Fish: On the Relative Popularity of Zane Grey and Ernest Hemingway
Explores notions of popularity in American literature through the parallel and sometimes overlapp... more Explores notions of popularity in American literature through the parallel and sometimes overlapping experiences of two ostensibly different writers. Hemingway and Grey, both natives of the Midwest, reflect the influence of Theodore Roosevelt and Owen Wister (The Virginian, 1902) in their understanding, application, and disregard of the codes of the white American male frontier. The writers share an interest in the healing qualities of nature. And both seemed to be aware of and consciously addressed the sometimes-cruel marketplace for books and the shifting demographics of their respective readerships
Zwiedzanie cudzych kolonii. Wiedza i władza w afrykańskich powieściach Karola Maya
Dominika Ferens Visiting French and German Colonies: Knowledge and Power in Karl May's Africa... more Dominika Ferens Visiting French and German Colonies: Knowledge and Power in Karl May's African Novels This paper considers the ambivalent role that the still popular German writer Karl May (1842-1912) played in the construction of the German colonial discourse. Although May opposed the colonial race and did not travel outside Europe until he was in his sixties, by writing adventure fiction set in exotic locales he colonized the world with his pen. An interesting connection between race, power, and knowledge becomes apparent when we analyze May's "African" novels. At a time when Germany was intent on annexing Namibia, Togo, and Cameroon, May's protagonist is interested only in British and French colonies. He ostensibly travels as an amateur ethnographer yet he already knows Africa better than do the locals. Quick to criticize colonial authorities, he nonetheless repeatedly finds himself in positions of power, authorized by people of color who value his European...
Zaczne od nie tak dawnych czasow, kiedy po wydaniu mojej ksiązki "Dziewczyny, wyjdźcie z sza... more Zaczne od nie tak dawnych czasow, kiedy po wydaniu mojej ksiązki "Dziewczyny, wyjdźcie z szafy!"[1] uslyszalam wielokrotnie, ze cześc czytelniczek i czytelnikow nalezących do tak zwanej heteroseksualnej wiekszości nie rozumie tytulu, bo kojarzy szafe wylącznie z miejscem przechowywania odziezy. Ciekawe o tyle, ze akurat w Polsce szafa powinna sie kojarzyc, i to doslownie, takze z miejscem ukrywania Żydow. Gdy jednak przywolywalam owo historyczne doświadczenie, spotykalam sie z oburzeniem, ze dokonuje naduzycia (choc nie probowalam porownywac losu Żydow w czasie Holocaustu z lesbijkami opresjonowanymi w dzisiejszej Polsce, a jedynie funkcje rzeczonego mebla). W slowniku mniejszości seksualnych szafa akurat wziela sie z czego innego i blizej rozwiązania zagadki byli ci, co mieli pomysl, ze to takze miejsce, gdzie trzyma sie trupa, a wiec tabu. Trop prowadzi do świata anglosaskiego, bo closet oznacza szafe wlaśnie, angielskie skeleton in the closet znaczy tyle co trup zamknie...
Academic Journal of Modern Philology, 2024
This paper explores the role of affect in academic life, using as case studies three North Americ... more This paper explores the role of affect in academic life, using as case studies three North American campus novels narrated from undergraduate and graduate students’ perspectives. While the case studies – Sarah Henstra’s The Red Word (2018), Brandon Taylor’s Real Life (2020), and Juliet Lapidos’s Talent (2019) – include humorous elements, they tend to foreground the student-protagonists’ emotional responses to their precarious position in the competitive and hierarchical world of academia. In each novel, the emotional impact of academic life is additionally complicated by the students’ gender, class, race, and/or sexuality. Arguably, out of the many affects young people experience every day, two play a special role in academia: interest and shame. Referring to the affect theories of Silvan S. Tomkins (2008), Paul J. Silvia (2005, 2008), Pierre Bourdieu ([1994] 1998), and Ann Cvetkovich (2012), this paper attempts to show how writers tell emotionally charged stories about campus life, structured by the interplay
of interest and shame.
Why does a man with such great talent continually deny his sensitivity and overprotest his mascul... more Why does a man with such great talent continually deny his sensitivity and overprotest his masculinity? He is so virile and so vast-why does he waste his time roughhousing with playboys, trying to catch the biggest fijish, to bring that fijish in the fastest […]? -Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings on Ernest Hemingway (qtd. in Eby 94)
A Queer Mixture: Gender perspectives on Minority Sexual Identities. Co-editor, with Tomasz Basiuk and Tomasz Sikora. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Śląsk, 2002.
