The Global Remapping of American Literature (review)

Paul Giles. The Global Remapping of Literature. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 2010. 340 pp. $39.50.No one knows more about than Paul Giles. Giles's encyclopedic range, though, gets diffused early on in this book amidst what he promises accomplish: demystify what was never definitively mystified in first place and recover what he calls overlooked but isn't. Despite these promises, The Global Remapping of Literature provides capacious, often engaging survey. It reminds us that what we call American literature and way academy understands American literature resembles Henry James's house of fiction, with a number of possible windows [. . .] in its vast front subject vision and [. . .] pressure of individual will. Over past generation, both literary and critical writing, has increasingly grappled with what Giles presents as his demystify[ing] and refractive (3, 24) thesis, his argument that the interrelationship between and geography iscontested terrain (1) rather than natural phenomenon (267).Where did Giles get idea that any memorable makers or influential readers of ever treated it as other than contested? Giles's own evidence illustrates ubiquity and durability of this contestation, as do examples that any student of writing might adduce.Philip Roth, for example, has always been in business of deterritorialzing (1-25; 23; 266), concept key Giles' argument, which he adapts from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Roth's first book, Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Storie (1959), makes at least two deterritorializing moves. Here's how map-equipped narrator (Roth, Goodbye 9) of title story pictures future of feckless light-bulb peddler he befriends: He would get off in New London [. . .] maybe further north [. . .] world was Leo's territory, every city, every swamp, every road and highway [. . .] he could go Newfoundland . . . Hudson Bay, and on up Thule, and then slide down other side of and rap on frosted windows on Russian steppes (118-19). Few passages in canon more vividly practice what Giles calls geographical materialism (1). In third story, Defender of Faith, combat-weary narrator anticipates flying new front push eastward [. . .] until we had circled globe (161).Roth's later work also exhibits his global grasp (Morley 11, 52, 88, 92) and shows how, in Giles's reading, Roth aims to relocate within planetary context . . . disturb customary demarcation of territory . . . challenge conventional epistemological framework upon which . . . territorial claims are grounded (179). Among later Roth novels Giles considers, Pastoral features multinational commercial network, which enables Levov family's prosperous glove-making enterprise; Dawn Levov's attachment Swiss Simmental cattle (198); Merry Levov's global notoriety as fugitive revolutionary (157); and her importation of Indian Jainism Newark (232; 246).In this respect, Roth is typical among living novelists-and critics. One of most telling recent reminders of durability and ubiquity of this contest is reflected in relationship that novelist Bharati Mukherjee has spent nearly two decades establishing between her own writing and writing of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Her 1993 novel, The Holder of World, renders Hawthorne's storied Puritan Massachusetts, England, and its newly seized East India Company's territories, literally, as part of same global family (Bloom 44-45). Her 2010 contribution of Scarlet Letter section The New Literary History of The United States amplifies this affinity by turning schoolroom classic multicultural. The year 2010 also saw publication of Monique Truong's second novel, Bitter in Mouth, which stretches idea of the into global continuum encompassing South America and Vietnam, as well as Dixie. …

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