This book deals mostly with American avant-garde literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the present-day practice and politics of its translation into Polish, trying to answer the following questions: What are the meaning and the limits of avantgardism? What is the rationale of literary translations and what is their life-cycle in receiving literary polysystems? Furthermore: What is the importance of translation in shaping the politics of meaning – our collective textual practices determining our epistemological perspectives in literature and beyond? And finally: What are the consequences of implementing foreign modes of thinking and making politics in the receiving culture, both in the social sphere and in writing?