American Literature for a Post-American Era (original) (raw)
Related papers
Borderwaters of US-American Literature (grad seminar syllabus)
2020
Syllabus and reading calendar for a grad seminar I taught Winter 2020, titled "Borderwaters of US American Literature." Course overview: During the first decades of the twentieth century, US and broader American historians innovated and elaborated on a historical model that centered on "the borderlands," a set of contested spaces at the margins and overlaps of European empires in the Americas. According to this model, the wild borderlands were moving toward domestication by means of nation-states' consolidations and superimpositions of geopolitical borders. In the 1980s, inspired by the Chicana scholar and activist Gloria Anzaldúa, Latinx critics also embraced a borderlands model of culture, now looking toward the geopolitical border (principally the US-Mexico border) as an unnatural line superimposed upon cultural continuums that have not stopped at borders, with the borderlands now emerging as the geographical and cultural arenas of anxiety and insurgence against unnatural geopolitical divisions. These two models of the borderlands-as advanced by American historians and Latinx scholars-have taken inspiration from one another in mutual ways, and have sometimes been leavened in recent years by the decolonial border thinking of Latin American intellectuals including Walter Mignolo. Today, the borderlands paradigm has to a large extent been universalized, deployed widely as a heuristic capable of illuminating cultural contestations, insurgencies, comminglings, and interactions regardless of place or time period. On one level, the universalization of the borderlands might seem benign enough, even if it may tend to evacuate the model's specificities and hence eventually meaning. However, acquiescing to the overtly landed borderlands as a key to understanding the dynamics of US and broader American cultures becomes pronouncedly dicey when we recall that although the United States has been mythologized as a decidedly continental and hence landed geopolitical and cultural entity, the country, largely by virtue of the archipelagoes it claims in the Pacific and the Caribbean, lays claim to more ocean space than it does land space, and it assert geopolitical authority over more oceanic space than any other country. The United States is not a majority-continent nation-state; it is a preponderantly archipelagic nation-state. Hence, for as illuminating as borderlands paradigms have been, slipping too easily into a land-centric and universalized version of the borderlands is to acquiesce to the storied-yet geographically unmoored-mythology of the United States as a continent. Alternatively, how might we imagine an archipelagic United States characterized by the borderlands' watery analogue, the borderwaters? What stories-what mythologies-might facilitate these imaginations? Following the impetus of recent scholarly work in the arena of archipelagic American studies, this graduate course turns toward a variety of cultural forms-novels, memoirs, treaties, poetry, scholarly essays, short stories, films, international law, archipelagic and oceanic conceptual readings, visual art, maps, geology, haiku, and archives stored in the digestive tracts of albatrosses-to piece together a version of US literary culture that sees, and re-mythologizes, the United States for what it is, a majority ocean nation. In so doing, this course draws on texts from multiple geographies and time periods but focuses on literatures and cultures of the twentieth-and twenty-first-century United States.
With reference to Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), Amy Waldman’s The Submission (2011) and Teju Cole’s Open City (2011), the first two parts of the article attempt a reappraisal of contemporary American literature’s world-literary potential by problematizing cosmopolitanism and neoliberal globalization in close relation to 9/11, the ideal of American multiculture and non-American assertions of alterity. Introducing Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011) and Mitchum Huehls’ After Critique (2016), the third part then shifts its focus onto the crisis of the neoliberal condition as lived in America today. Rather than insisting merely on thematic and demographic reprioritization, Berlant and Huehls are shown to strike at the very core of the literary and the human, exposing the ‘cruelty’ of both the novel and cosmopolitanism as residual expressions of a now anachronistic and ultimately harmful optimism regarding national cohesion and global understanding. The article concludes its search for a worldlier, more cosmopoetic American novel with an analysis of George Saunders’ short story collection Tenth of December (2013).
Judie Newman 2007: Fictions of America. Narratives of Global Empire
2009
The volume Fictions of America. Narratives of Global Empire by Judie Newman is an illuminating contribution to the field of contemporary American fiction from the perspectives of globalization and transnational literatures. It joins other critical treatises on those topics, such as Michael Valdez Moses’ The Novel and the Globalization of Culture (1995), Vinay Dharwadker’s Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture (2001) or James Annesley’s Fictions of Globalization: Consumption, the Market and the Contemporary Novel (2006). The book focuses specifically on the effects of globalization on American literature, so that it can also be said to be an interesting addition to the growing list of titles that relate national literatures to global processes, such as Nathan E. Richardson’s Postmodern Paletos: Immigration, Democracy and Globalization in Spanish Narrative and Film (2002), Lu Jie’s Dismantling Time: Chinese Literature in the Age of Globalization (2004) or M...
North American Literature and Global Studies: Transnationalism at War
The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative North American Literature. Ed. Reingard M. Nischik. New York: Palgrave, 2014.
This chapter argues that it is through their parallel engagement with the global that American and Canadian literatures of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have opened up bilateral conversations and avenues of cultural exchange. While a continental or hemispheric identity has shaped transnational North American Studies, it is worthwhile to take an even broader perspective and consider the global networks that have brought American and Canadian writing into closer proximity in mutually illuminating ways. The chapter is organized around two related arguments. Firstly, a sustained comparative inquiry into the global remapping of North American literature must begin with an analysis of how transnational reading paradigms in the two countries seem to proceed in somewhat inexplicable ignorance of one another. While Canadian studies of literature and globalization tend to remain under the radar of U.S.-based scholars, Canadian scholars also appear largely unaware of key works in comparative and transnational American Studies that have transformed the field. Secondly, to redress this mutual misrecognition, the chapter circumscribes the question about the global dimensions of U.S. and Canadian literatures to a scrutiny of how they imagine wars on proxy territories in which both countries have become entangled. American and Canadian literatures have been influenced by international conflict to a greater extent than we may have been aware. To make sense of this influence is to redraw the map of globalized North American Studies in ways that take seriously and do justice to the violent tensions from which such synthesis inevitably grows. Specifically, the chapter examines texts that are uncongenial to the dichotomies of nationality and postnationality often proffered in defense of a global reading of literature, suggesting instead triangular modes of thinking by which the laws of contemporary warfare complicate the one-to-one comparison of one North American national literature to another. In triangular texts of different literary genres, such as Tony Kushner's play Homebody/Kabul (2001) and Jane Urquhart's poetic novel Sanctuary Line (2010), we can trace the fraught terrain of global North American Studies not as a field that imposes a choice between the national and the transnational, or a reconciliation of both, but as an opportunity to compare two distinct visions of the global, visions that have been forged by conflicts in an international arena.