Shades of the Planet

by Dimock, Wai Chee

• ISBN13: 9780691128511
• ISBN10: 0691128510
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-03-26
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

In a globalizing age, studying American literature in isolation from the rest of the world seems less and less justified. But is the conceptual box of the nation dispensable? And what would American literature look like without it?Leading scholars take up this debate inShades of the Planet, beginning not with the United States as center, but with the world as circumference. This reversed frame yields a surprising landscape, alive with traces of West Africa, Eastern Europe, Iran, Iraq, India, China, Mexico, and Australia. The Broadway musicalOklahoma!has aboriginal antecedents; Black English houses an African syntax; American slavery consorts with the Holocaust; Philip Roth keeps company with Milan Kundera; the crime novel moves south of the border; and R. P. Blackmur lectures in Japan. A national literature becomes haunted by the world when that literature is seen extending to the Pacific, opening up to Islam, and accompanying African-American authors as they travel. Highlighting American literature as a fold in a planet-wide fabric, this pioneering volume transforms the field, redrawing its institutional as well as geographical map.The contributors are Rachel Adams, Jonathan Arac, Homi K. Bhabha, Lawrence Buell, Wai Chee Dimock, Susan Stanford Friedman, Paul Giles, David Palumbo-Liu, Ross Posnock, Joseph Roach, and Eric J. Sundquist.

Author Biography

Wai Chee Dimock is William Lampson Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University. Her most recent book is "Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time" (Princeton). Lawrence Buell is Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harvard University. His many books include "Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the United States and Beyond".

Table of Contents

Introduction: Planet and America, Set and Subset	p. 1
The Field, the Nation, the World	p. 17
Global and Babel: Language and Planet in American Literature	p. 19
The Deterritorialization of American Literature	p. 39
Unthinking Manifest Destiny: Muslim Modernities on Three Continents	p. 62
Eastern Europe as Test Case	p. 101
Mr. Styron's Planet	p. 103
Planetary Circles: Philip Roth, Emerson, Kundera	p. 141
Local and Global	p. 169
World Bank Drama	p. 171
Global Minoritarian Culture	p. 184
Atlantic to Pacific: James, Todorov, Blackmur, and Intercontinental Form	p. 196
Ecoglobalist Affects: The Emergence of U.S. Environmental Imagination on a Planetary Scale	p. 227
At the Borders of American Crime Fiction	p. 249
African, Caribbean, American: Black English as Creole Tongue	p. 274
Index	p. 301
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