Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time

Description

Argues that what we call American literature is quite often a shorthand, a simplified name for an extended tangle of relations. This book 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 national or English-language context.

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".

Honorable Mention for the 2007 Harry Levin Prize, American Comparative Literature Association Honorable Mention for the James Russell Lowell Prize "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 "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 "[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