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Dimock reflects on languages in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic On December 30, 2019, before the World Health Organization (WHO) issued warnings about the coronavirus outbreak that would be known as COVID-19, a Canadian start-up, BlueDot, noticed a cluster of unusual pneumonia cases in Wuhan and flagged it BlueDot doesn't just accept official statistics Kamran Khan, its founder and CEO said that they know that governments may not always be relied upon to provide information in a timely fashion Instead, a machine-learning algorithm using natural language processing combs through a vast database every day, looking for syndromes of over 150 diseases in sixty-five languages Local news stories, medical bulletins, even livestock and animal disease data are all on the algorithm's reading lists When an outbreak is identified, its location is linked to global air-travel data to pinpoint other cities at risk

Beginning with Margaret Atwood's novella The Penelopiad and its staging in regional and experimental theaters in Canada, the U.K., and around the world, this essay traces a long history of network mediation for the Odyssey, beginning with the performative decisions made by itinerant rhapsodes, who variously selected, arranged, and circulated the Homeric epics in ancient Greece, and extending well into the twenty-first century, in the self-conscious invocations of the Odyssey by filmmakers such as the Coen Brothers and Richard Linklater. Crowdsourcing, the unruly and never-ending input from masses of people, is the morphological ground of the epic, an art form energized by its downward percolations. Penelope, that infinitely patient and longsuffering wife, becomes a variety of things as a result, much changed since Homer's times. In the hands of Atwood, she shares the stage with her twelve maids.

In thinking about the relation between literature and the arts, one concept that I'd like to try out is "relay"--cross-genre and cross-media relay. What I have in mind is a series of entries that are sequential, requiring multiple players, perhaps multiple tangents, entries that, rather than allowing a text to remain a finished product, with a discrete beginning and a discrete closure in the past, turns it instead into an open-ended input network, a work-in-progress that is long drawn-out, with no preassigned generic boundaries and no logical endpoint. Understood in this way, literature is less an object than a vector, a forward momentum, one that says: "to be continued." It can be taken in any number of ways, updated in any number of ways. Different people add different legs to it; these legs don't always move in unison, and perhaps that is the point. What this suggests about literary history is that the original composition by any one author is bound to be "incomplete"--in the sense that it cannot be its own sequel, its own endpoint--precisely because it is singular, the work of one pair of hands. This isn't necessarily a shortcoming, a sin of commission or omission. Rather, it is what comes with the terrain, comes with individuation itself, a limitation not only built-in but also inversely generative, turning every text into a multi-author undertaking, the condition of possibility for gaps to be subsequently filled, roads not taken to be subsequently visited. Through these long-running, not necessarily recuperative, but fairly reliably incremental relays, traces of the unactualized past can be carried into the future, and shadowy outlines can be given unexpected shapes. The umbrella term under which I'd like to consider such relays is "epic," using this oldest and bulkiest of genres to name its current iterations in modernity, which is to say, as a genre made up by its extensions and inversions, a genre that survives by being turned upside down and inside out, indexing new developments in the world, and indexing as well the variety of media that become available. Without further ado, then, let me turn to the three figures in this relay--Herman Melville, C. L. R. James, and Frank Stella--to give you a sense of what I have in mind. I begin with James. No matter how we look at it, Mariners, Renegades, Castaways is a strange book. Is it literary criticism? The genre isn't entirely clear. James began writing it on June 10, 1952, when he was arrested by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Services, and sent to Ellis Island, where he was detained for the next 6 months. It was on Ellis Island that he tried to put into words the almost prophetic vision that came to him, in this encounter with what he called "the miracle of Herman Melville" I use the word "prophetic" because James's own word--"miracle"--seems to call for it, and I'll have more to say about this sudden appearance of what seems to be an entirely different order of reality, so out of place in the starkly bureaucratic and geopolitical environment of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. But, for now I want to concentrate on the extraordinary claim that James is making, namely, that his twentieth-century experience with the world's immigrant populations is somehow of a piece with his reading of a novel by a nineteenth-century author. This is what he says: A great deal of this book was written on Ellis Island while I was being detained by the Department of Immigration. The Island, like Melville's Pequod, is a miniature of all the nations of the world and all sections of society. My experience of it and the circumstances attending my stay there have so deepened my understanding of Melville and so profoundly influenced the form the book has taken, that an account of this had seemed to me not only a natural but necessary conclusion. This is to be found in Chapter VII. (James, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways 4) Well, at least that was the plan. …