Edith and Winnifred Eaton: Chinatown Missions and Japanese Romances. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002.
Traveling Subjects: American Journeys in Space and Time. Co-editor, with Justyna Kociatkiewicz and Elżbieta Klimek-Dominiak. Kraków: Rabid, 2004.
Parametry pożądania: Kultura odmieńców wobec homofobii. [Parameters of Desire: Queer Culture vs. Homophobia]. Co-editor, with Tomasz Basiuk and Tomasz Sikora. Kraków: Universitas, 2006.
Out Here: Local and International Perspectives in Queer Studies. Co-editor, with Tomasz Basiuk and Tomasz Sikora. Amersham: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2006.
Ways of Knowing Small Places analyzes several responses to a crisis in American ethnographic and ... more Ways of Knowing Small Places analyzes several responses to a crisis in American ethnographic and literary representation that began roughly in the 1960s. Confronted by unprecedented social, economic, and epistemological change initiated by decolonization and the Civil Rights movement, American ethnographers and minority writers of fiction had to rethink their relation to the small places and cultures that had hitherto been central to their writing. Small, isolated places – particularly islands – had been key sites for studying non-western peoples through participant observation. In the 1960s, however, the natives of those small places usurped the right to represent themselves in social science and the literary marketplace. Meanwhile, many anthropologists resorted to more self-reflexive modes of writing, such as autobiography and fiction. Ways of Knowing Small Places brings to critical attention two bodies of writing: fiction conceived as a critique of/an alternative to ethnography and fiction by anthropologists. Underlying this project is a curiosity about what happens when literature acts like ethnography, or is mistaken for ethnography, or when ethnography acts like literature.
Hinterlands: Literary and Cultural Perspectives, 2024
Contrary to the urban studies tradition of focusing on the densely populated and spatially bounde... more Contrary to the urban studies tradition of focusing on the densely populated and spatially bounded city, in the last decade Neil Brenner and Andy Merrifield, among others, have argued that there is nothing natural or inevitable about the growth of cities and that urban growth has depended on the systematic transformation of rural hinterlands "into zones of highintensity, large-scale industrial infrastructure-operational landscapes" (Brenner, "The Hinterland Urbanised" 124, italics in the original). This observation may seem trite, yet it signals a shift of attention from the city to other areas of the planet, where "colossal, if unevenly developed industrial and environmental upheavals" have taken place as a result of the widespread belief that urban growth is inevitable and desirable (123). Although the upheavals are there in plain sight, until recently, urban studies scholars took little interest in them, and neither were they fully visible to academics in the social sciences and humanities. Brenner therefore asks: "How can we visualize, and thereby politicize, the encompassing but generally invisible webs of connection that link our urban way of life to the silent violence of accumulation by dispossession and environmental destruction in the world's hinterlands and operational landscapes?" (126). Brenner attempted to make the webs of connection visible by means of NASA satellite maps of "operational landscapes", and by spearheading group projects like Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanism (2014). Three decades earlier, the Japanese American author Karen Tei Yamashita started writing fiction about "operationalized" landscapes and global "webs of connection". To her, such phenomena were perfectly visible because, though she was raised in Los Angeles, from 1974 to 1983 she had lived in Brazil, where she witnessed (to use Brenner's words) those "colossal … industrial and environmental upheavals" long before globalization got a bad name. Her first novel, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990), depicted rural Brazil as a hinterland radically transformed
Editorial #5
InterAlia, 2010
Ways of Knowing Small Places: Intersections of American Literature and Ethnography since the 1960s - Repozytorium Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego
Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 2010
Editorial #1
interalia: a journal of queer studies, 2006
Edith and Winnifred Eaton: Chinatown Missions and Japanese Romances
legacy, 2002
Edith &f Winnifred Eaton CHINATOWN-MISSIONS AND JAPANESE ROMA Dominika Kerens Daughters of a Brit... more Edith &f Winnifred Eaton CHINATOWN-MISSIONS AND JAPANESE ROMA Dominika Kerens Daughters of a British father and a Chinese mother, Edith and Winnifred Eaton pur-sued wildly different paths. While Edith wrote stories of downtrodden Chinese im-migrants under the ...
