American Literature as World Literature

Jeffrey R. Di Leo

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781501332289
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

For better or worse, America lives in the age of "worlded" literature. Not the world literature of nations and nationalities considered from most powerful and wealthy to the least. And not the world literature found with a map. Rather, the worlded literature of individuals crossing borders, mixing stories, and speaking in dialect. Where translation struggles to be effective and background is itself another story. The "worlded" literature of the multinational corporate publishing industry where the global market is all. The essays in this collection, from some of the most distinguished figures in American studies and literature, explore what it means to consider American literature as world literature.

Part One

World, Worldings, Worldliness

1

American Literature and Its Shadow Worlds: Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Specters of Worldliness

Paul Giles

The relationship of American literature to the wider world is an old topic, one that can be seen in John Winthrop’s invocation of Christ in “A Model of Christian Charity” (1630) as an epitome of “the most perfect and best proportioned body in the world” (my italics), an image linked by Winthrop to the organic interrelation of his New England community as “members of the same body.” It is the question of whether New England should be seen as a microcosmic “model” for the whole world or, conversely, a separatist retreat from its corruptions that forms the crux of Winthrop’s argument here.¹ More recently, though, such idealist formulations have often been met with a skepticism deriving from a philosophical suspicion that the particularity of American perspectives could not readily be reconciled with universalist designs. In a 1913 letter to Henrik Christian Andersen, where he criticized the latter’s plans for a “World Centre” and his pamphlet on a “World Conference,” Henry James wrote:

I simply loathe such pretensious forms of words as “World” anything—they are to me mere monstrous sound without sense. The World is a prodigious and portentous and immeasurable affair, and I can’t for a moment pretend to sit in my little corner here and “sympathize with” proposals for dealing with it. It is so far vaster in its appalling complexity than you or me, or than anything we can pretend without the imputation of absurdity and insanity to do to it, that I content myself, and inevitably must (so far as I can do anything at all now) with living in the realities of things, with “cultivating my garden” (morally and intellectually speaking) and with referring my questions to a Conscience (my own poor little personal), less inconceivable than that of the globe.²

There is, admittedly, the sense here of James in old age—he was to die only three years later—seeking to withdraw from the public stage. But it is also possible to detect the intellectual influence of William James’s Pragmatism (1907), where Henry’s elder brother contrasted the “tough-minded” with a “tender-minded” proclivity, one he described as a “monistic” outlook that “starts from wholes and universals, and makes much of the unity of things,” thus tending to overlook the empirical significance of particular facts.³ In his impatience with what he called the “Conscience” of “the globe,” and in his preference for more “personal” horizons, Henry James was therefore not only expressing personal world-weariness but also implicitly affiliating himself with an American tradition of popular pragmatism that extended well beyond academic philosophy to embrace a general discomfort about the idea of global perspectives. “No Ideas But in Things,” as William Carlos Williams was famously to put it in his 1927 version of Paterson.⁴

James’s unease with “the globe” brings to mind contemporary theorists of world literature, who have similarly expressed disquiet about what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak termed “the financialization of the globe.”⁵ Again, the threat for Spivak is one of homogenization, a glossing over of local difference in the interests of corporate conglomeration. Emily Apter has related this process to the erosion of the “intractable alterity” of different languages, with “the rush to globalize the literary canon” involving in her eyes “the ‘comp-lit-ization’ of national literatures throughout the humanities.”⁶ The frequently expressed fear in this context is of an unwarranted hegemony of global English, of American soft power incorporating the world into its own orbit. But this phenomenon of national appropriation is not confined exclusively to the United States, and there are uncomfortable complicities between funding regimes in many countries linked to the dissemination of taxpayer funding for higher education purposes and a protectionist intellectual economy that would seek to “globalize” a national literature and culture in the interests of advancing its own institutional standing. Anyone who has served on assessment panels of government funding bodies, of the kind operational in such diverse state systems as those of Canada, China, Taiwan, Australia or the United Kingdom, will recognize how they generally seek to balance the theoretical promotion of a global discipline with a material consolidation of national interests. Although Homi K. Bhabha is doubtless right to suggest that in attempting to validate their own genealogy nations anxiously try to claim a “naturalistic beginning,” their more pressing concern in the twenty-first century is often a distribution of scarce tax dollars in a way that can be electorally justified to parsimonious voters.⁷

In this sense, James himself might have agreed with Mads Rosendahl Thomsen’s recent formulation that world literature “will always be a world literature as seen from a particular place.”⁸ No classic Goethean agenda of Weltliteratur can render the subject immune from particularities of languages, economics, pedagogy, or public culture. Hence world literature will always be—paradoxical as this may sound—a partial phenomenon, since it seeks not to “cover” the entire world, but to make productive conjunctions among entities that are disparate in time or space (or both). The disabling idea that particular forms of cultural knowledge could only be accessed through an “ethnic insiderism,” a notion that Werner Sollors demolished a generation ago within the postmodern framework of Beyond Ethnicity, can be seen now to replicate itself in political anxieties among traditional guardians of national literatures about how the economic rationale for their subject might be compromised if it were to manifest itself on a world rather than a merely national stage.⁹ In a 2014 review essay considering the relationship between Australian literature and world literature, for example, Russell McDougall pointed again to a “fear of standardization ...the nightmare of one universally accessible global idiom,” recounting how at the University of New England (in New South Wales) he has “had to abandon the Australian Literature unit I have taught for quite some years focusing on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander texts alongside more canonical settler texts” because “the market will not sustain it.”¹⁰ McDougall is right to be wary of such economic pressures, of course, and the global business of academic anthologies of “world” literature always risks privileging a certain version of what Jonathan Arac has called “Anglo-Globalism,” while systematically excluding others.¹¹ But it is symptomatic of the changing landscape of this field that one of the biggest student markets for Australian literature today is in China, particularly since its “new openness to foreign cultures” following the ascent of Deng Xiaoping in 1978, and it is reasonable to speculate that Chinese readers might compensate for their lack of appreciation of local detail in other ways, through a recognition of (for example) how Australian literature correlates with international socialism or planetary ecologies.¹² It is always important to be able to read alien cultures, but it is entirely fanciful to presume there is only one proper way of doing so. Just as Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic famously helped to open up the field of American literature in the 1990s to transnational horizons, so it is equally plausible to assume that over the next generation revisionist works from Chinese or other Asian scholars will effectively resituate Australian literature within an expanded worldly domain. National literatures might lose something by being relocated within a worldly circumference, but they have much to gain as well.

The work of Henry James, moving as it does fluently across international borders, has always posed a particular challenge to those who would seek to codify or contain literature within specific national formations. William C. Spengemann wrote in 1981 of how James’s “The American calls into question the very idea of American literature,” while John Carlos Rowe three years later argued that American literary scholarship of the twentieth century found itself in the position of having to “catch up” with James, who explicitly transformed questions of nationality into international issues.¹³ So far as the relatively familiar transatlantic theme goes, James’s most famous theoretical declaration came in a letter to William James on October 29, 1888, when he said that he could not “look at the English and American worlds, or feel about them, any more, save as a big Anglo-Saxon total, destined to such an amount of melting together that an insistence on their differen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• American Literature as World Literature: An Introduction
• Part 1 World, Worldings, Worldliness
• Part 2 Literature, Geopolitics, Globalization
• Part 3 Experience, Poetics, New Worlds
• Part 4 History and the American Novel
• Notes on Contributors
• Index
• Copyright Page