Wai Chee Dimock

Bio: Wai Chee Dimock is an academic researcher from University of Chicago. The author has contributed to research in topics: Literary criticism & Historicism. The author has an hindex of 16, co-authored 50 publications receiving 1301 citations. Previous affiliations of Wai Chee Dimock include Yale University.

Shades of the planet : American literature as world literature

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

Residues of Justice: Literature, Law, Philosophy

Abstract: In this arresting book, Wai Chee Dimock takes on the philosophical tradition from Kant to Rawls, challenging its conception of justice as foundational, self-evident, and all-encompassing. The idea of justice is based on the premise that the world can be resolved into commensurate terms: punishment equal to the crime, redress equal to the injury, benefit equal to the desert. Dimock focuses, however, on what remains unexhausted, unrecovered, and noncorresponding in the exercise of justice. To honour these 'residues', she turns to literature, which, in its linguistic density, transposes the clean abstractions of law and philosophy into persistent shadows, the abiding presence of the incommensurate. Justice can only be a partial answer to the phenomenon of human conflict.In arguing for justice as an incomplete virtue, Dimock draws upon legal history, political philosophy, linguistics, theology, and feminist theory; she discusses Aristotle and Augustine, Locke and Luther, Marx and Durkheim, Michael Sandel and Carol Gilligan, Noam Chomsky and Mary Ann Glendon. She also examines an unusual configuration of nineteenth-century American authors, pairing figures such as Herman Melville and Rebecca Harding Davis, Walt Whitman and Susan Warner. The result is a book both passionate and scholarly. It invites us to rethink the meanings of literature, law, and philosophy, and to imagine a language of community more supple and more nuanced than the language of justice.

Debasing Exchange : Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth

Abstract: " ... you got reckless-thought you could turn me inside out and chuck me in the gutter like an empty purse. But, by gad, that ain't playing fair: that's dodging the rules of the game. Of course I know now what you wanted-it wasn't my beautiful eyes you were after-but I tell you what, Miss Lily, you've got to pay up for making me think so." . . . "Pay up?" she faltered. "Do you mean that I owe you money?" He laughed again. "Oh, I'm not asking for payment in kind. But there's such a thing as fair play-and interest on one's money-and hang me if I've had as much as a look from you-" (Wharton, House 145-46)

Literature for the Planet

Abstract: What happens when a text is read in different centuries, different countries? The fate of the Divine Comedy in the Soviet Union suggests one answer. Focusing on Osip Mandelstam's intense attachment to Dante and thinking generally about the consequences of a globalizing readership, this essay argues for literature as a peculiar form of “life,” a planetary life. Not biological like an organism and not territorial like a nation, this form of life extends across linguistic borders and across the borders of chronology. This form of life comprises a population of temporal hybrids: “translations” that disrupt the territorial sovereignty of the state, even as they disrupt its regime of simultaneity.

Rethinking class : literary studies and social formations

Abstract: In recent years, as the centrality of race and gender has been established in literary studies, class has often been seen as a crude and reductionist concept. For this volume, the editors have commissioned essays arguing for the continuing vitality as well as the energizing problematics of the category of class. The book's introduction addresses the ways that the concept of class has been employed in both literary and historical analysis, and the importance of a renewed interest in class in the current trend toward historicism. The first section of the book restores class to its moment of inception as both a theoretical construct and an objectively descriptive category. In the second section, the contributors test some of the general propositions set forth by examining the categorization of class as itself a history and a problematic. The text concludes by asking how the category of class can enrich and complicate our response to specific literary texts.

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

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

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

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