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Roundtable Paul Giles, The Global Remapping of American Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011, $39.50). Pp. 340. isbn 978 0 6911 3613 4.

HESTER BLUM, KIRSTEN SILVA GRUESZ, AUGUSTA ROHRBACH, XIOMARA SANTAMARINA and PAUL GILES

Journal of American Studies / Volume 46 / Issue 03 / August 2012, pp 747 762DOI: 10.1017/S0021875812000813, Published online: 14 August 2012

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0021875812000813

How to cite this article:HESTER BLUM, KIRSTEN SILVA GRUESZ, AUGUSTA ROHRBACH, XIOMARA SANTAMARINA and PAUL GILES (2012). Review of Paul Giles 'The Global Remapping of American Literature' Journal of American Studies, 46, pp 747762 doi:10.1017/S0021875812000813

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Journal of American Studies, (), . doi:./SPaul Giles, The Global Remapping of American Literature (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, , $.). Pp. . ISBN .

The transnational and hemispheric “turn” taken by the field of Americanist literarystudies in the past decade is by now familiar enough that the directional subject canstand to lose its scare quotes. This shift in the field, at once ideological,methodological, and dedicated to canon reformation, is in part invested in recognizingthe artificiality and intellectual limitations of national boundaries in studying forms ofliterary and cultural influence and circulation. Out of this movement, and yetstanding in many ways apart from it, comes Paul Giles’s extraordinarily broad-rangingwork. In The Global Remapping of American Literature he seeks to distinguish what hecalls the “national” period of the American geographical imagination – that is, theperiod between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of Ronald Reagan’spresidency – from the deterritorialized, transnational Americas that pre-date the CivilWar and continue to extend from the s. Indeed, argues Giles, the literary outputof the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries holds in common more of a globalawareness than either of those two centuries shares with, say, the late nineteenthcentury. This is a smart and persuasive argument and a provocative interruption of theusual telos of American literary history.One of the book’s most striking features is the sweep of its range and Giles’s

magisterial command of its evidence. While sustained attention is given to a fewauthors (Longfellow, Roth) or places (the South, the Pacific Northwest), Gilesotherwise invokes scores of works over hundreds of years. It is quite an achievement ofreading, and yet still provides ample space for other scholars to expand upon thenecessarily glancing treatment given to most of the material at hand. The sheer

Notable works in the transnational vein of the past decade include the following, few of whichGiles engages directly in his book: Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine, eds.,Hemispheric American Studies (); Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell, eds., Shades ofthe Planet: American Literature as World Literature (); and Dimock’s own Through OtherContinents: American Literature across Deep Time (); Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy ofEmpire in the Making of U.S. Culture (); Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Ambassadors of Culture:The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing (); Anna Brickhouse, TransamericanLiterary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere (); Rodrigo Lazo, Writing toCuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United States (); Sean X. Goudie, CreoleAmerica: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic(); Robert Levine, Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century AmericanLiterary Nationalism ().

Journal of American Studies, (), , – © Cambridge University Press

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number of textual invocations raises methodological questions, however; outside aliterary history, what kind of critical work is accomplished by one-paragraph or one-page readings of individual texts? This book is not framed as a student’s textbook, or asa broad companion to American literature, for which such coverage would be essential.As such the reader wishes for a more explicit logic for treating so very many works inso brief a fashion; the risk is that Giles’s enormous achievement of reading could seemopportunistic. (And given the expansive possibilities for inclusion in a book structuredthis way, Giles might have included more noncanonical writers in his analysis in thefirst two-thirds of the book.) What makes this organizational choice notable is that inseveral places he chides other scholars for not reading as fully into the oeuvres ofwriters like Cotton Mather (“The Magnalia is thus in every sense a more capaciouswork than has normally been assumed, particularly by those scholars, more numerousthan they should be, who have made assumptions about this major work withouthaving ever read it through properly” ()) or Ralph Waldo Emerson (“my point isthat by foregrounding a highly selective version of Emerson’s writings . . . Americancritics in the wake of Matthiessen have tended to hypostatize a partial version ofEmerson as patriot that is not justified by a wider reading of his works” ()). While Ithink that his point about Emerson is an astute one, such claims about cherry-pickingcould invite their application to Giles’s own work in ways that a more explicitmethodological consistency might have forestalled.In marking forms of relation, influence and exchange, Giles argues for a global

network of associations that helped to shape the works of “classic” American authors,whose works constitute much of this book’s focus. As such, The Global Remapping ofAmerican Literature at times reads like the transnational version of David Reynolds’sBeneath the American Renaissance (). In the wake of a couple of decades of canonreformation, and of a recognition of the twentieth-century ideological constructionsof the categories of “high” and “low” literature, this is an interesting move. It also couldbe seen as a belated one; it is hard to think of scholars in the past ten to fifteen yearswho have argued that American literature was produced in splendid isolation. Giles’sobservations on the forms these global relations took will nonetheless be sure to have astrong impact on the field. In the book’s opening chapters, on pre- literature, hisargument relies in good part on taking aim at a presumed critical consensus that findshis subjects stuffy or conservative. He maintains that other critics have missed theplayfulness or worldliness of what Giles calls “Augustan American literature”; thebaroqueness of eighteenth-century literary expression, he suggests, shares formalqualities with postmodernism in its “art of translation and transposition, thedisplacement of Puritan epic into mock-epic, the reorienting of neoclassicism asburlesque” (). Giles describes the technological and commercial innovations thatproduced, in turn, networks of transportation and media exchange whose functionwas to produce national solidarity and homogeneity. As he observes, the forces of bothassimilation and resistance to this nationalizing model were “mutually complemen-tary” (). The middle section of the book finds Giles reading postwar andpostmodern fiction in the glare of the television and the computer screen. The bookcloses with a comparative description of the global South (an area of hugely renewedinterest in Americanist work), and a wonderful and fresh exploration of the PacificNorthwest as literary region.Because of the enormous potential power of Giles’s insights about the trans-

temporal consanguinity of the pre- and post- American periods in theirtenuous and skeptical attachment to the space of the national (if they are not liberated

