Through Other Continents (ebook)

Argumento de Through Other Continents (ebook)

Honorable Mention for the 2007 Harry Levin Prize, American Comparative Literature Association
Honorable Mention for the James Russell Lowell Prize

"Wai Chee Dimock's provocative and original new book should serve as a methodological manifesto for the burgeoning field of transnational American literary studies."--Mark Pedretti, Emerson Society Papers

"Across Other Continents is a brave attempt at reading outside the box. Dimock's archive is idiosyncratic and her reading practice, as befits her thesis, rhizomatic. She roams broadly over fields of philosophy, science, ethics, anthropology, art history, philology, and religious history to create links between far-flung elements. Occasionally the tendrils that link disparate texts are gossamer thin, while others are startlingly resilient."--Michael Davidson, Novel

"Offering new ways of reading, analyzing, and critiquing literature, Dimock's book will be invaluable to scholars of American literature, literary theory, comparative literature, and cultural studies."--Choice

"In Through Other Continents Wai Chee Dimock has created a provocative and altogether compelling vision of American literature as a global phenomenon. At once a set of wide-ranging illustrations and a map for the future, her study will permanently alter the boundaries, and therefore the national implications, of American literary scholarship."--Eric J. Sundquist, UCLA

"This is a wonderful book, of the highest importance, which brings to fruition Dimock's recent proposals in a number of articles. I expect the book to be very widely read, discussed, and no doubt debated. The book offers a model not merely for a new way to study American literature, but also the beginnings of a new relation between comparative literature and the study of American literature."--Jonathan Arac, Columbia University

"Dimock's timely and wide-ranging book will change the discussion of the effect of globalization on the field of American literary studies. Invoking the historical depth of what she calls planetary literature to redraw the map of American literature, Dimock argues that this literature has not been disrupted by globalization. Rather, American literature is one of the tributaries of the planet's literary system."--Donald E. Pease, Dartmouth College

"Through Other Continents makes good on Dimock's proposal for a more imaginative and more capacious reading of not only American literature, but literature in general. It adds a unique voice to current discussions of global culture, literary studies in a postnational frame, transnational cultural studies, and the disciplines of American studies and comparative literature. This is a highly original and thoroughly engaging piece of scholarship."--David Palumbo-Liu, Stanford University

"In a series of bold and brilliant thought experiments, Through Other Continents extends the horizons of 'American literature' as no one has done before. It accomplishes nothing less than the creation of a genuinely new critical framework and idiom for reconceiving the field on a planetary scale. For years Americanists have been calling for a new transnationalism. No one has responded to that call more eloquently and originally than Wai Chee Dimock."--Lawrence Buell, Harvard University

"[S]tartlingly original and compelling studies of a diverse array of authors . . . . [A] groundbreaking book . . . Dimock's sheer knack for linking abstract theoretical issues with concrete historical illustrations . . . is on impressive display throughout."--Robert Kern, Modern Philology0List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction
Planet as Duration and Extension 1
Chapter One: Global Civil Society: Thoreau on Three Continents 7
Chapter Two: World Religions: Emerson, Hafiz, Christianity, Islam 23
Chapter Three: The Planetary Dead: Margaret Fuller, Ancient Egypt, Italian Revolution 52
Chapter Four: Genre as World System: Epic, Novel, Henry James 73
Chapter Five: Transnational Beauty: Aesthetics and Treason, Kant and Pound 107
Chapter Six: Nonstandard Time: Robert Lowell, Latin Translations, Vietnam War 123
Chapter Seven: African, Caribbean, American: Black English as Creole Tongue 142
Chapter Eight: Ecology across the Pacific: Coyote in Sanskrit, Monkey in Chinese 166
Notes 197
Index 237