%0 Journal Article 
%A Studniarz, Sławomir
%T The American waste: a new take on the conquest of the West in Paul Auster’s novel "Travels in the Scriptorium"

%D 2018
%@ 2171-9594
%U http://hdl.handle.net/10017/34805
%X The subject of the article is the 2006 novel "Travels in the Scriptorium" by Paul Auster, which contains an embedded story, presenting the alternative history of the USA. The article aims to demonstrate that Auster’s novel offers a revision of two essential myths of the American nation. The precise moment in the history of the USA that Auster’s novel reinvents is the time before the Mexican War and before taking over the Southwest and California. The Mexican War and its political consequences marked the transition of the USA from a republic upholding its libertarian and progressive ideals to an invading imperial power. The shift in the American policy toward its neighboring nations and peoples is reflected in Auster’s novel in the presentation of the westward expansion as a brutal invasion. Auster’s novel heavily revises the two formative myths of the American state, the myth of the West and the “errand in the wilderness,” with Manifest Destiny as its later incarnation justifying the imperialist mission. The wilderness itself is divested of spiritual significance, desacralized, as the Alien Territories are converted into the arena of carnage and indiscriminate slaughter. It is unreservedly sacrificed to the interests of the emerging imperialist enterprise, which is nothing less than the ultimate consequence of the original Puritan venture—the taming of the wilderness and the creation of a model Christian state for the rest of the world to admire.

%K Alternative history
%K Counterfactual
%K Embedded narrative
%K The errand into the wilderness
%K American specialness
%K The myth of the West
%K Historia alternativa
%K Contrafactual
%K Narrativa incrustada
%K La misión en el desierto
%K La singularidad americana
%K El mito del Oeste
%K Literatura
%K Literature
%K Medio ambiente
%K Environmental science
%K info:eu-repo/semantics/article
%~ Biblioteca Universidad de Alcala