Showing papers by "Wai Chee Dimock published in 2006"

Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time

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

Genre as World System: Epic and Novel on Four Continents

Abstract: What would literary history look like if the field were divided, not into discrete periods, and not into discrete bodies of national literatures? What other organizing principles might come into play? And how would they affect the mapping of “literature” as an analytic object: the length and width of the field; its lines of filiation, lines of differentiation; the database needed in order to show significant continuity or significant transformation; and the bounds of knowledge delineated, the arguments emerging as a result? In this essay, I propose one candidate to begin this line of rethinking: the concept of literary genre. Genre, of course, is not a new concept; in fact, it is as old as the recorded history of humankind. Even though the word itself is of relatively recent vintage (derived from French, in turn derived from the Latin genus), 1 the idea that there are different kinds of literature (or at least different kinds of poetry) came from ancient Greece. Traditionally it has been seen as a classifying principle, putting the many subsets of literature under the rule of normative sets. Theorists like Benedotto Croce have objected to it on just these grounds. “[I]nstead of asking before a work of art if it be expressive and what it expresses,” genre criticism only wants to label it, putting it into a pigeonhole, asking only “if it obey the laws of epic or of tragedy.” Nothing can be more misguided, Croce says, for these “laws of the kinds” have never in fact been observed by practicing writers (36 ‐37). 2 Derrida makes the same point. “As soon as genre announces itself, one

Scales of Aggregation: Prenational, Subnational, Transnational

Abstract: What can one say about transnational, citizenship, and humanities? The three key terms, combined in this fashion, probably sound novel, but do they bring anything new? Each of the contributors to this issue has proceeded with some degree of caution We simply put three terms on the table, fully aware that each is fraught, that each can be ironized, and that their intimated directionality might be no more than an illusion Rather than acting as a spur, three arrows pointing toward a brave new future, transnational, citizenship, and humanities might look like the latest symptoms of a world spinning out of control, occasioned on the one hand by the diminished sovereignty of the nation-state and on the other hand by the diminished value of our own work, both unstoppable, it seems, a downward spiral As the bombings in New York, Madrid, and London make abundantly clear, the continued existence of national borders only highlights the shared hazard of those inside those borders And the continued existence of English departments only highlights the across-the-board decline of the discipline, the sense that innovation is now coming from fields other than our own It is in this context, as we are being lumped again and again into corporate units-often with a less-than-happy profile-that aggregation becomes a pressing issue Aggregation: not only as it produces random and nonrandom sets of casualties, but also as it generates different kinds of filiations on different scales, opening up the question of what counts as an entity, the platform on which it emerges, the agency available to it, and the pressure that this scalar variety exerts on more conventional forms, such as the form of the nation The work of Aihwa Ong is exemplary here As an anthropologist, Ong tends to aggregate down rather than up, towards fairly small, empirically-constrained units; her goal is to test grand concepts against the delimited data of ethnographic fieldwork On what scale should we study the transnational? How does it mesh with the