Deconstruction and the Transcultural Uncanny

The focus of Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller's ambitious, distinctive, and highly engaging book Thinking Literature across Continents¹ is nothing less than the world (the meaning of "the world" and what is happening to it, above all from the perspective of people involved in education, whether teaching or being taught), together with that seemingly familiar yet peculiar, elusive thing called literature. There are many differences between what Ghosh and Miller say and indeed how they say it. In chapters of alternating authorship they explore their shared as well as diverging, sometimes conflicting concerns. Miller writes from the United States, but with an informed awareness of how literature and literary theory are taught and studied "across continents": much of his contribution to this book complements or overlaps with material published in his An Innocent Abroad: Lectures in China.² Ghosh writes "across continents" from India, with an expansive sensitivity to European and American literature, literary theory and philosophy, as well as a passionate interest in elaborating the significance and value of "the Sanskrit, Hindi, and Bengali notion of literature as Sahitya."³ Ghosh is concerned with what he calls "(in)fusion" theory and its efficacy for the study of "world literature"; Miller is skeptical about such a globalizing impulse and is more driven to affirm and demonstrate the significance and value of reading a specific literary text, whether this be a poem by Yeats or a novel by Anthony Trollope. As Miller summarizes: "all the theoretical knowledge in the world is of little help in the actual business of reading a given poem in its uniqueness and in its resistance to oversimplifying theoretical presuppositions."⁴

Thinking Literature across Continents is in various respects impelled by a sense that, in Jacques Derrida's words, literature is "the most interesting thing in the world, maybe more interesting than the world … [W]hat is heralded and refused under the name of literature cannot be identified with any other discourse. It will never be scientific, philosophical, conversational."⁵ At the same time, both Ghosh and Miller are palpably challenged by the fact that this interestingness counts for very little in the current context of political incompetence and social injustice, climate change, and the advances and seductions of teletechnology. As Miller writes:

We do not have time today, it might well be argued, to worry about whether literature any longer matters. Who cares? How can we justify taking time to care about something so trivial, something that matters so little, when we have such big problems?⁶

Or as Ghosh opens his chapter on trying to unfold and explore "the story of a poem":

The story begins on a note of anxiety, not particularly on a crest, for one cannot deny the career of the poem as having hit an undulation in our times, when speed is the cult of living and upright alertness is preferred over sensitivity.⁷

While neither author is to be deterred—and this persistent, irrepressible fascination with the nature of poetry, drama, and fiction is perhaps the most admirable thing about their book—there is nonetheless a constant awareness of how much has to be negotiated or set aside, even in the most apparently straightforward business of reading. Repeatedly we encounter signs of something like a disjunction between "speed" and "upright alertness," on the one hand, and "sensitivity" or "close reading" on the other. Thinking Literature across Continents is thus preoccupied with the kind of opposition between "hyper" and "deep attention" described by N. Katherine Hayles—an opposition she sees as "a generational shift in cognitive styles that poses challenges to education at all levels, including colleges and universities".⁸ As Claire Colebrook and Jami Weinstein describe it:

Years of reading and culture, as well as the required leisure and safety of civilization, allowed humans to develop deep attention, exemplified by the sustained close reading of novels and the articulation of complex philosophical arguments. Now, not only is the brain supplemented by the memories and skills of computers, but it has also reverted to the hyperattention (or fleeting and multi-task-oriented modes of captivation) that would...