eBook

Through other continents

Wai Chee Dimock

2006,2008,2009,2007

Overview

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.

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Subject: Aesthetic Theory / Aestheticism / Al-Ghazali / American / American and Ancient / American literature / American literature -- Foreign influences / American literature -- History and criticism / Ancient and American / Anti-Americanism / Antithesis / Barbarian / Barbarism (linguistics) / Benedict Anderson / Christianity / Civil disobedience / Civil society / Classical language / D. H. Lawrence / Despotism / Dialectic / Divine Comedy / Edward Said / Epic and Novel / Erudition / Etymology / Ezra Pound / Family resemblance / For All Practical Purposes / Foreign influences / Form of life (philosophy) / Garry Wills / Genre / Globalization in literature / Hannah Arendt / Henry David Thoreau / History and criticism / Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.) / Islam / Islamic literature / Jews / Juvenal / Karl Shapiro / Language & Literature / Lawrence Buell / LITERARY CRITICISM / LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General / Literature / Literature, Comparative / Literature, Comparative -- American and Ancient / Literature, Comparative -- Ancient and American / Mad scientist / Mark Rothko / Mary Moody Emerson / Modernity / Moralia / Multitude / Nation state / Neo-fascism / Orientalism / Perpetual peace / Philosophy / Poetry / Political philosophy / Prose / Racism / Rainer Maria Rilke / Religion / Sanskrit / Satyagraha / Scholasticism / Self-Reliance / Sovereignty / Superiority (short story) / Symptom / The Course of Empire / The Other Hand / The Persians / The Philosopher / The Sovereign State / Theory / Un-American / War / Warfare / William Styron / Writing
• ISBN: 0691114501, 9781400829521, 0691114498, 1400829526, 9780691114507, 9780691114491