Through Other Continents

[Dave Monroe]

Dimock, Wai Chee.  Through Other Continents:
   American Literature across Deep Time.
   Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2006.

"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 invokes the duration and extension
of the planet as her coordinates, arguing that
American literature is answerable not to the
nation-state, but to the human species as a whole.

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8296.html


 
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