Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time
4/5
()
About this 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.
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.
Wai Chee Dimock
Enter the Author Bio(s) here.
Read more from Wai Chee Dimock
Weak Planet: Literature and Assisted Survival Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEmpire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsResidues of Justice: Literature, Law, Philosophy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to Through Other Continents
Related ebooks
Knowledge LTD: Toward a Social Logic of the Derivative Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDispossession and Dissent: Immigrants and the Struggle for Housing in Madrid Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRehabilitating Bodies: Health, History, and the American Civil War Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Error and the Academic Self: The Scholarly Imagination, Medieval to Modern Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPoetry, Geography, Gender: Women Rewriting Contemporary Wales Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEcosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Connected Condition: Romanticism and the Dream of Communication Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAt the Precipice: New Mexico's Changing Climate Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAvant Canada: Poets, Prophets, Revolutionaries Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBeautiful Waste: Poems by David McComb Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Freaks of History Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCrossing Borders, Drawing Boundaries: The Rhetoric of Lines across America Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRemainders: American Poetry at Nature's End Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOde to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBefore Recollection Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Monstrous Politics: Geography, Rights, and the Urban Revolution in Mexico City Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsUnderstanding Lee Smith Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGhost-Watching American Modernity: Haunting, Landscape, and the Hemispheric Imagination Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Museum of Disappearing Sounds Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe First Book: Twentieth-Century Poetic Careers in America Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNarrowcast: Poetry and Audio Research Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMaking Literature Now Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDomesticating Empire: Enlightenment in Spanish America Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsExtraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBorder Rhetorics: Citizenship and Identity on the US-Mexico Frontier Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWaterworlds: Anthropology in Fluid Environments Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAnimals and Other People: Literary Forms and Living Beings in the Long Eighteenth Century Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNight for the Lady, A Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Luminous presence: Derek Jarman's life-writing Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPhysics Envy: American Poetry and Science in the Cold War and After Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Literary Criticism For You
One Hundred Years of Solitude: A Novel by Gabriel Garcia Márquez | Conversation Starters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The 48 Laws of Power: by Robert Greene | Conversation Starters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Art of Seduction: by Robert Greene | Conversation Starters Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/512 Rules For Life: by Jordan Peterson | Conversation Starters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Verity: by Colleen Hoover | Conversation Starters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Man's Search for Meaning: by Viktor E. Frankl | Conversation Starters Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Letters to a Young Poet Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Power of Habit: by Charles Duhigg | Conversation Starters Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A study guide for Frank Herbert's "Dune" Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Circe: by Madeline Miller | Conversation Starters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Court of Thorns and Roses: A Novel by Sarah J. Maas | Conversation Starters Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself by Michael A. Singer | Conversation Starters Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain | Conversation Starters Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Bad Feminist: Essays Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5SUMMARY Of The Plant Paradox: The Hidden Dangers in Healthy Foods That Cause Disease and Weight Gain Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Book of Virtues Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Just Kids: A National Book Award Winner Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts.by Brené Brown | Conversation Starters Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Reader’s Companion to J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Through Other Continents
1 rating0 reviews