These days, it is impossible to look at the news without finding Facebook in one headline or another. Many are prompted by the leaking of personal information. But a few critics have also called attention to a different kind of problem, having less to do with privacy than with the nature of Facebook as a social medium. Writing in the New York Review of Books, Charles Petersen makes much of its genesis in an Ivy League dorm room: “While Microsoft could as easily have originated at MIT or Caltech, it was no accident that Facebook came from Harvard.” He goes on to analyze the ethos of the site as the digital equivalent of the preppie look: well scrubbed and well behaved, prankish on occasion but in the end clean and safe and bland. The site's juvenile “principle of in loco parentis” has given way to the “authoritarian building codes” of the suburbs, with more legroom perhaps but no less supervised and no less homogeneous, a “chilling and puritanical atmosphere” (9–10).

This essay examines the 2006 collaboration between poet Yusef Komunyakaa and dramaturg Chad Gracia, the recycling of Gilgamesh as low-budget stagings in the USA. The migration of the epic into a performance-basis genre—and into vernacular settings and grassroots organizations—constitutes a feature of epic that Mikhail Bakhtin overlooked. These downward percolations in venue are accompanied by a parallel downshift in thematics and demographics: the audience changes across time, as does the sympathy for characters. In the Komunyakaa/Gracia stage adaptation, it is not Gilgamesh, and not even Enkidu, but Humbaba, their not-quite-human adversary, who becomes the emotional focus, turning a genre once dedicated to the hubris of kings and princes into one saturated by the pathos of those who are “slaves to the gods.”

What would literary history look like if the field were divided, not into discrete periods, and not into discrete bodies of national literatures? What other organizing principles might come into play? And how would they affect the mapping of “literature” as an analytic object: the length and width of the field; its lines of filiation, lines of differentiation; the database needed in order to show significant continuity or significant transformation; and the bounds of knowledge delineated, the arguments emerging as a result? In this essay, I propose one candidate to begin this line of rethinking: the concept of literary genre. Genre, of course, is not a new concept; in fact, it is as old as the recorded history of humankind. Even though the word itself is of relatively recent vintage (derived from French, in turn derived from the Latin genus), 1 the idea that there are different kinds of literature (or at least different kinds of poetry) came from ancient Greece. Traditionally it has been seen as a classifying principle, putting the many subsets of literature under the rule of normative sets. Theorists like Benedotto Croce have objected to it on just these grounds. “[I]nstead of asking before a work of art if it be expressive and what it expresses,” genre criticism only wants to label it, putting it into a pigeonhole, asking only “if it obey the laws of epic or of tragedy.” Nothing can be more misguided, Croce says, for these “laws of the kinds” have never in fact been observed by practicing writers (36 ‐37). 2 Derrida makes the same point. “As soon as genre announces itself, one

reestimation of “context” in literary studies should itself be read in the context of the “Postscript on Method” in Common Knowledge 8:1 (winter 2002): 147–203 (contributions by Jeffrey M. Perl and Alick Isaacs, Peter Burke, Marcel Detienne, and Anne Carson). 2. Immanuel M. Wallerstein, Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth-Century Paradigms (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 1991), 259. PLANETARY TIME AND GLOBAL TRANSLATION

What difference does it make to map globalization along the axis of time rather than the axis of space? This essay tests that possibility, focusing on pre-national time and exploring it through a genre-based paradigm, inspired by Adorno and especially Lukacs. Adorno and Lukacs see genres as diachronic forms giving each individual work a backward as well as a forward extension. The ancient epic and the modern novel continually interact and must be read in tandem if literature is to be seen as a cumulative, global phenomenon. James's novels are global in just this way: looking back to The Odyssey and forward to Erza Pound's Cantos.