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from it), and the interest I expect the broader field of American literature will take inengaging with his work, I wished for a more consistently applied epistemic structurefor the book. I wonder how Giles is conceiving his evidentiary exigence when hewrites,

Toni Morrison, for example, rarely acknowledges television explicitly in her fiction,most of which is set historically in the pretelevision era, but as a publicintellectual – and someone who, as a senior editor for Random House, accumulatedmany years of professional experience in the U.S. information industry – she alwayspositions her work to enable it to intervene effectively within national networks. ()

There are curious presumptions of causal relationships in this line (as there are inmany similar ones in the book, often orchestrated around a quirk of biographicaldetail) that can distract from this book’s impressive achievements.I return to the question of Giles’s methodology in this book out of my sense that

questions of methodology will be fundamental to the ongoing process of defining theparameters of transnational work. On one level, transnational work can involve arecognition that texts travel, and that the print-cultural specifics of their production,transmission, and reception can be traced beyond the boundaries of the local or thestate. Ideas travel, as do languages, and such circulations can be apprehended in varioustheoretical and archival ways. While many of the best practitioners of transnationaland hemispheric work have been working with literature in languages other thanEnglish, a frequent critique of the hemispheric turn in American literary studies hasbeen that it can replicate structures of imperial possession on intellectual and culturallevels. On the other hand, some have used transnationalism as metaphor or analogy.The “remapping” of this book’s title, for example, and Giles’s interest in a“cartographic dimension” () to literary study, seem themselves to reside in therealm of the metaphorical. In a now globally expansive field for US literature, thefamous Edinburgh Review question of takes on new resonance: “In the fourquarters of the globe, who reads an American book?”Now that the agents of exchangefor books –American and otherwise – are stationed with far less regard forgeographical or political checkpoints, we should think anew about the products theyare exchanging, and how they are declared (to force the customs figure). Whatresources, specifically, are at stake in Giles’s global remapping of the field of Americanliterature? What kind of critical labor is required for the extraction of such resources?This substantial, provocative work leaves us with a number of questions for theongoing recalibration of critical literary study; it is to Paul Giles’s great credit that wehave new means of posing them.

H E S T E R B L UMThe Pennsylvania State University

Whatever other discussions it may spark, Paul Giles’s The Global Remapping ofAmerican Literature is bound to reignite the disciplinary quarrel that comparatistscontinue to have with Americanists who adopt transnational approaches. Althoughneither “comparative” nor “transnational” appears in its title, the book revolves arounda challenge to what Giles sees as the field’s persistent attachment to the nation – bothas imagined spatial limit of our object-choices as literary critics, and as the temporaldeterminant of our sense of period and tradition. Spanning the seventeenth century to

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the twenty-first and including authors from Cuba and Canada, Remapping showsGiles pushing beyond the transatlantic scope of his first three books – a formidabletrilogy on the co-presence of British and US letters. Here he argues that Americanistsin a global era need, more than ever, to marshall critical reading practices to “demystifymetaphorical maps of the world that position the US as their subliminal center” ().Bringing about such a perspectival shift is also a foundational goal of the InternationalAmerican Studies Association (of which Giles is past president) and journals likeComparative American Studies (of which he is a longtime associate editor). Giles isexceptionally well positioned, then, both to report on the often intense debates thathave surrounded the “transnational turn” of the past twenty years, and to advance thecritical conversation about its scope, method, and language. Disappointingly, the bookfalls short on both counts.In its readings across periods and spatial borders, Remapping often hits upon

something new and compelling, especially in the sections about contemporary fictionsof globalization. Yet the Introduction and Conclusion, which develop Giles’s field-intervention in greater detail than do the other six chapters, resound in a kind of timewarp. He states, curiously, that comparative approaches are “rarely brought intoconjunction” with American literature, incurring “a risk of a ComparativeAmericanist approach appearing theoretically more unusual than it might be inanother area of literary study” (). Now that every important journal in Americanliterary studies has sponsored at least one special issue on transnational, comparative,and/or multilingual approaches, and several university presses have established bookseries on this theme, it seems safe to say that the call to “reconceive American literarystudies in global terms” () has been heard and heeded. Granted, monographs oftenface a long path to publication, but Giles does a fair amount of finger-pointing at theuninformed traditional Americanist, a straw man who collapsed some time ago. “Todraw a global map of American literature is to suggest how the subject could beconfigured differently” (), he writes – but differently than what? Noting that “acomparative methodology can perform useful work” for the study of Americanliterature (a category assumed to be self-evident, even after a discussion of the historyof the discipline chips away at its integrity), Giles cautions us to “be specific about theideological implications of any given comparative approach” (). Yet it is unclearhow this awareness of institutional positionality informs his reading practices in theprincipal chapters. His comparative method “involves the use of spatial and temporalcoordinates,” showing how these are themselves “metaphorical constructions” bywhich “geographical consciousness enters subliminally into American culturalnarratives” (), many, but not all, of which are considered within a looselyDeleuzean framework of deterritorialization.If this dual time–space axis recalls Wai Chee Dimock’s Through Other Continents:

American Literature across Deep Time (), it is because both attempt to erect awide scaffolding of globality that would reveal fresh ways of seeing familiar texts andput them in conversation with unexpected ones. While Dimock focusses on extendedinfluence studies and problematizes questions of linguistic and cultural translation,Giles puts more emphasis on geographical perspective. The first chapter revisits thatold chestnut, the Puritan origins of the American self, and asks provocatively how “thenarrative of New England itself might change if the South, rather than the North,were to become a discursive focal point” (). Turning first to that polymathpaterfamilias of the American intellectual tradition, Cotton Mather, Giles describesMather’s dialogue with English writers within a new spatiotemporal category,

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“Augustan America.” Magnalia Christi Americana gets suggestively reframed as a“plantation epic,” linked to Cook and Byrd rather than to Puritan sermonists. Thisperspectival shift might be even more radical if it ventured outside the anglophoneworld: the title of Eliga Gould’s influential review essay, “The English-SpeakingAtlantic as a Spanish Periphery,” indicates the magnitude of the cognitive remappingsthat have already taken place among historians of the colonial period.

