According to Wai Chee Dimock, scholars of American literature should study it in a bigger historical context than the one beginning in 1776 or even 1620, freeing themselves in this way from the narrow-minded nationalism that has so often drawn a border around their research. To view American literature in light of the longer durée of ancient civilizations is to see Henry David Thoreau reading the Bhagavad Gita, Ralph Waldo Emerson the Persian poet Hāfez, and rediscover in these and other extensive sympathies the kinship of American literature with world literature. Dramatically expanding the tracts of space-time across which literary scholars might draw valid links between author and author, text and text, and among author, text, and the wide world beyond, the perspective of deep time holds the additional promise, for Dimock, of reinvigorating "our very sense of the connectedness among human beings" and of dissuading us, thereby, from the wisdom of war. 1 At the very least we might hope that American soldiers wouldn't look idly on, as they did on 14 April 2003, as the cultural treasures of the Iraqi National Library-which are the treasures of all humankindwere looted and burned. Dimock's Through Other Continents is among the most prominent but also most unusual works of the transnational turn in literary studies, and one way of beginning to discern its originality is to run through a checklist of readily offered objections to the way its argument is framed. For starters there is the historical materialist objection, which casts an ironic light on events like those of 14 April 2003, when some ancient "documents of civilization," as Walter Benjamin called them, finally became victims of the same "barbarism" of which they were originally made. 2 Refusing to contemplate that original horror, Dimock would seem from this perspective to want to acquit culture of its complicity in historical violence, dissolving Special thanks are due to the editors of this journal, in particular Lauren Berlant, for inspiring large-scale acts of revision. Thanks also to the many individuals and institutions whose benign influence was felt at various points in the unusually long duration of its composition.
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What does it mean to think of the rise of Amazon.com as an event in contemporary literary history? This essay analyzes the literary practices and programs “organic” to the Amazon digital ecology, including Kindle Direct Publishing, and then asks how the entrepreneurial logic, ethos, and temporality of “customer service” might be taken as the dominant logic of contemporary fiction as such.
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