Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time

After taking the author’s Yale course I was looking forward to reading her theories. Well. I read them. Not impressed.

This book is a breathtaking roller-coaster ride through American literature, but not the American literature you usually find in anthologies. Dimock's study embraces texts like the Bhagavad Gita and the Egyptian Book of the Dead, engages with disciplines like geometry and physics, and places Henry James beside Gilgamesh and Coyote stories beside the legends of Hanuman. Best of all, you can actually read it. Oh, how I love literary criticism that's also good writing!I was a little disappointed in the chapter on Black English, as I'd hoped Dimock would choose a particular text and explore it with the passion she showed in her treatment of, for example, The Golden Bowl. I was also surprised that Africa failed to pop up in her discussion of trickster stories. These disappointments are very small, however, in comparison to the great pleasure and enlightenment I got out of the book. Dimock takes risks: anyone who ranges as broadly as she does, who touches on as many different subjects, is going to be exposed to being "caught out" by specialists in various fields. The risks are worth it. Dimock's essays are always suggestive, and sometimes dazzling. Highly recommended.

This study, rightly called by one of its endorsements, a "thought experiment," really does shake up the world-space (geoimaginary) and chronological-time (history) coordinates of what we take "American literature" to be. It does so via taking, quite inventively in each of the eight chapters, a "deep time" and "fractal" approach to reading literature that cuts across the usual divisions and taken-for-granted nation-state or continental coordinates, such that Emerson and Hafiz and the Grateful Dead refigure a deeper relation to Mesopotamia; Gary Snyder's deep ecology linkages decenter US into a transpacific biosphere; Robert Lowell's translations and synchronic poetics overlay US global power and the falling Roman empire; Margaret Fulller tampers with Egyptian and Italian spectral forces of renewal; Thoreau's Walden pond and Concord rivers open up to Asia, the Americas, and Africa in the forging (prefiguring) of a global civil society based upon non-violence and the pursuit of just action; the Golden Bowl worries narrative romance with epic-like overlays of imperial figurations and foreign hauntings of aesthetic plunder."Through Other Continents" painstakingly shows how this nexus of literary inventiveness (embedded in transactions of genre, language, trope, community, polity, ecology, world religion) has worked, as a relay of worlding figurations and energy influx, in the past and present. Sources and influences resonate with these differently worlded configurations of space/time relativity. The very notion of what we take "globalization" to be is seemingly wrested away from the neo-liberal teleology of market time and "the world is flat" integration. This is a work of ingenious imagination, elegant learning, planetary necessity, and poetic inventiveness: in a time of amplified global-local interface and danger, American literature is made new, clotted, and strange by these coalitional transactions, above and below the nation frame and across civilizational divides. These passings "through other continents" and scalar shifts can alter how we imagine "space" and "time" and "language" shape (or, more to the point) are shaped by the literature that such planetary-minded Americans can create. This Amazon-com reviewer, "he went down to Deep Elem, now his preaching days are thru."