Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

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

Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern BodiesThinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary WestYearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural PoliticsGender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial thought and historical difference

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

The madwoman in the attic :the woman writer and thenineteenth-century literary imagination

Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science

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

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/648032

Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time

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?

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/25501790

Introduction: Genres as Fields of Knowledge

I begin with a simple observation.1 Here is a list of some of the most influential books in the field, published in the past 60 years: F. 0. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (1941); R. W B. Lewis, The American Adam (1955); Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (1978); Myra Jehlen, American Incarnation: The Individual, The Nation, and The Continent (1986); and Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (1995). A lot has changed in the past 60 years, but one thing has not. One word is still there, still holding court. What does it mean to refer to a body of writing as American? What assumptions enable us to take an adjective derived from a territorial unit-an America, a set of spatial coordinates on a map-and turn it into a mode of literary causality: a set of attributes based on the territorial, determined by it, and subsumable under its jurisdiction? Physical space, in this paradigm, is endlessly reinscribed in other spheres of life: it becomes a political entity, an economic entity, a cultural entity. All of these are its replica; all warrant the use of the adjective American. There is a kind of causal chain gang at work here. We assume that there is a perfect fit, a seamless correspondence, between the geographical boundaries of the nation and the boundaries of all its other operative domains. And, because this correspondence takes the form of a lockstepped entailment-because its causality goes all the way up and all the way down-we assume there is a literary domain that lines up in just the same way. This is why the adjective American can serve as literary description. Using it, we assume, with or without explicit acknowledgment, that literature is an effect, an epiphenomenon, of the US, territorially predicated and territorially describable. American literary studies as a discipline is largely founded on this fateful adjective. This governs the domain of inquiry we construct, the range of questions we entertain, the kind of evidence we take as significant. The very professionalism of the field rests on the integrity and the legitimacy of this founding concept.2 Not surprisingly, its disciplinary stranglehold has tightened rather

Deep Time: American Literature and World History

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."

Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism

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.

Wai Chee Dimock

Papers

Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time

Introduction: Genres as Fields of Knowledge

Deep Time: American Literature and World History

Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism

A Theory of Resonance