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Wai Chee Dimock

Other affiliations: Yale University
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.


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13 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore the possibility to map globalization along the axis of time rather than the plane of space, and explore it through a genre-based paradigm, inspired by Adorno and especially Lukacs.
Abstract: What difference does it make to map globalization along the axis of time rather than the axis of space? This essay tests that possibility, focusing on pre-national time and exploring it through a genre-based paradigm, inspired by Adorno and especially Lukacs. Adorno and Lukacs see genres as diachronic forms giving each individual work a backward as well as a forward extension. The ancient epic and the modern novel continually interact and must be read in tandem if literature is to be seen as a cumulative, global phenomenon. James's novels are global in just this way: looking back to The Odyssey and forward to Erza Pound's Cantos.

9 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In the Tractatus logico-logico-philosophicus (Tractatus Logico-Philosoph icus) as mentioned in this paper, Wittgenstein pointed out that what prevails as reality often does so haphazardly, at the expense of a much larger pool that has no compelling reason for not staying large "All that hap is a happenstance, a tightening of the causal net in one direction rather than another, one that, often for no good reason, drastically thins out the range of available options, reducing a multitudinous
Abstract: "Whatever we see could be other than it is," and "whatever we can describe at all could be other than it is," Wittgenstein writes in the Tractatus Logico-Philosoph icus (58) Wittgenstein is speaking here of a world that he refers to as a "limited whole" It is the world that we call "empirical"?the one that is manifest to us, that can be documented or demonstrated, and that appears to be the only world there is This apparent totality is deceptive, Wittgenstein says, for the empirical world is actu ally no more than a fraction, a subset, however self-contained, of a much larger uni verse That larger universe includes not only phenomena that have taken visible form but also phenomena that have not: a world resting just below the threshold of actual ization, made up of could-have-beens and could-still-bes These counterfactuals are, by our common parlance, non-events They are not considered part of history Yet not only are they real alternatives?cousins or even siblings to the real events?they are often comparable to the latter in their degree of likelihood, their probability of oc currence There is no logical reason why they should not have happened and, had they done so, what is now called "otherwise" would have been no more and no less than the real thing The stark antithesis between the two is a semantic distinction, in deed a fluke It is a happenstance, a tightening of the causal net in one direction rather than another, one that, often for no good reason, drastically thins out the range of available options, reducing a multitudinous world to a few hard facts Wittgenstein highlights just this random narrowing of a once-populous field He reminds us that what prevails as reality often does so haphazardly, at the expense of a much larger pool that has no compelling reason for not staying large "All that hap

7 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Anachronisms are freely strewn over the phraseology of Spielberg's Lincoln as discussed by the authors, and these words seem wrong because they are intruders, uninvited guests, contemporary expressions barging in upon the past, showing up in temporal locations where they could not possibly have been.
Abstract: “Anachronisms, though never so thick as to become an annoyance, are freely strewn over the phraseology of Spielberg’s Lincoln,” David Bromwich writes in the New York Review of Books (8). He frets over these undisguised and unapologetic signs of the present, in what ought to have been strictly a representation of the past. Among these, Bromwich cites Lincoln’s surprise visit to W. N. Bilbo, Tennessee lawyer and no-holds-barred vote-getter, culminating in Bilbo’s “Well I’ll be fucked!” These words seem wrong because they are intruders, uninvited guests, contemporary expressions barging in upon the past, showing up in temporal locations where they could not possibly have been. Unlike legitimate nineteenth-century expressions, at home in their environments and in turn making us at home, these out-of-place words distract us and disorient us, putting us on the wrong track, sending us back where we came from, into a medley of contemporary vibes and cross-references, just where we should not be. This is the unspoken, but very much taken-for-granted definition of anachronism: a form of spatial misbehavior with respect to time. The culprit could be a phrase, a material object, a technology— a salient article from the present exported backwards, a form of retroactivity that, in allowing the present to be visited upon the past, seems not only counterintuitive but downright contrary to nature. And that is indeed what the etymology suggests: from the Greek ἀνά

6 citations


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TL;DR: In this paper, Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism are discussed. And the history of European ideas: Vol. 21, No. 5, pp. 721-722.

13,842 citations

01 Jan 1992
TL;DR: The body politics of Julia Kristeva and the Body Politics of JuliaKristeva as discussed by the authors are discussed in detail in Section 5.1.1 and Section 6.2.1.
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

1,125 citations

01 Jan 1984
TL;DR: The modes of fainting should be all as different as possible and may be made very diverting. as discussed by the authors The Girls' Book of Diversions (ca. 1840) from Sappho to myself, consider the fate of women.
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

446 citations