Customer Reviews

Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time

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Terrible scholarship. Her main thesis (American literature should be read in a wider context) is so intuitively obvious it shouldn't require much argument, so she sets up a ludicrous straw man argument in the introduction and continues to argue against it the entire book: "For too long, American literature has been seen as a world apart, ... An Americanist hardly needs any knowledge of English literature, let alone Persian literature, Hindu literature, Chinese literature." (p. 3)

Um, has ANYONE ever denied that knowledge of English literature is useful in studying American literature, let alone this silly proposition being "for too long" taken for granted? Certainly not the 19th-c. American authors themselves (Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, etc.), who were keenly aware of the slavish reliance on European models which characterized most of American literature. Certainly not the professor of any class I ever took. Certainly not whoever designed the BA in English programs for the major universities, which routinely include mandatory "World Lit" courses. It takes a certain kind of person to report on Thoreau's liking for the Bhagavad Gita, prominent in "Walden," as if it's earth-shaking news.

In addition to much verbiage wasted on an uncontroversial thesis, expect (as has become common in literary studies) jargon from other disciplines (fractal geometry, physics, philosophy) to be regularly tossed into the argument in ways that indicate a lack of understanding of the basic concepts of those fields. For someone who has read Kant and knows what the term "synthetic a priori" refers to, the casual reference to "literary culture" as "the true 'synthetic a priori' of civil society" (p. 8) becomes MORE frustrating, not less. And if you're wondering how scientifically literate the discussions of Einsteinian physics in Ch. 6 will be, the reference to the age of the universe as "14 billion light years" (p. 6)--light years measure distance, not time--should give you a good idea.

Finally, there are some glaring examples of quotes from famous authors being used out-of-context so they seem to say the opposite of what the author actually said. If these quotes are not malicious, they indicate the author didn't read the context from which she's quoting. The first is from Malcolm X's description of his pilgrimage to Mecca in his autobiography. After citing him as a black writer favorable to Islam, she then cites James Baldwin as an "antithetical" voice because, contrary to Malcolm's view of Islam as capacious and multiracial, Baldwin saw it as "a small and contracting circle gathered around Elijah Muhammad." The subject under discussion has been silently shifted from the ancient religion of Islam to the "Nation of Islam," the new religion loosely based on Islam founded by the African-American prophet Elijah Muhammad and which preached the racial superiority of blacks. Malcolm X had already broken away from the Nation of Islam when he made his pilgrimage, and the quote about the racial diversity of "true" Islam makes the exact same point about the Nation of Islam that Baldwin made. Once you get past Dimock's verbal trickery and quote-mining it is clear that these are not "antithetical" voices but voices of agreement about the Nation of Islam.

Likewise, in Ch. 6 Dimock tries to support her point that the "modern" view of time as linear is not in fact common-sense but instead a covertly Newtonian ideology from which dissent was once more possible than it is now by quote-mining Aristotle. To get Aristotle to agree with her nonsensical notions about the act of reading creating a "nonstandard time" in which the present is simultaneous with the past (a more blockheaded idea it's hard to imagine), she quotes him as saying, "if to be simultaneous in time is to be in the same now, then if both what is earlier and what is later are in one particular now, the events of 10,000 years ago will be simultaneous with those of today, and no event will be earlier than any other." (p. 126) In context, this is a reductio ad absurdum argument: Aristotle has been considering whether we should think of time as composed of many "nows" or only one moving "now," and the fact that the latter option leads to events 10,000 years ago being simultaneous with those of today is not a point in its favor. Rather than proving Dimock's point, this quote--in its context--proves the opposite: that our linear view of time was in fact such good "common-sense" even in Aristotle's day and in Aristotle's mind that it could serve as the basis of a reductio ad absurdum--any view of time which contradicted its linearity could not be valid.

There are several more examples of quote-mining and misrepresentation I found while reading this book, and likely others I missed through not being familiar with the source material. Whether they are malicious or just ignorant, they consititute a major reason not to bother reading this book if you are considering it.

In conclusion, this book takes a blase thesis and supports it with metaphysical twaddle, improperly used jargon from irrelevant discourses, made-up terms like "deep time" which disguise fuzzy ideas which analyze into either the obviously stupid or the stupidly obvious, and an overlay of intellectually dishonest quote-mining. I give it the lowest grade imaginable: an A minus... minus!!

Just kidding.