Moving forward in the next chapter to the early nineteenth century, Giles doesshow how an awareness of England’s former colonial rivals persists in TimothyDwight’s Travels in New England and subsequent meditations on American space, asthey help create the architecture of westward expansionism. He capably synthesizesrecent transnational scholarship, but for the most part his early national America, like“Augustan America,” stops at the edge of the continent before reaching the WestIndies. Likewise, the capable but brief readings of major and minor texts of theAmerican Renaissance in the remainder of chapter follow a path back to England,sometimes in a way that doggedly avoids other linguistic traditions: Giles readsLongfellow’s neo-medievalism, for instance, by way of Tennyson, rather than throughany of the other European and circum-Mediterranean sources that so fascinated thisnoted polyglot. After an intervening section on national boundaries in the twentiethcentury, however, chapter returns to the period of national formation in just such anadventurous manner. From a discussion of William Bartram’s Travels, it segues into awonderful reading of William Gilmore Simms’s The Cassique of Kiawah, which Gilescalls “a doppelgänger of The Scarlet Letter” () because, in contrast to Hawthorne’sidentification of the national past with the space of New England, Simms insists onrecalling the wider colonial “world of multiple, autonomous regions – stretching fromJamaica and Barbados across to Florida, Virginia, and the Carolinas . . . a legitimateprecursor and pre-history to the nineteenth-century Confederacy” (). This strikingexample of the possibilities of a more geographically revisionist literary history falters,however, when it turns to the late nineteenth-century writing of José Martí.While Giles’s reading of Martí as an example of the “bifocalism” of North and

South comprises just over five pages (–) of Remapping, it stands out as the mostextensive discussion of texts written in a language other than English. As such it cutsto the heart of the quarrel between comparative literature and transnationalAmericanism, for Martí’s inside-the-monster essays from New York have becomeone of the most common reference points of hemispheric and transnationalscholarship. Lamentably, this section lapses into the very geocultural solipsism thatGiles intended this book to cure. Giles argues that “Martí’s geographical displacementof America from north to south is matched by an equivalent displacement from amaterial to a metaphysical imaginary” () – but it is only a US reader who wouldfeel “displaced” by Martí’s use of “América,” not the Latin American newspaperreaders who first encountered his essays, or the many successor generations of Spanishreaders since. If the message here is that reading Martí can productively reorientus – can make US Americans a little less assured in their claim to the name of thehemisphere – this unobjectionable move is undercut by the rest of the analysis, which

Eliga H. Gould, “AHR Forum: Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-SpeakingAtlantic as a Spanish Periphery,” American Historical Review (June ), available at www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/./gould.html, accessed Dec. . On earlyAmerican literature’s transnational transformation, see the joint special issue of AmericanLiterary History, , () and Early American Literature, , ().

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http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/112.3/gould.html

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characterizes Martí’s thought as an “intertextual rotation of Emerson” ().Certainly, as other critics have noted, Martí read Emerson, and they drew fromsome of the same wells of German, French and English political, social and scientificphilosophy, although differently encountered and refracted – in Martí’s case, throughthe Spanish liberal reinvention of the Scholastic tradition. To reduce the complexityof Martí’s copious output (twenty-eight volumes in the authoritative Cuban edition)into an “almost pastiche version” of Emersonian contradiction () is to negate thefact that Latin American thought has an existence of its own, one that pre-dates bothMartí and the era of US imperialism.Even the differences between Emerson and Martí that emerge in Giles’s analysis

betray a perspective on Latin America that is ridden with clichés: Martí’s “extravagantsacrifice of himself in a war when he understood little about the strategies of battle isonly another version of his persistent attempt . . . to adorn the quotidian world with atantalizing spiritual grandeur” (the Transcendentalists did the same, but presumablyless extravagantly). His aesthetic, we are told, “owes much to Catholic styles oftranssubstantiation” and – inevitably – “anticipates the style of magical realism” (),since magical realism has become the universal go-to concept that explains all thingsLatin American. Whether such generalizations can be sustained by bits and pieces ofan author’s output cited, and possibly read, in translation is for other readers to judge.I want to give Giles due credit for venturing beyond his comfort zone, and I absolutelydo not advocate a narrow territorialism about who is or is not permitted to commenton certain texts. The issue here has rather to do with the ethics of citation. Those whowork in the anglophone sphere of knowledge production enjoy great privileges ofaccess to scholarship from around the globe, including Latin America, that are notreciprocal. By not availing himself of that privilege to absorb, or mention, even afraction of the Latin Americanist scholarship on one of the major figures of globalmodernism (some of it available in English), it is hard to see how Giles is helping toimagine the US in a more relative position to the rest of the world.This point about the “trade imbalance” of transnational Americanist scholarship

has been made by Robert McKee Irwin, Sophia McClennan, and Claire Fox andClaudia Sadowski-Smith – ironically, in the very pages of Comparative AmericanStudies. It is one of the central complaints about the field that have arisen fromwithin comparative literature, expressed most recently in a special issue of thediscipline’s flagship journal. In their Introduction, coeditors Lois Parkinson Zamoraand Silvia Spitta take “New Americanists” to task on three counts: for appropriatingLatin American material within US ideological constructs, for not working inlanguages other than English, and for failing to engage in dialogue with scholars andscholarly traditions outside the US. As with similar statements by Djelal Kadir, I findthis an ungenerous position, backed by a reductive and cursory review of a by-nowcrowded field. Moreover, what it would mean to “speak and write and know the Otherotherwise,” as Zamora and Spitta implore, seems just as maddeningly imprecise as

Robert McKee Irwin, “¿Qué hacen los nuevos americanistas? Collaborative Strategies for aPostnationalist American Studies,” Comparative American Studies, , (), –;Sophia McClennan, “Inter-American Studies or Imperial American Studies?”, ComparativeAmerican Studies, , (), –; and Claire Fox and Claudia Sadowski-Smith,“Theorizing the Hemisphere: Inter-Americas Work at the Intersection of American,Canadian, and Latin American Studies,” Comparative American Studies, , (March ),–.