Big Fish: On the Relative Popularity of Zane Grey and Ernest Hemingway
Explores notions of popularity in American literature through the parallel and sometimes overlapp... more Explores notions of popularity in American literature through the parallel and sometimes overlapping experiences of two ostensibly different writers. Hemingway and Grey, both natives of the Midwest, reflect the influence of Theodore Roosevelt and Owen Wister (The Virginian, 1902) in their understanding, application, and disregard of the codes of the white American male frontier. The writers share an interest in the healing qualities of nature. And both seemed to be aware of and consciously addressed the sometimes-cruel marketplace for books and the shifting demographics of their respective readerships
Zwiedzanie cudzych kolonii. Wiedza i władza w afrykańskich powieściach Karola Maya
Dominika Ferens Visiting French and German Colonies: Knowledge and Power in Karl May's Africa... more Dominika Ferens Visiting French and German Colonies: Knowledge and Power in Karl May's African Novels This paper considers the ambivalent role that the still popular German writer Karl May (1842-1912) played in the construction of the German colonial discourse. Although May opposed the colonial race and did not travel outside Europe until he was in his sixties, by writing adventure fiction set in exotic locales he colonized the world with his pen. An interesting connection between race, power, and knowledge becomes apparent when we analyze May's "African" novels. At a time when Germany was intent on annexing Namibia, Togo, and Cameroon, May's protagonist is interested only in British and French colonies. He ostensibly travels as an amateur ethnographer yet he already knows Africa better than do the locals. Quick to criticize colonial authorities, he nonetheless repeatedly finds himself in positions of power, authorized by people of color who value his European...
Zaczne od nie tak dawnych czasow, kiedy po wydaniu mojej ksiązki "Dziewczyny, wyjdźcie z sza... more Zaczne od nie tak dawnych czasow, kiedy po wydaniu mojej ksiązki "Dziewczyny, wyjdźcie z szafy!"[1] uslyszalam wielokrotnie, ze cześc czytelniczek i czytelnikow nalezących do tak zwanej heteroseksualnej wiekszości nie rozumie tytulu, bo kojarzy szafe wylącznie z miejscem przechowywania odziezy. Ciekawe o tyle, ze akurat w Polsce szafa powinna sie kojarzyc, i to doslownie, takze z miejscem ukrywania Żydow. Gdy jednak przywolywalam owo historyczne doświadczenie, spotykalam sie z oburzeniem, ze dokonuje naduzycia (choc nie probowalam porownywac losu Żydow w czasie Holocaustu z lesbijkami opresjonowanymi w dzisiejszej Polsce, a jedynie funkcje rzeczonego mebla). W slowniku mniejszości seksualnych szafa akurat wziela sie z czego innego i blizej rozwiązania zagadki byli ci, co mieli pomysl, ze to takze miejsce, gdzie trzyma sie trupa, a wiec tabu. Trop prowadzi do świata anglosaskiego, bo closet oznacza szafe wlaśnie, angielskie skeleton in the closet znaczy tyle co trup zamknie...
Anglica Wratislaviensia, 2019
In The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, sociologist Arthur Frank uses narratology ... more In The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, sociologist Arthur Frank uses narratology to typologize the stories people tell about illness. Next to teleological stories of survival, which “reassure the listener that however bad things look, a happy ending is possible”, Frank discusses “the chaos narrative” in which “events are told as the storyteller experiences life: without sequence or discernible causality” 97. While the storytellers discussed by Frank mostly suffer from physical ailments and traumas, I would argue that the chaotic mode of telling also characterizes texts that explore other kinds of traumas, including those related to displacement and shaming experienced by several generations of Koreans and Americans of Korean descent. Drawing on affect studies, I analyze Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s DICTEE 1982 alongside two essays, by Grace M. Cho and Hosu Kim published in The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social 2007, all of which use the collage form to challenge the e...
Between Taste and Interest: Reading Asian American Literature in the Age of Food Literacy: Dominika Ferens
Eating America: Crisis, Sustenance, Sustainability
Demokracja i edukacja: dylematy, diagnozy, doświadczenia
Ministerstwo Nauki i Szkolnictwa Wyzszego – Decyzja nr 250349E/-680/S/2013 z dnia 27 lutego 2013,... more Ministerstwo Nauki i Szkolnictwa Wyzszego – Decyzja nr 250349E/-680/S/2013 z dnia 27 lutego 2013, środki przyznane na utrzymanie potencjalu badawczego Wydzialu Nauk Pedagogicznych Dolnośląskiej Szkoly Wyzszej w roku 2013.
