Through other continents : American literature across deep time / Wai Chee Dimock.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Dimock, Wai-chee, 1953-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--Foreign influences.

American literature.

American literature--History and criticism.

Globalization in literature.

Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (258 p.)

Edition:

Course Book

Place of Publication:

Princeton, N.J. ; Woodstock : Princeton University Press, 2009.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

What we call American literature is quite often a shorthand, a simplified name for an extended tangle of relations." This is the argument of Through Other Continents, Wai Chee Dimock's sustained effort to read American literature as a subset of world literature. Inspired by an unorthodox archive--ranging from epic traditions in Akkadian and Sanskrit to folk art, paintings by Veronese and Tiepolo, and the music of the Grateful Dead--Dimock constructs a long history of the world, a history she calls "deep time." The civilizations of Mesopotamia, India, Egypt, China, and West Africa, as well as Europe, leave their mark on American literature, which looks dramatically different when it is removed from a strictly national or English-language context. Key authors such as Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, Gary Snyder, Leslie Silko, Gloria Naylor, and Gerald Vizenor are transformed in this light. Emerson emerges as a translator of Islamic culture; Henry James's novels become long-distance kin to Gilgamesh; and Black English loses its ungrammaticalness when reclassified as a creole tongue, meshing the input from Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Throughout, Dimock contends that American literature is answerable not to the nation-state, but to the human species as a whole, and that it looks dramatically different when removed from a strictly national or English-language context.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Planet as Duration and Extension

Chapter 1. Global Civil Society: Thoreau on Three Continents

Chapter 2. World Religions: Emerson, Hafiz, Christianity, Islam

Chapter 3. The Planetary Dead: Margaret Fuller, Ancient Egypt, Italian Revolution

Chapter 4. Genre as World System: Epic, Novel, Henry James

Chapter 5. Transnational Beauty: Aesthetics and Treason, Kant and Pound

Chapter 6. Nonstandard Time: Robert Lowell, Latin Translations, Vietnam War

Chapter 7. African, Caribbean, American: Black English as Creole Tongue

Chapter 8. Ecology across the Pacific: Coyote in Sanskrit, Monkey in Chinese

Notes

Index

Notes:

Originally published: 2006.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9786612463228

9781282463226

1282463225

9781400829521

1400829526

OCLC:

700687112