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Giles’s mandate to see American literature “differently.” But although Giles does notlive on this side of the pond, their assessment of “the insularity of U.S. academic work”seems to be borne out by his foray into Martí studies.While some comparatists will continue to hold the line on questions of language

proficiency, many others –Dimock among them – have made the case that translationitself can provide a useful critical method as well as new objects of analysis. There isroom for reasonable disagreement about whether, and how far, transnationalAmerican scholarship should go outside the realm of English. My own position isthat it is important to keep the question of language at the forefront: prior toEuropean contact, at least three hundred languages were spoken in the area that isnow the United States; even today, nearly percent of the nation’s populationregularly speaks a language other than English, with thirteen of those languages havingat least half a million speakers. Giles devotes a section in chapter to a thoughtfulsynthesis of recent work on the pressures toward linguistic and cultural homogeniz-ation at the turn of the twentieth century, mentioning the existence of multilingualAmerican literatures, only to discount their influence after World War I. Despitethese gestures, the “global” in the title of the book ultimately implies “GlobalEnglish” – precisely the collapsing of usages that comparatists have warned against.

At any rate, it is far from the case that comparative and transnational approacheshave taken over American literary study – and multilingual approaches even less so.Some quarters of the field have, instead, retrenched themselves within more familiarboundaries of nation-state and region, not necessarily from a will to return toAmerican exceptionalism but with a thoughtful regard for the rigors and limits oftheir training. Whether the current wave of interest in “remapped” and intersectionaltreatments of texts from and about the United States will continue depends on manyfactors – not least among them, whether this field can more satisfyingly addressunresolved questions about its method, scope, and linguistic diversity.

K I R S T E N S I L VA G R U E S ZUniversity of California, Santa Cruz

Paul Giles’s most recent book delivers on the promise made by its title: the study trulyis a Global Remapping of American Literature. Close readers will note that I have madeone change to the title – switching “the” with “a.” I do so not as subtle critique butrather to indicate, at the outset, that there may be more than one “remapping,” and if

Lois Parkinson Zamora and Silvia Spitta, “Introduction: The Americas, Otherwise,”Comparative Literature, , (), –. For Djelal Kadir’s review of Dimock asemblematic of what he takes as disturbing turns in the field, see Comparative Literature Studies,, (), –; see also his “America’s Exceptional Comparabilities: An Instance ofWorld Literature” in the Zamora and Spitta special issue. Giles does note Kadir’s warning, in a special issue of PMLA, that the field keeps on “reinforcing and naturalizing thesymptomatic Americanness of American studies” (), but does not really engage with thiscritique.

For a more detailed articulation of a comparative Americanist methodology that takes languageas a significant axis of analysis see “Worlding America: The Hemispheric Text-Network,” co-authored by myself and Susan Gillman, in Robert Levine and Caroline S. Levander, eds., TheBlackwell Companion to American Literary Studies (Malden, MA: Blackwell, ), –.

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there is a flaw to this comprehensive and engrossing study, it lies in its effort tocomprehend so much in such detail. Would that more books would suffer from thisdefect!Readers picking up the book will immediately appreciate how carefully Giles has

chosen his title. He does indeed take a global approach – one made more likely by thefact that he is writing from a distance – the book was written in England during histenure at Oxford and then completed at the outset of his appointment to the facultyat the University of Sydney. But perhaps the geographical distance is less importantthan is the shift in time zones – not for Giles the scholar, but rather for his subjectmatter. A major feature of Giles’s remapping is its critical refashioning of eras, epochsand periods that one associates with European culture, staking a claim to a broaderswath of Western history than Matthiesen did when he dubbed the mid-nineteenthcentury “the American Renaissance.” Giles retrieves – and establishes links to –periods as distant as the Augustinian and medieval periods, drawing through hisanalysis of what he calls “Temporal Latitudes” in the first third of his study.Maps are substantial sources for this study because they record the provisional

nature of nationhood; as boundaries shift and details get filled in, so, too, do themythologizing narratives begin to solidify – if not stultify – what constitutes“American literature.” Giles’s interest is to restore the imaginative act of nation-building that the maps reveal, seeking to leverage the critical acts of imagination wecall “American literature” against a larger and longer narrative of global culture. Closeattention to the map that served as the frontispiece to Cotton Mather’s MagnaliaChristi Americana or The Ecclesiastical History of New England (), for instance,helps readers see how, in Giles’s terms, both the map and the text are fraught acts of“renegotiation.” Bringing the map and text into a critical relationship shows Mather’smassive treatise wrestling with “the historical contradictions and terrestrial ironies” asJacob wrestled with the angel.Close scrutiny is given to more than just literary culture, however. Following Martin

