Recycling the Epic: Gilgamesh on Three Continents

Wai Chee Dimock is the William Lampson Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University. She experiments with close readings across different widths of space, and across a range of time-scales. Her book, Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time (2006), received Honorable Mention for both the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association and the Harry Levin Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association. A collaborative volume, Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature, further elaborates on these arguments. Outside Yale, Dimock was a consultant for Invitation to World Literature, a thirteen-part series produced by WGBH and aired on PBS stations in the fall of 2010. A related Facebook forum, “Rethinking World Literature,” is still ongoing. She is now at work on two critical books, Recycling and Many Islams, and a print-and-web anthology, American Literature in the World. She writes a blog on that website, http://www. amlitintheworld.org, and posts images on its Facebook page.