The series "Katowice Interdisciplinary and Comparative Studies" publishes works of scholars who, on the one hand, wish to see literary works in the unceasing dialogue with other arts and, on the other, want to rethink literary theory. It contains essays on a wide range of topics which include studies of individual texts placing them in a rich web of comparative references as well as in-depth investigations of particular notions in their historical and multicultural contexts.

Motivated by such events as the election of the first African American president of the United States of America, the author focuses on slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the resulting segregation of the races. The postscriptum gives a brief picture of several American writers and their fiction during the Civil War and Reconstruction.

This book reads Faulkner’s with philosophies of death: Benjy senses Max Scheler’s intuitive certainty of death, Jason is the Schelerian dweller of the West, Quentin the embodiment of Martin Heidegger’s «Dasein», and Caddy’s fecundity and Dilsey’s responsibility for the «Other» exemplify Emmanuel Levinas’s «victory over death».

Dwight Macdonald was the most prominent American excoriator of mass culture in the 1950s and ‘60s, but has since been derided as elitist and irrelevant. argues against previous interpretations, offering new perspectives on a figure that grappled with issues of culture that remain ever-pertinent.