Through Other Continents

by Dimock, Wai Chee

• ISBN13: 9780691114507
• ISBN10: 0691114501
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-10-20
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

What we call American literature is quite often a shorthand, a simplified name for an extended tangle of relations." This is the argument ofThrough Other Continents, Wai Chee Dimock's sustained effort to read American literature as a subset of world literature.Inspired by an unorthodox archive--ranging from epic traditions in Akkadian and Sanskrit to folk art, paintings by Veronese and Tiepolo, and the music of the Grateful Dead--Dimock constructs a long history of the world, a history she calls "deep time." The civilizations of Mesopotamia, India, Egypt, China, and West Africa, as well as Europe, leave their mark on American literature, which looks dramatically different when it is removed from a strictly national or English-language context. Key authors such as Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, Gary Snyder, Leslie Silko, Gloria Naylor, and Gerald Vizenor are transformed in this light. Emerson emerges as a translator of Islamic culture; Henry James's novels become long-distance kin toGilgamesh; and Black English loses its ungrammaticalness when reclassified as a creole tongue, meshing the input from Africa, Europe, and the Americas.Throughout, Dimock contends that American literature is answerable not to the nation-state, but to the human species as a whole, and that it looks dramatically different when removed from a strictly national or English-language context.

Author Biography

Wai Chee Dimock is the William Lampson Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University. She is the author of Empire for Liberty (Princeton) and Residues of Justice

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction: Planet as Duration and Extension	p. 1
Global Civil Society: Thoreau on Three Continents	p. 7
World Religions: Emerson, Hafiz, Christianity, Islam	p. 23
The Planetary Dead: Margaret Fuller, Ancient Egypt, Italian Revolution	p. 52
Genre as World System: Epic, Novel, Henry James	p. 73
Transnational Beauty: Aesthetics and Treason, Kant and Pound	p. 107
Nonstandard Time: Robert Lowell, Latin Translations, Vietnam War	p. 123
African, Caribbean, American: Black English as Creole Tongue	p. 142
Ecology across the Pacific: Coyote in Sanskrit, Monkey in Chinese	p. 166
Notes	p. 197
Index	p. 237
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.