Wai Chee Dimock

Abstract: List 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

Abstract: What exactly are genres? Are they a classifying system matching the phenomenal world of objects, a sorting principle that separates oranges from apples? Or are they less than that, a taxonomy that never fully taxonomizes, labels that never quite keep things straight? What archives come with genres, what critical lexicons do they offer, and what maps do they yield? And how does the rise of digitization change these archives, lexicons, and maps?

Abstract: Wai Chee Dimock approaches Herman Melville not as a timeless genius, but as a historical figure caught in the politics of an imperial nation and an "imperial self." She challenges our customary view by demonstrating a link between the individualism that enabled Melville to write as a sovereign author and the nationalism that allowed America to grow into what Jefferson hoped would be an "empire for liberty."

Abstract: Does a literary text remain the same object across time? This essay answers no and bases a defense of literature on that answer. Temporal extension, a phenomenon neglected in contemporary literary studies, makes some meanings unrecoverable and others newly possible. A text endures as a nonintegral survivor, an echo of what it was and of what it might become, its resonance changing with shifts in interpretive contexts. Since this resonance cannot be addressed by synchronic historicism, I propose an alternative, diachronic historicism, inspired especially by scientific theories on background noise, by Einstein's account of the relativity of simultaneity, and by critiques of the visual bias in Western epistemology. I try to theorize the text as a temporal continuum, thick with receding and incipient nuances, exercising the ears of readers in divergent ways and yielding its words to contrary claims. Literature thus encourages a semantic democracy that honors disagreement as a crucial fact of civil society.

Abstract: Introduction: Planet and America, Set and Subset by Wai Chee Dimock 1 PART ONE: The Field, the Nation, the World 17 Chapter 1: Global and Babel: Language and Planet in American Literature by Jonathan Arac 19 Chapter 2: The Deterritorialization of American Literature by Paul Giles 39 Chapter 3: Unthinking Manifest Destiny: Muslim Modernities on Three Continents bySusan Stanford Friedman 62 PART TWO: Eastern Europe as Test Case 101 Chapter 4: Mr. Styron's Planet by Eric J. Sundquist 103 Chapter 5: Planetary Circles: Philip Roth, Emerson, Kundera by Ross Posnock 141 PART THREE: Local and Global 169 Chapter 6: World Bank Drama by Joseph Roach 171 Chapter 7: Global Minoritarian Culture by Homi K. Bhabha 184 Chapter 8: Atlantic to Pacific: James, Todorov, Blackmur, and Intercontinental Form by David Palumbo-Liu 196 Chapter 9: Ecoglobalist Affects: The Emergence of U.S. Environmental Imagination on a Planetary Scale by Lawrence Buell 227 Chapter 10: At the Borders of American Crime Fiction by Rachel Adams 249 Chapter 11: African, Caribbean, American: Black English as Creole Tongue by Wai Chee Dimock 274 Index 301

Abstract: (1995). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. History of European Ideas: Vol. 21, No. 5, pp. 721-722.

Abstract: Preface (1999) Preface (1990) 1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire I. 'Women' as the Subject of Feminism II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire III. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate IV. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary and Beyond V. Identity, Sex and the Metaphysics of Substance VI. Language, Power and the Strategies of Displacement 2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix I. Structuralism's Critical Exchange II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender IV. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification V. Reformulating Prohibition as Power 3. Subversive Bodily Acts I. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva II. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity III. Monique Wittig - Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex IV. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions Conclusion - From Parody to Politics

Abstract: I am like the needy knife-grinder — I have no story to tell. — Maria Edgeworth I dwell in Possibility — A fairer House than Prose — More numerous of Windows — Superior — for Doors — Emily Dickinson ... the modes of fainting should be all as different as possible and may be made very diverting. — The Girls’ Book of Diversions (ca. (1840) From Sappho to myself, consider the fate of women. How unwomanly to discuss it! — Carolyn Kizer