...Jeffrey J. Williams “American Literature in the World” is an interview with the literary critic Wai Chee Dimock, in which she discusses her efforts to extend the field of American literature, over time and to various continents, for instance seeing the use of the ancient epic Gilgamesh...

... Moretti, Pascale Casanova, Djelal Kadir, Wai Chee Dimock, Christopher Prendergast, and others. This is indeed what Apter is against in Against World Literature, but fortunately hers is a far richer and more generative book than the prepo- sition would suggest. The syntagm “Against X” is an old...

... perspicuous. At a time when prominent literary critics such as Wai Chee Dimock, Lawrence Buell, and Jonathan Arac have called on humanists to think about Ameri- can writing within radically expanded spatial and historical horizons, US 2. Horace Engdahl, “The Nobel Prize: Dawn of a New Canon accessed...

... the scholar be, free and brave. Free even to the definition of freedom 1 This I would like to thank Wai Chee Dimock, Dana Nelson, Steven Weisenburger, and the edi- torial collective of boundary 2 for their suggestions and criticisms...

... passage, let me offer a counterexample. If I single out Wai-chee Dimock’s Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism as exemplary of those practices of reading at work in contemporary literary-cultural criticism that could not be any further removed from philopoesis, it is because...

... comments on deep history and Wai Chee Dimock’s work—about the problems posed by the proliferation of discourses of world literature, I could not help but think that one consequence of this proliferation, one very interesting institutional effect, is the proliferation of literary material for study...

... from comments by many partici- pants at these events. Thanks, too, to those whose comments on written drafts heartened, challenged, and instructed me: Rashmi Bhatnagar, Paul A. Bové, Marshall Brown, Law- rence Buell, Amanda Claybaugh, Wai Chee Dimock, James Livingston, Matt Sandler, and Werner...

... of the rare exceptions, Wai-­ chee Dimock’s “Genre as World System: Epic and Novel on Four Conti- nents” (2006), feels compelled to defend the epic from charges of being “moribund”—she cites Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990)—and, in case that example is not sufficiently persuasive, she proceeds to show...

... David . 2003 . What Is World Literature? Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press . De Lomnitz Hugo Meltzl . 1877 . “ Present Tasks of Comparative Literature .” Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum ( October ): 307 – 15 . Dimock Wai Chee . 2006 . Through Other...

.... But it is not, as in Shakespeare, the psychological resonance of this disobedience that Melville emphasizes; it is the social. In a way that 8. See Wei-Chee Dimock, Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989). Dimock identifies Melville’s ‘‘orphan...

... Chee Dimock and Law- rence Buell (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 19–38. 4. Jonathan Arac, “Preface to the Morningside Edition,” in Commissioned Spirits: Shap- ing of Social Motion in Dickens, Carlyle, Melville, and Hawthorne (1979; repr. with a new preface, New York: Columbia...

... in Wai-chee Dimock, Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 38. Spanos  /  Edward W. Said and Zionism  155 to the United States; and, with the settlement of the Pacific Coast...

... Art of Moby-Dick, esp. 191–203. 16. Wei-chee Dimock makes explicit the pervasiveness in Pierre of the metaphorics of em- pire and shows convincingly that the domestic topos which the novel overdetermines is utterly continuous with the geopolitical. See Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics...