This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and ...impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1996.
Through other continents Dimock, Wai Chee; Dimock, Wai Chee
2006., 20081020, 2008, 2006, 2009, c2006., 2007-01-01
eBook
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.
Shades of the planet Dimock, Wai Chee; Buell, Lawrence
2018., 20180605, 2018, 2007
eBook
In a globalizing age, studying American literature in isolation from the rest of the world seems less and less justified. But is the conceptual box of the nation dispensable? And what would American ...literature look like without it?Leading scholars take up this debate in Shades of the Planet, beginning not with the United States as center, but with the world as circumference. This reversed frame yields a surprising landscape, alive with traces of West Africa, Eastern Europe, Iran, Iraq, India, China, Mexico, and Australia. The Broadway musical Oklahoma! has aboriginal antecedents; Black English houses an African syntax; American slavery consorts with the Holocaust; Philip Roth keeps company with Milan Kundera; the crime novel moves south of the border; and R. P. Blackmur lectures in Japan. A national literature becomes haunted by the world when that literature is seen extending to the Pacific, opening up to Islam, and accompanying African-American authors as they travel. Highlighting American literature as a fold in a planet-wide fabric, this pioneering volume transforms the field, redrawing its institutional as well as geographical map.The contributors are Rachel Adams, Jonathan Arac, Homi K. Bhabha, Lawrence Buell, Wai Chee Dimock, Susan Stanford Friedman, Paul Giles, David Palumbo-Liu, Ross Posnock, Joseph Roach, and Eric J. Sundquist.
I'll be using low-bar networks as a conceptual tool to think about Faulkner as a Southern writer trying to atone for his region's past through just such weak ties. To the terms proposed by Latour, ...Granovetter, and Rainie and Wellman, I would like to add two more. The network I will be exploring is for the most part an affective network: it has to do with forms of emotional life, what Raymond Williams in Marxism and Literature calls " structures of feeling ": not quite a philosophy or worldview but simply a "practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity."
Dimock discusses a weaker, lower-level kind of theorizing making no prediction about the primacy of any genre and no prediction either about its being the last word. This approach is not offered in ...strict opposition to Mikhail Bakhtin, partly because the bold assertions outlined seem qualified by his own practical criticism and by some of his late writings. Here, he looks to a different work, then, as his example of sovereign theory, one focused on science rather than literature, but important, as sounding board and foil, openly articulating its absolutism. He introduces a trio of genres--fiction, drama, and poetry--variously represented by Henry James, Colm Toibin, and W. B. Yeats.
Wai Chee Dimock, introduction to American Literature in the World: An Anthology from Anne Bradstreet to Octavia Butler, ed. Wai Chee Dimock et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 1–18.
The Survival of the Unfit Dimock, Wai Chee
Daedalus,
01/2021, Letnik:
150, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Is there room for weaklings in Darwin’s theory of evolution? The “survival of the fittest” – that muscular phrase taken from Herbert Spencer – would seem to suggest not. A more nuanced and ...counterintuitive picture emerges, however, when fitness is remapped: as a form of mutuality between the human and the nonhuman, rather than an exclusively human attribute vested in a single individual. I explore that possibility in the contemporary novel, a genre evolving steadily away from its Victorian antecedent, and circling back to the epic to reclaim an elemental realism, alert to the reparative as well as destructive forces of the nonhuman world. In Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible and Richard Powers’s The Overstory, these nonhuman forces turn the novel into a shelter for disabled characters, granting them a testing ground and a future all the more vital for being uncertain.
Abstract
“I Can’t Breathe, 2020: The Arts and Sciences of Oxygen” proposes a literary criticism responsive to the existential crises of our time, working at the intersection of the linguistic, the ...physiological, and the atmospheric. Bringing together disciplines usually kept apart, this crisis-responsive genre remaps the input networks of literature, highlighting human agency on opposing ends of the spectrum. Both senses of the anthropogenic are at work here. Human causation is harm-mitigating as well as harm-bearing. Native American literature and pandemic responses provide a compelling archive for this approach. Often discussed only in terms of harm, this body of evidence in fact also shows harm partly alleviated, suggesting that reparative agency is possible, and that diversifying our investigative lens might be one way to begin. Joy Harjo—poet, musician, and former premed major—is a salient test case. “For Alva Benson” and “Ah, Ah,” like her blog posts, and like her saxophone playing, dwell on the respiratory chemistry of the human body as our precarious common ground. This chemistry integrates the arts and sciences of oxygen as physiological need, survival baseline, and expressive medium, speaking to the burden of the past, and holding out the perils and promise of the future.
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