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.

World Literature on Facebook

Abstract: These days, it is impossible to look at the news without finding Facebook in one headline or another. Many are prompted by the leaking of personal information. But a few critics have also called attention to a different kind of problem, having less to do with privacy than with the nature of Facebook as a social medium. Writing in the New York Review of Books, Charles Petersen makes much of its genesis in an Ivy League dorm room: “While Microsoft could as easily have originated at MIT or Caltech, it was no accident that Facebook came from Harvard.” He goes on to analyze the ethos of the site as the digital equivalent of the preppie look: well scrubbed and well behaved, prankish on occasion but in the end clean and safe and bland. The site's juvenile “principle of in loco parentis” has given way to the “authoritarian building codes” of the suburbs, with more legroom perhaps but no less supervised and no less homogeneous, a “chilling and puritanical atmosphere” (9–10).

Preface: Literature and Science: Cultural Forms, Conceptual Exchanges

Abstract: In his Rede Lecture of 1959, the English scientist and novelist C. P. Snow coined the phrase ‘‘two cultures’’ to describe a disjunction between the sciences and the humanities that, he believed, both signaled and produced grave social problems. Four years later he explained that his primary objective in the lecture was to sharpen ‘‘the concern of rich and privileged societies for those less lucky.’’ But what amazed, angered, or amused his ever broadening audience, and subsequently became the chief legacy of the piece, was his claim that ‘‘the intellectual life of the whole western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups.’’ Humanists and scientists, he argued, have nothing in common: from their assembled data to their research methods, from the way they think to the way they talk, ‘‘a gulf of mutual incomprehension’’ divides them. They inhabit, in an anthropological sense, two cultures. The accuracy of Snow’s comments is not our concern in this special issue. We are interested more in what Jay Clayton, in his essay in this volume, calls a ‘‘convergence.’’ On the one hand, scientific specializations have moved at such a pace that the untrained are virtually illiterate. On the other hand, the practical impact of this specialized knowledge—from reproductive technologies to electronic archives, from bioterrorism to gene therapy—makes science illiteracy no longer an option. Scholars in the humanities simply have to come to terms with these forces of change. Unpersuaded by the language of crisis with which some cultural observers have responded to the current situation, we see an opportunity for creative and productive responses to the emergence of new forms of knowledge, of cross-disciplinary

Rethinking Space, Rethinking Rights: Literature, Law, Science

Abstract: Does the radius of the "interdisciplinary" extend so far as to encompass literature, law, and science? Do these three fields meet in any meaningful ways, in ways that bear on all three, clarifying the claims, the limits, and the premises of each? In answering "yes," this essay argues, not for a necessary, determinate relation between these fields, but for a dynamic continuum evolving through them, tracing a deeprooted genealogy among some of their operating terms. This essay explores that genealogy. More specifically, it calls attention to the spatial postulate implicit in the concept of rights, juxtaposing it against the scientific debate between "absolute" versus "relative" space. That debate, a turning point in modern physics, the point at which Newton gives way to Einstein, issues a corresponding challenge to other domains of thought. This essay takes that challenge to ethics, especially to the space of rights in the Kantian tradition. Kant's grounding of ethics--his location of it in a domain that is given rather than derived, formal rather than empirical--is itself an abstraction of Newtonian absolute space, and must be reexamined in light of the latter's proven limits. Against Kant's a priori formalism, it might be helpful to develop a theory of "conditionality," along the lines suggested by Einstein, and by philosophers such as Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Hans Reichenbach, Rudolf Carnap, and John Dewey. The essay ends by looking at another instance of conditional space -- in the literary genre called New England "local color." The short stories by Mary Wilkins Freeman are not, strictly speaking, responses to Newton and Kant. Still, they do play out the consequences of a different set of spatial postulates. The moral terrain here is one of conflicting and overlapping claims. Its desired endpoint is not an integral affirmation of rights, but linked compromises and concessions.

Rethinking Space, Rethinking Rights: Literature, Law, Science

Abstract: Does the radius of the "interdisciplinary" extend so far as to encompass literature, law, and science? Do these three fields meet in any meaningful ways, in ways that bear on all three, clarifying the claims, the limits, and the premises of each? In answering "yes," this essay argues, not for a necessary, determinate relation between these fields, but for a dynamic continuum evolving through them, tracing a deeprooted genealogy among some of their operating terms. This essay explores that genealogy. More specifically, it calls attention to the spatial postulate implicit in the concept of rights, juxtaposing it against the scientific debate between "absolute" versus "relative" space. That debate, a turning point in modern physics, the point at which Newton gives way to Einstein, issues a corresponding challenge to other domains of thought. This essay takes that challenge to ethics, especially to the space of rights in the Kantian tradition. Kant's grounding of ethics--his location of it in a domain that is given rather than derived, formal rather than empirical--is itself an abstraction of Newtonian absolute space, and must be reexamined in light of the latter's proven limits. Against Kant's a priori formalism, it might be helpful to develop a theory of "conditionality," along the lines suggested by Einstein, and by philosophers such as Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Hans Reichenbach, Rudolf Carnap, and John Dewey. The essay ends by looking at another instance of conditional space -- in the literary genre called New England "local color." The short stories by Mary Wilkins Freeman are not, strictly speaking, responses to Newton and Kant. Still, they do play out the consequences of a different set of spatial postulates. The moral terrain here is one of conflicting and overlapping claims. Its desired endpoint is not an integral affirmation of rights, but linked compromises and concessions.

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