REMEMBERING AMERICA IN THE WRITINGS OF THE POLISH PARTICIPANTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA INTERNATIONAL WRITING PROGRAM:A PHENOMENOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE
REMEMBERING AMERICA IN THE WRITINGS OF THE POLISH PARTICIPANTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA INTERNATIONAL WRITING PROGRAM:A PHENOMENOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

Summary/Abstract: The International Writing Program, started at the University of Iowa by Paul Engle and Hualing Nieh in the 1960s, has to date brought to the USA over 1400 writers from all over the world. Some of these writers, on returning home, published accounts of their stay in America. Polish writers have been frequent participants of the International Writing Program since its inception; a number of them published written accounts of their encounter with the USA after their return to Poland. Some of these accounts appeared before, and some after the 1989 political transformation in Poland and in Central and Eastern Europe. This article reviews Edward S. Casey’s phenomenological approach to memory and uses it as a lens through which to look at the memories of the Polish writers’ sojourns in America, carried by the written accounts. It lays particular emphasis on the link between memory and place, which features prominently in Edward S. Casey’s approach and which is one of those aspects of it that may make it especially useful in the description, analysis and interpretation of the writers’ accounts of their stays in the USA.

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