Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Jeffrey R. Di Leo is Dean of Arts and Sciences and Professor of English and Philosophy at the University of Houston-Victoria, USA. His books include Higher Education under Late Capitalism: Identity, Conduct, and the Neoliberal Condition (2017), Dead Theory: Derrida, Death, and the Afterlife of Theory (Bloomsbury, 2016), Corporate Humanities in Higher Education: Moving Beyond the Neoliberal Academy (2014), and Turning the Page: Book Culture in the Digital Age (2013).A dynamic anthology with thirteen essays that push beyond traditional comparative literature geographies and genres to ask how American literature is uniquely worldly… An important contribution to a burgeoning field of global American studies, <i>American Literature as World Literature </i>deserves to be widely read.
Comparative Literature Studies
With its muscular, wide-ranging discussions of the relationship between world (particularly European) cultural heritage and American literature, this book offers challenging philosophical and critical discourse that frames and provides entree into current scholarly work on the topic. Summing Up: Recommended.
CHOICE
<i>American Literature as World Literature</i> offers a kaleidoscopic take on the potentials and problems that come from seeing American literature beyond its usual territorial—and disciplinary—confines. Radically expanding and refreshing our geographical and temporal scales of critical analysis, Di Leo’s pioneering volume assembles an outstanding and diverse group of scholars to probe the forms, themes, and investments of American writing from Whitman to Hustvedt.
Stephen J. Burn, Reader in American Literature after 1945, University of Glasgow, UK
Gathering an exceptional roster of highly distinguished scholars, Jeffrey Di Leo’s wide-ranging collection brilliantly problematizes American literature as world literature to explore the elective affinities as much as the dangerous liaisons of words and worlds, poetics and politics, from the age of Emerson and Whitman to that of Amitav Ghosh and Siri Hustvedt. At once theoretically sophisticated, attentive to the entanglement of national and global histories, and mindful of the intricacies of literary form, these thought-provoking essays contribute to redefining the boundaries of American literary scholarship in a timely and innovative fashion.
Thomas Constantinesco, Lecturer in American Literature, Université Paris Diderot, France, and member of the Institut Universitaire de France
Endlessly surprising in its forays across continents and across media, this stylishly diverse volume takes us from Walt Whitman to James Baldwin, from <i>The Smithsonian's History of America in 101 Objects</i> exhibit to political serials such as <i>Tanner '88</i> and <i>House of Cards</i>. It shows just what opens up when we bracket the default limits of national borders. A must-read for all students of American literature and culture.
Wai Chee Dimock, William Lampson Professor of English & American Studies, Yale University, USA
Acknowledgments
American Literature as World Literature: An Introduction
Jeffrey R. Di Leo (University of Houston-Victoria, USA)
Part 1: World, Worldings, Worldliness
1. American Literature and Its Shadow Worlds: Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Specters of Worldliness
Paul Giles (University of Sydney, Australia)
2. Worldings of American Literature Off the Cultural Radar
Lawrence Buell (Harvard University, USA)
3. Who Needs American Literature? From Emerson to Marcus and Sollors
Jeffrey R. Di Leo (University of Houston-Victoria, USA)
Part 2: Literature, Geopolitics, Globalization
4. Worlds of Americana
Peter Hitchcock (City University of New York, USA)
5. Political Serials: Tanner ’88 to House of Cards
Emily Apter (New York University, USA)
6. Weltliterature? Mapping American Literature after Territorialism: Manifesto for a 21st-Century Critical Agenda
Christian Moraru (University of North Carolina, Greensboro, USA)
7. Amitav Ghosh's Ibis Trilogy in American World Literature
Jonathan Arac (University of Pittsburgh, USA)
Part 3: Experience, Poetics, New Worlds
8. Whitman’s Polyvocal Poetic Revolution: Equality and Empire in New World Literature
Gabriel Rockhill (Villanova University, USA)
9. Experience to Experiment, SIgns to Signals: Towards Flusser’s New World
Aaron Jaffe (Florida State University, USA)
10. Un-Making American Literature: Mind-Making Fictions of the Literary
Alan Singer (Temple University, USA)
Part 4: History and the American Novel
11. Last American Stories and Their Adventurous Sequels
Robert Caserio (Penn State University, USA)
12. Transhuman Poetics and American World Literature: James Baldwin’s Demon of History in Just Above My Head
Daniel O’Hara (Temple University, USA)
13. The Pathos of History: Trauma in Siri Hustvedt’s The Sorrows of an American
Jean-Michel Rabaté (University of Pennsylvania, USA)
Notes on Contributors
Index
Literatures as World Literature welcomes new and creative reading methodologies for engaging with the category of world literature. The series acknowledges that the world as object of study has been defined in recent decades by a set of overarching environmental concerns, ongoing geo-political pressures, and realignments of both hard and soft-power dynamics that together dramatically shift our understanding of world literature as a literary category. With this in mind, the series attends to language, form, medium and theme in relation to literary texts and authors in their world-literary dimensions. The series recognizes that world literature grows out of creative and critical reading practices that empower and deepen our understanding of scholarly and educational approaches to a particular author, genre, art form, or theory in diverse ways.
We are interested in approaches that interrogate conceptions of the world within a range of literary considerations including aesthetic, geographical, and historical. It will also be important to discover the further reaches of this field in forms of largely oral storytelling still practiced today – often making use of emerging media platforms – with its roots traceable to pre-modernity. In short, we invite scholars and practitioners who are willing to move outward from their own areas of specialization to engage in critical inquiry that mobilizes the polyphonic, multiperspectival, multimedial term of world literature in order to discover something novel and expansive about their area of study.
To submit a proposal, please contact Amy.Martin@bloomsbury.com or the series editors: Thomas O. Beebee (tob@psu.edu) or Sofia Ahlberg (sofia.ahlberg@engelska.uu.se). For more information, see www.bloomsbury.com/discover/bloomsbury-academic/authors/submitting-a-book-proposal.