Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time

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.

About the Author :
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.

Review :
"Honorable Mention for the James Russell Lowell Prize" "Honorable Mention for the 2007 Harry Levin Prize, American Comparative Literature Association" "Offering new ways of reading, analyzing, and critiquing literature, Dimock's book will be invaluable to scholars of American literature, literary theory, comparative literature, and cultural studies."-- "Choice" "Across Other Continents is a brave attempt at reading outside the box. Dimock's archive is idiosyncratic and her reading practice, as befits her thesis, rhizomatic. She roams broadly over fields of philosophy, science, ethics, anthropology, art history, philology, and religious history to create links between far-flung elements. Occasionally the tendrils that link disparate texts are gossamer thin, while others are startlingly resilient."---Michael Davidson, Novel "[S]tartlingly original and compelling studies of a diverse array of authors . . . . [A] groundbreaking book . . . Dimock's sheer knack for linking abstract theoretical issues with concrete historical illustrations . . . is on impressive display throughout."---Robert Kern, Modern Philology "Wai Chee Dimock's provocative and original new book should serve as a methodological manifesto for the burgeoning field of transnational American literary studies."---Mark Pedretti, Emerson Society Papers