"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.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Planet as duration and extension
Chapter One
Global civil society: Thoreau on three continents
Chapter Two
World religions: Emerson, Hafiz, Christianity, Islam
Chapter Three
The planetary dead: Margaret fuller, ancient egypt, italian revolustion
Chapter Four
Genre as world system: Epic, novel, henry james
Chapter Five
Transnational beauty: Aesthetics and treasonm kant and pound
Chapter Six
Nonstandard time: Robert lowell, latin translations, vietnam war
Chapter Seven
African, Caribbean, American: Black english as creole tongue
Chapter Eight
Ecology across the pacific: Coyote in sanskrit, monkey in chinese
notes
index
Wai Chee Dimock is William Lampson Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University. She is the author of "Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism" (Princeton) and "Residues of Justice: Literature, Law, Philosophy".