Bruckner’s important work on cartography, Giles further traces the rise of geographyas a compulsory subject for American schoolchildren by documenting its materialpresence on the book market. Giles has a remarkable way of linking literal and materialfacts to limn the outlines of a broader picture without losing the granular nature of hisexamples. Indeed, his eye for the way detail can be used to create an image might bemost closely linked to the pointillist movement in art, in which the larger image ismade up of a mass of individual marks. One needs physical distance to discern theimage or one risks getting lost in the myriad of dots that speckle the surface. Hisapproach to detail is part of what makes this a most demanding read; Giles expects hisreaders to have a command of the archive of American literature that spans the earlycolonial period on through David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers.This may be a tall order for most readers and the book is clearly directed to a

scholarly audience. Giles is aware, however, that many of his readers may not havequite as long a view of the literature as he does; thus he is careful to contextualize theexamples he draws on from both a literary and a historical vantage point. The booktherefore offers a rich education as well as an important addition to recent efforts tothink beyond the nationalistic paradigms that academic departments of literature (andhistory, for that matter) have created in order to chart a course for themselves.Giles’s study will most benefit those who are intrigued by ideas of “deep time,” as

Wai Chee Dimock calls it, but who also want to give some credence to temporalarchitecture that has been the bedrock of historical analysis. For instance, Giles’s

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“Medieval American Literature” chapter dwells on the intellectual impact of thediscovery of Native American burial grounds dating back to . Positing a medievalhistory buried beneath the “New World” served, according the Giles, a range ofneeds – not the least among them was the need for more of a history thanconventional records had afforded. These burial mounds – and the extensivecivilization they portend – provide important historical leverage to Giles’s analysisand to readers who long for more than metaphorical resonances in the term“medieval.” Giles tracks the visible presence of the burial mounds on the landscape aswell as in the intellectual history of the period. From “a four-tiered pyramid coveringfourteen acres and rising one hundred feet into the air” that stood “the tallestmanmade edifice in the United States until ” () to mention of the mounds andthe people who built them in texts by Jefferson and Bryant, Giles documents thedegree to which this history gave the young nation the pride (and perplexity) of aprehistory, a term first coined in .Key terms that have a particularly spatial cast are also derived from concrete

references to historical, scientific and literary history. “Parallax” is one that figuresprominently throughout the book and thus deserves some attention here. Strictlyspeaking, the term refers to a method of measuring distances through an angle ofvision that takes in two lines of sight. For the purposes of this study, the notion helpsGiles name the function of comparison for the writers and thinkers that he discusses.For Cotton Mather, moving “backward and forward in time to create both temporaland spiritual conjunctions,” the parallels between New England and antiquity –biblical and otherwise – prove to be a primary teaching tool.However, the term “parallax” – in its complexity – has greater purpose when it

comes to analyzing American literature as a field of study, the other project of thisbook. This more explicitly conceptual application is at the center of the chapter called“Hemispheric Parallax.” Here Giles uses it to meditate on “how the contours of[American literature] have changed over time by examining the shifting geospatialdynamics associated with two specific areas of the contemporary United States: theSouth and the Pacific Northwest” (). Through the figure of “parallax,” Giles deftlycalls attention to how ideas of space are as informative to the construction of our fieldas they are to the literary stories that constitute it.The model of time (and space) employed by Giles might put some readers in mind

of the French philosopher/critic Gilles Deleuze as it resembles his concept of therhizome. Indeed, Giles repurposes Deleuze and Guatarri’s “deterritorialization,” a termtaken from their Anti-Oedipus, in order to prevent the idea of mapping from beingoverly consolidating. Rather, Giles means to release the energies of divergent historiesacross time and space to give new meaning to the term “transnational.” He does notwish to supersede geography, the temporal, or the empirical bases upon which theyoperate, but rather wrest from them the power to suggest stability, coherence, and asense of inevitability. This is a book for scholars about scholarship and the limitationsof its practices as much as it is a book about American literature.

A U G U S TA ROH R B ACHWashington State University

The Global Remapping of American Literature challenges the idea that Americanliterature, as an imaginary construct, corresponds mimetically with historical and

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existing geographical boundaries of the United States. Instead, Paul Giles conceives of“American literature” in relation to discursive forms of geographic consciousness andintertexual dialogues between the local and the global. By liberating, or, in Giles’s term,“deterritorializing,” writers from an imperative to represent their geographic location,Giles presents writers across space and time via a dynamic “interplay of near and far,”in a way that resists the traditional, or “territorializing,” forms of geographicalessentialism we associate with American literary studies. Deftly and on a dizzying scale,Giles amasses a wide range of close readings of texts written in the United States (inany of its geographic configurations) that establish the global attributes of the localand, relatedly, the localizing properties of the global. When he taps intotransnationalizing texts that challenge a self-identifying US unitary subject, Gilesoffers us a United States at home in – or interrelating with – the global, and not aworld apart, or a “city on a hill.”Giles takes aim at the American exceptionalist tradition of literary criticism in part

by delimiting the reach of a truly “national” tradition to the historically specificpolitical boundaries of the United States as it existed between the US Civil War in and the beginning of the Reagan presidency in . In this regard, Giles joinsother scholars in American studies who have foregrounded the Cold War politics thatbolstered earlier formations of American exceptionalism. Specifically, Giles mobilizesan alternative literary antinationalist tradition that relates American literature to theamorphous, unstable and fluid sense of territorial shifts of the earlier period, and the“deterritorializing” effects of a post-Fordist globalized US. It is the United States “asone of the objects of globalization, rather than as merely its malign agent” or as a siteof “convergence and divergence” that guides this “alternative literary history” ().Obviously, Giles anticipated complaints of the neocolonizing potential in this versionof American globality because he is careful to stress what it does not mean:

I am not . . . attempting simply to describe American literature as a globalphenomenon, as if the subject could imperially claim the whole world as its rightfulsphere; more modestly, I am seeking to trace historical variables in the uneven waysAmerican literature has imaginatively mapped itself in relation to a global domain overthe past three hundred years. ()

