American Literature as World Literature ed. by Jeffrey R. Di Leo (review)

American Literature as World Literature consists of four parts, (1) World, Worldings, Worldliness, (2) Literature, Geopolitics, Globalization, (3) Experience, Poetics, New Worlds, and (4) History of the American novel. It is introduced by the editor, Jeffrey R. Di Leo, who also contributes an essay to part 1. Other contributors include: Paul Giles, Lawrence Buell, Peter Hitchcock, Emily Apter, Christian Moraru, Jonathan Arac, Gabriel Rockhill, Aaron Jaffe, Alan Singer, Robert Caserio, Daniel T. O'Hara, and Jean-Michel Rabaté. The book builds upon work in American literary studies by figures such as Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors who in A New Literary History of America consider literature in its broadest terms to include histories, maps, philosophy, paintings, war memorials, films, comic-books, and much else. That is, they look at literature, more or less new historically, as a confluence of networked discourses: textual, visual, aural, and so forth. Fundamental to their project is the idea that there can be no one master narrative or set of master narratives that could serve to objectify and stabilize the term literature, let alone American literature. No study or suite of studies could be imagined to exhaust the countless moments and accounts of such a literature that readers might think up for themselves. This is because "as world literature, American literature requires many different maps and many different timelines that connect and disconnect its history, or more properly, its many histories" [7]. Whereas most accounts of American literature presume this literature is written in English, we're told that such literature has never been "delimited by language" [9]. That is because English was accompanied by French, Spanish, Dutch, African, and native American languages at the outset of America's founding.

Another major influence on this collection is Wai Chee Dimock for whom American literature "bears witness to the comingling of near and far, with words and worlds continually in motion, fueled by large-scale forces such as colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, the movement of capital, the movement of troops, the attendant diplomacies, and reproducing these within the contours of day-to-day living" [9]. For Dimock, "American literature has always been energized by input from the rest of the world" [10] and is therefore so entangled in worldly flows of influence and information that one cannot separate the United States off from the world as some on the political right would like to do. Not surprisingly, this collection presumes that American literature is a multidisciplinary subject mediated by various critical maps and epistemological grids. Another intellectual influence behind some of this thinking is certainly Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari who in the 1980s introduced notions of rhizomatic development, nomadic sprawl, and deterritorialized manifestations of place. The literary work as resistance to history per se is central to a paradigm that imagines a coupling between anti-ethno-centric thinking and the decentering of nation and narration, given that in the latter context history is exploded in terms of traditional notions of time and causation.

Still, Emily Apter in "Political Serials" isn't convinced that American literature is as decentered as one might wish. To her, "American World Literature" is "US-centric," something that spills over into the British literary scene relative to Zadie Smith. After listing a plethora of well-known commercial writers whose works are popular in America and abroad, she writes, "Though the works may be bitingly critical of American exceptionalism, national hubris, the commercialized American way of life, racism, violence, and vulture capitalism, they nonetheless extend the American empire of fiction" [107]. Apter doesn't mention Marcuse's notion of repressive tolerance, but the shadow it casts is hard to miss. The hegemonic dominance of endless American self-critique today barely masks the real society that sustains these writers: a corrupt kleptocracy drunk with greed and propped up by hypocrisy. Or is that just one of the narratives to be fashioned? When Apter speaks of an American empire of fiction—of the business of publishing and...