Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time (review)

Dimock’s is a book of its time, a time when U.S. literature and culture are being read and re-examined in a broad context as part of the larger world and its global history. Such endeavors form part of the internationalization of the field of American Studies and the opening up of institutional formations and discourses to a horizon that reaches beyond the merely national. Instituted in such initiatives as the founding of the International American Studies Association in 2000, this new opening of American Studies and, in particular, of the study of U.S. literature, brings the critical purview and scholarly discourse of U.S. Americanists into a potentially productive rapprochement with the discipline of comparative literature. Dimock’s work is very much a part of these developments, and the American Comparative Literature Association duly recognized her effort by conferring “Honorable Mention” on Dimock’s book for the Association’s 2007 Harry Levin Prize.

Through Other Continents, then, is an instance of an outward move from the center, or cultural self-centeredness, to what is still perceived as a circumference, a move encoded in such designations as global study, planetarity, and distant reading. In this regard, too, Dimock’s book partakes of the scholarly trends of its time. Unfortunately, these are treacherous times for critical clarity and scholarly engagement, since contemporary historical realities and Realpolitik grant no immunity to such noble efforts. Such endeavors, thus, are vulnerable to being compromised by the inexorable embeddedness in which they are enfolded. No matter how libratory and well-meaning, then, as historical events, these critical endeavors, including Dimock’s, inevitably bear the mark of their moment in history. The most significant manifestation of this inevitability in Dimock’s book could well be the conspicuously persistent avoidance, or peculiar inflection, perhaps in some measure unconscious, of the term “history,” though the book is clearly a historical study of U.S. American literature. In this sense, the use of “Deep Time” in the subtitle and throughout the book strikes the reader as counter-historical, as a u-chronic historiographic tack, deliberate or not, that reaches beyond history as locally constituted and nationally constructed into a trans-historic, trans-continental temporality that de-defines U.S. national literary culture and re-defines it as global phenomenon, as worldly epiphenomenon, or as part of a global legacy of human history. Dimock accomplishes this goal with full command of the critical idiom and theoretical repertoire of the moment. However, her efforts also become a demonstration of the fact that a counter-historical posture does not necessarily absolve one from history. The discursive unmaking of history is, alas, inevitably a historic event. In this sense, Dimock’s book becomes articulate more than she herself might have intended. This makes Dimock’s book eminently teachable, a pedagogical opportunity for the disciplines of American Studies and comparative literature, certainly at that promising juncture where these two disciplines intersect.

Through Other Continents reads as the symptomatic record of a recent discovery by U.S. American Studies, a discovery of which international Americanist and comparatists have long known and what this reviewer pointed out some twenty years ago in a book entitled Questing Fictions (U Minnesota P, 1986), namely, that “continents are incontinent” when it comes to literary and cultural relations. The belated discovery of this principle by U.S. American Studies betrays its sense of novelty in Dimock’s project through the counter-factual observation on the history of the discipline as national formation: “It is as if the borders of knowledge were simply the replicas of national borders” (3). The epistemological diagnosis of American Studies as national(ist) discourse, hypothetically cast by Dimock, has certainly been discerned as more than mere hypothesis by the international community of Americanists and comparatists for a number of decades now. That it should dawn on U.S. Americanists as more than mere hypothesis during this first decade of the twenty-first century is not...