In the service of this alternative literary history, Giles’s book offers a series offascinating counterreadings of American literature that covers a truly global reach,temporal and spatial, from Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana () andEbenezer Cook’s The Sot-weed Factor: or A Voyage to Maryland () to DavidFoster Wallace’s magnum opus Infinite Jest (). Through lively and creativereadings of books ranging across time and space and a variety of subjects that includespostmodernism, media broadcasting technology, mercantile history and environ-mental humanism, Giles brings to light numerous and heterogeneous forms ofgeographic–literary consciousness. That Giles can adumbrate a literary trajectory somethree hundred years long speaks to the exciting potential such a discursive “remapping”offers for enriching recent historicist and neoformalist impulses in contemporaryliterary criticism.The book’s originality lies in the way Giles reconfigures various modes of US

literary periodization as his key tool for remapping the temporalities and spatialboundaries of the received American literary tradition. Principally, he disposes of“self-authenticating” narratives like “early,” “Republic,” or “antebellum,” as theproducts of backward-looking, or proleptical, readings of American literature that

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infer the inevitable growth of the Republic from particular events and periods. Thesehe replaces with “Augustan” and “medieval” as aesthetic categories that best illuminatethe previously hidden convergences and dialogues in the literature pre-dating thenationalizing period of –. At the risk of reproducing the very temporalitiesto which Giles objects, it serves to identify these aesthetics as corresponding roughly tothe colonial and antebellum periods.The “Augustan” aesthetic that Giles identifies challenges eighteenth-century

American exceptionalism with irreverent exposés of the discrepancies between epicand profane, mind and matter, which cut across the grain of the Puritans’ typological(or mythic) narratives. Against the ideological tack promoted by the Puritans, whorepresented the New England settlements as instances of the epic and the sacred, Gilespoints to the links between Puritan communities in America and in England aswarranting the conceptualization of this literature within, rather than outside, “aBritish imperial imaginary” (). The Puritans’ utopian representations of theirsettlements, Giles demonstrates, not only obscured the relevance of the English CivilWar and the existence of cross-ocean ties between these communities, they alsoobscured the contests between religion and mercantilism that characterized this CivilWar and resulted in “new” world settlements that served as strategic marketexpansions. It fell to poets like Ebenezer Cook and Samuel Butler to form acountertradition of “clownship” that highlighted the discrepancies between utopianideals and commercial origins as the “incongruous interpenetration between spirit andmatter” (). More importantly, the salience of such transgressive incongruities provesthat a connection to the past does not have to be reactionary, or anachronisticallynostalgic; hence Giles offers counterintuitive readings of Phillis Wheatley’sneoclassicism as a “lowbrow form” that turns the classical archetype inside out, andthe “manic tenor” and “black comedy” in the art of Puritan church elder TimothyDwight as investments in religious “infidelity” (, ).Giles’s counterreadings of established and unknown writers are central to his

formulation of a metaphoric legacy of “medievalism” that links Old and New Worldtemporalities and explodes the basis of Americanness in a colonial rupture from theOld World. This medieval counternarrative not only disputes the assumption ofsocial rupture, it helps “tease out a different version of national identity, one neitherso beholden to the idea of the nation-state as an independent, autonomous entitynor so concerned with the imponderable question of ‘origins’ ” (). Framed withinthis medieval legacy, American writers appear more continuous with, rather thanradically outside, “the reactionary power of feudal aristocracy,” and, as such, lessidentified with the “progressive narrative of rational freedom” associated withAmericanness.This new periodizing aesthetic results in rich and creative readings that are at the

core of this book’s strengths. Within such a medieval framework, Poe stands alongside,rather than opposed to, the “Renaissance” writers, his Gothicness not simplyreactionary, but a tool intended to puncture national stories of “sentimental uplift”(). Emerson exists in dialectical tension with European influences and history ratherthan solely in terms of New England nationalism; he also appears more appreciative ofthe creative possibilities inhering in intertexuality, authorship, tradition and historywhen he affirms that “all works of literature are Janus-faced and look to the future andthe past” (). Correspondingly, we are invited to reevaluate Longfellow as a “worldly”writer who has been unfairly dismissed in the twentieth century for his failures toadhere to Puritan rhetoric and transcendentalism, and to view Hawthorne’s obsession

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with genealogical “entanglement” as signaling the author’s refusal to split off“internecine feudalism from progressive democracy” ().Giles’s discussion of an archaeological imagination that taps into densely populated

Native American “prehistories” speaks to one of the most novel implications ofrecovering a “medieval” continuity between New and Old World temporalities.Pointing to the interest around mid-nineteenth-century archaeological excavations ofthe mound-builders of Cahokia (in present-day Missouri), Giles traces Americanwriters’ interest in pre-Columbian civilizations to the potential that a NativeAmerican “usable past” offered to challenge British colonialism: “The specter ofmedieval culture . . . operated for mid-nineteenth-century American writers as atantalizingly distant real, a parallel to the relics of Indian civilization with which theywere surrounded on their own continent” (). This perspective on Native Americaas an Old World formation reconfigures territorial borders, belies the “truncatedtemporal span of the new nation,” and challenges the Whitmanesque idea of Americaas “a world primal” ().Next, Giles addresses the tensions he sees between nationalizing and counter-

nationalizing impulses during the hundred years between the Civil War and thatHenry Luce defined as “the American Century” (). Not surprisingly, this processof nationalist incorporation was marked and defined by the tension betweenforces – the “arcs of modernism” – tending to American assimilation, and theresistance of myriad immigrant groups and US writers like William Dean Howellsto melting-pot politics. Giles sees this period as a potentially globalizing “moment”associated with a form of ethnic “federalism” that could reconcile Americanizationand ethnicity without “smothering” ethnic or regional difference; contra nationalistexceptionalism, ethnic federalism offered “a capacity to align old countries with thenew continent and to establish U.S. culture through a play of similarities anddifferences, rather than by projecting a romance of the new nation alone” (). Theproblem, however, was that the United States after the Russian Revolution and WorldWar I retreated into increasingly isolationist positions that negated the potential ofthis globalization, and it was out of the devolution, one might say, of this globalmoment that an organicist ideal of Americanness emerged. As most clearly formulatedby F. O. Matthiessen’s The American Renaissance (), this renewed emphasis ontransmuting the foreign into an American idiom relied on an allegorical reading of USgeography that represented the environment as a source and guarantor ofAmericanness.Turning to the globalizing pressures of the post-Reagan era, Giles discusses how