Parametry pożądania: kultura odmieńców wobec homofobii
Out here: local and international perspectives in queer studies
Asian American Literature in Transition, Volume One: 1850-1930, 2021
Affect theory offers a new way of framing the writings by Edith Eaton (Sui Sin Far) and Winnifred... more Affect theory offers a new way of framing the writings by Edith Eaton (Sui Sin Far) and Winnifred Eaton (Onoto Watanna). Drawing on insights from such theorists as Silvan Tomkins, Sara Ahmed, Sianne Ngai, and Sue J. Kim, this chapter argues that Sui Sin Far and Onoto Watanna developed sophisticated understandings of what affects do: how they are triggered, modulated, and extinguished though human interaction in an unequal field of power relations. Not only did they use writing to meditate on the ways in which fear, hatred, and contempt for the Chinese in North America had shaped their own affective systems, but they also sought to understand what fictional representations of affects could do to the reader. When looked at from the perspective of Tomkinsian theory, such works as “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian” and Marion are clearly structured around scenes of shaming, linked by complex reparative scripts that model ways of responding to shame, from self-effacement and withdrawal, through anger and contempt for others, to constructing allegories of a non-racist society and becoming politically engaged. Using such a reading strategy allows us to appreciate particularly those narratives by the Eaton sisters which have hitherto been dismissed as naively sentimental.
Edith and Winnifred Eaton : the uses of ethnography in turn-of-the-century Asian American literature
"Res Rhetorica"
The present paper offers a subjective overview of approaches to affect. Research on affect accele... more The present paper offers a subjective overview of approaches to affect. Research on affect accelerated in the last two decades within several disciplines, in response to different concerns and research questions, energized by new research in psychology and, more recently, neuroscience. But while affect studies scholars agree that emotions, amplified by the media, course through all social relations and electrify our entire bodies, scholars attracted to specific clusters of theories have little to say to each other. To remedy this situation, I attempt to bridge several seemingly incompatible strands of research on affects in psychology, cultural studies, and media studies, in order to bring out commonalities and patterns that may prove useful for reading literature and other cultural artifacts. Defining affects, I refer to the practice of tuning musical instruments to a specific pitch as an analogy for the way affects resonate from the macro to the micro levels of social life.
Kabaret lesbijski jest fenomenem. Zwłaszcza w Polsce, gdzie tak niewiele jest przejawów kultury n... more Kabaret lesbijski jest fenomenem. Zwłaszcza w Polsce, gdzie tak niewiele jest przejawów kultury nie tylko lesbijskiej, ale w ogóle związanej z ruchem LGBT. Większość artystów i artystek, których moglibyśmy zaliczyć do tego nurtu, woli zachowywać niezależność i nie chce się z ruchem utożsamiać. A kabaret "Barbie Girls" jasno definiuje się jako lesbijski! Ich dowcipy dotyczą głównie życia lesbijek, ale pojawiają się też skecze o innych odmieńcach. Kabaret istnieje od 2005 roku, początkowo występował tylko okazjonalnie, od kilku lat można go jednak zobaczyć w branżowych klubach, na festiwalach kultury LGBT, a ostatnio nawet w mainstreamowej prasie i telewizji! Polacy uwielbiają kabarety, to jedna z najpopularniejszych form rozrywki estradowej w naszym kraju. Odbywa się mnóstwo meetingów czy festiwali kabaretów, a poszczególne grupy jeżdżą po kraju z coraz to nowymi programami. Co ciekawe, zazwyczaj występują w nich mężczyźni (oni też grają żeńskie role), kobiety stanowią na s...
Big Fish
Unpopular Culture
Introduction : Let ’ s Talk About ( Crip ) Sex Tomasz Sikora
The intention of this special thematic issue of InterAlia is to problematize the notion of a heal... more The intention of this special thematic issue of InterAlia is to problematize the notion of a healthy, (re)productive, desirable body through the lenses of queer and crip theory. The perspective we adopted when calling this issue into existence was largely a continuation of the one proposed in a provocative article by Paulina Szkudlarek and Sławomira Raczyńska entitled “Zboczone kaleki. Poza sanonormatywnością i somatoestetyką” (Perverted Cripples. Beyond Sanonormativity and Somaaesthetics). The thrust of the argument was that illness and disability in conjunction with nonnormative sexualities has the potential to (doubly) undermine the liberal-humanist model of modern subjectivity, although more often than not the dominant, neoliberal, politically correct discourses effectively separate the two “parameters of identity” without ever acknowledging how fluid and intersecting they are in a single body – a body whose ever changing processes, needs and desires can never reduce it to a sta...