twentieth-century writers have simultaneously contested and shored up Americannessin response to the communicative and technological forces of globalization. In thisview, older American writers like Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, John Updike and DonDeLillo display anxieties about the fragmentation of national space in a global mediamarket; in contrast, younger authors, members of the “MTV generation” like DavidFoster Wallace and Dave Eggers, try to reimagine a utopian frequency that parlays theimmediacy of media – the coming to you “live,” the bringing the very distant close inthat characterizes postmodern flows – into an aesthetic of immediacy that dissipateshegemonic nationalist energies. Beyond a retread of liberal humanism, this generation,Giles claims, offers the best hope for an ideal of “digital posthumanism” () and“cynicism and naivete” (citing Wallace) that reformulates communities in relation tocommunication networks, rather than to regional, geographic coordinates: “in thework of Wallace and Eggers, [a] national metanarrative is dissolved into a different

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kind of ecosystem, one organized around the global flow of information, where ethicalaffinities are grounded not in direct relations to territory or patrimony but in morecircuitous ways” (). We could distill this ethos for discursively formedcommunities into Wallace’s imperative for living in a fluid, multinational world:“we have to get along and communicate with other people” (). Yet this idea ofbuilding communities through communication hardly seems new, postnational, orpostmodern: public-sphere theorists like Michael Warner, Nancy Fraser and JürgenHabermas have long explored the role of print “spheres” in modern nation-making,which raises the question of what makes digital technology, in theory, distinct fromthe localizing and nationalizing character of print. From this perspective, one shouldnot view “imagined-digital communities” as characterizing the global, a priori; thespecificity of digitization and its distinctive structuring of “global” publics needs yet tobe formulated and should not be assumed.This last argument about the communicative imperative inhering in globalization

aptly represents the odd, and almost apolitical, nature of Giles’s efforts to kill off the“vampire” of American exceptionalism (to riff on his phrase “the unquiet corpse ofAmerican exceptionalism” (). Giles’s use of Deleuze and Guattari’s principle of“deterritorialization” – a principle framed alongside a desire for socialtransformation – would suggest that there is some payoff in terms of a critical theorythat can offer insights into the politics inhering in the structures of globalizedcommunicative domains. But The Global Remapping of American Literature stopsshort of theorizing the politics of globalized representation even as it raises potentiallyimportant questions: how do authors respond to the uneven access populations haveto means of communication, Facebook and Twitter notwithstanding; or, moreimportantly, how might a postnational or transnational form of Americanness offer apotential space for building new political structures and reconfiguring politicalalliances across “the nation” and globally?While Giles offers a formidable range of historical, cultural and literary knowledge,

in the end he abstains from taking into account the wide terrain of social conflicts inwhich the local, national and global reaches of the nation are imbricated. Giles isstrangely reticent to take on some of his potential interlocutors, like those who offer“hemispheric” or “transatlantic” perspectives on the US, who have worked toundermine American exceptionalism generally, and are particularly critical of the waythe political entity of the United States continues to be enshrined as the ultimatedesignatee and representative of “American,” over and above the other culturesoccupying the Americas. This is a theoretical blind spot for Giles, who does notrecognize the ultimate debunking of vampiric American exceptionalism as acollaborative task that has engaged scholars across disciplines for the last decade, ifnot longer. Giles is far from the first, and one of many, to drive in that stake, and inthis way he overstates the transformative potential of his alternative literary history.Scholars like Kristen Silva Greusz, Anna Brickhouse, Robert Levine, CarolineLevander and others have, for some time now, firmly established Americanexceptionalism as an ideological, territorially derived discursive construct aimed at“domesticating” social conflicts, fragmented histories and messy counterhistories.Their work has advanced the field in terms of identifying and outlining those

Paul Giles, “Commentary: Hemispheric Partiality,” American Literary History, , (Fall), –.

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troublesome counterhistories across a range of registers – political, legal, mass cultureand literary – that testify to the perennially contested and unstable perimeters of USnationalism.One can imagine that Giles sees these recent efforts in relation to “hemispheric” or

“transatlantic” analytical rubrics as reinforcing the geographic essentialism of which heis so critical. But this raises the question of the potential, and ultimately the limits, of“deterritorialized” literary methods: can we read “American” literature as a historicalformation radically detached from geographic referents, without presupposing atranscendent, global-spanning perspective that again reinforces the politicallegerdemain at work in the nationalist foundation of “American studies”? How canGiles invoke, let alone define, the “American” literature to which his title refers if wedisarticulate it from the geographies of this unstable political entity and take especialnote of the ways that “American” relates intertextually to global spaces andtemporalities?The Global Remapping of American Literature offers creative close readings and

raises questions that are now very important in American literary studies; on this basisit will significantly bolster ongoing critical debates about the asymmetrical discursivedynamics that structure exchanges between the global, national, regional and local.

X I OM A R A S A N TAM A R I N AUniversity of Michigan, Ann Arbor

I am grateful for these responses to The Global Remapping of American Literature, allof which raise interesting questions about the work. As Augusta Rohrbach astutelyremarks, the book is as much about the remapping of time as of space, and it suggestsways in which traditional periodizing categories of American literature can oftenobscure as much as they illuminate. By extension, in response to Hester Blum’s pointabout potentially “opportunistic” styles of reading, I would recall Franco Moretti’sobservation that any kind of “close” reading can also offer its own distortions ofperspective. My own preference in this project was to combine close and distant, nearand far, and to try to illuminate particular texts by reformulating them according to alogic of temporal and spatial juxtaposition. It is of course true, as XiomaraSantamarina and the other respondents observe, that many other scholars have beenengaged over recent years in critiques of American exceptionalism, and it was by nomeans my intention to undervalue the contributions of various colleagues whose workI value highly, many of whom I cite in my book. But my overall aim here was not toget sidetracked into too many local theoretical disputes, but rather to imagine what asynthetic version of transnational American literary history might look like. Despite aplethora of particular comparative inquiries, it is, as these commentators acknowledge,

Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review, (Jan.–Feb. ), . In response to Blum’s critique, The Global Remapping refers to the work of Brickhouse (),Gruesz () and Dimock (), as well as the special “hemispheric” issue of AmericanLiterary History edited by Levine and Levander on which their subsequent Rutgers UniversityPress book was based (x). Oddly, I am also accused of not engaging Shades of the Planet, editedby Dimock and Buell, to which I contributed an essay that became the first chapter of TheGlobal Remapping.

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by no means the case that such approaches have become the orthodoxy in Americanliterary study more generally, and this book represented a specific attempt to imaginehow the broad contours of the field might change if remapped from a globalperspective.As is often the case, it is the hostile critique that perhaps reveals most about the

limitations and mutual incompatibilities of particular critical positions. Kirsten SilvaGruesz is actually wrong when she refers to “the transatlantic scope” of my “first threebooks,” since my second book, American Catholic Arts and Fictions, was published byCUP as far back as , pre-dating the transatlantic trilogy by several years, and itcontained a chapter on Donald Barthelme’s representation of cultural Catholicism asan antidote to more traditional Americanist narratives organized around ancestralProtestantism. There is no reason why Gruesz should know or care about this, exceptthat her isolated account of my reading of Martí in The Global Remappingmisrepresents the larger purpose of this chapter, “Hemispheric Parallax,” whichcontains a similar reading of how Donald’s younger brother, Frederick Barthelme,reconceives the landscapes of Mississippi and Texas in relation to the Catholic cultureof Latin America, as well as how Elizabeth Bishop refers specifically to Martí ()and engages with South America in her poems. In this chapter I argue that “tocategorize Martí merely in terms of a politics of anti-imperialism, as a staunch Latinoopponent of U.S. power, is to flatten out his view of American culture,” and I cite hereGruesz’s work as an example of such a one-dimensional tendency (). I do not, infact, disagree with Gruesz about ways in which thick linguistic description can enrichparticular critical projects, but I also think that language can at times be used as abarrier to protect the supposed autonomy of certain academic areas, often withdeleterious consequences. As I discuss in The Global Remapping (), some LatinAmericanists have been dismissive about US writing on the grounds that it offers onlya vulgar, commodified version of modernista dissensus, but this overlooks how thecomplex forms of texts such as those of Barthelme, Bishop and Zora Neale Hurstonemerge in every way out of a condition of hemispheric hybridity.The larger question of how language relates to comparative studies is a complicated

one, about which, as Gruesz acknowledges, there are many different scholarly views.Although as an expert on “Latino writing” she herself expresses a professional interestin keeping “the question of language at the forefront,” others, such as DavidDamrosch, have described “world literature” as “writing that gains in translation.”

Gruesz misrepresents my argument when she says I discuss “the pressures towardlinguistic and cultural homogenization at the turn of the twentieth century,mentioning the existence of multilingual American literatures, only to discount theirinfluence after World War I”; my point was never simply to “discount” this influenceon my own account, but rather to suggest that certain social, historical andinstitutional pressures during the s led Norman Foerster and others to directAmerican literary study away from multilingualism towards a more monolingualversion of national literary formation, on analogy with the national version ofAmerican history then being promoted by the likes of Frederick Jackson Turner ().Again, I do not disagree in principle that multilingualism is likely to becomeincreasingly important for American literary studies in the twenty-first century, and

David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,), .

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this is something I impress upon my current graduate students in Australia, whosefamiliarity with a variety of Asian languages, particularly Chinese, suggests ways inwhich the subject may eventually move in intriguing new directions. But there are analmost infinite number of linguistic horizons that might be brought into play here,and the crucial task for scholars of American literature is not simply to accumulatenew idioms but to think through ways in which they might be brought into a coherentdialogue with, and thus significantly impact, US national narratives. My general pointis that the separatist privileging of any given special interest, whether based on ethnic,linguistic or historical specialization, can induce a parochial myopia to the largercontours of the Americanist field.So far as Gruesz’s comments on Comparative American Studies go, before the

journal was first established by Sage Publications in I argued for the use of theword “comparative” in the title, rather than the more fashionable “transnational,” onthe ground that the older, less restrictive term might enable contributors to define theemerging sphere in the way they best saw fit. I am pleased the journal published someof the formative early articles in this area and that it continues to flourish today underthe editorship of Nick Selby. As Blum acutely observes, however, I would recognize myown work as coming “out of this movement, and yet standing in many ways apartfrom it.” The Global Remapping has, I think, some of the same kind of interest inhypothetical cartographies as Virtual Americas, and though it points towards keytheorists of the postnational state such as Habermas (), I would consider it beyondeither my remit or my competence to undertake the weighty task of what Santamarinacalls “theorizing the politics of globalized representation.” I sent a copy of The GlobalRemapping to Ursula Le Guin, who was very helpful in allowing the Press to reproducea fictional map from her science fiction novel Always Coming Home, and Le Guinemailed back to say that, despite a few reservations about my treatment of her work,she hoped the book would “have a thoroughly unsettling and disorienting effect on theoften very outdated maps of American literature used in our universities.” If TheGlobal Remapping could make a contribution towards that end, I would be entirelycontent.

P A U L G I L E SUniversity of Sydney

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