Search

Many things came to me during my four weeks at Spaulding Rehab: consolatory e-mails, cards, some flowers, and a care package from PMLA that kept me going for the entirety of my stay. What I never expected was a translation of a story by the Japanese writer Shiga Naoya, sent by Scott Miller, dean of the College of Humanities at Brigham Young University (BYU) and the translator.

Just how important is “big data” to humanists? is it mostly hype and hot air, as argued by Timothy Brennan in “The Digital Humanities Bust”? Or is it a genuine new beginning, as argued by Sarah E. Bond, Hoyt Long, and Ted Underwood in response? And what exactly does “big” mean? Is the magnitude necessarily the result of algorithmic computation, a form of digital humanities based on data mining and yielding statistical observations about large corpora? Or could it be nonalgorithmic, coming from collaboration, say, rather than computation? Bond, Long, and Underwood point out that big data projects might look different in the future, transformed by new partnerships with libraries and museums. What might some of these projects be?

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.

“Weak Reparation” proposes a new methodological debate in law and literature, inspired by Eve Sedgwick’s “reparative reading” and broadening the discussion to enlist literature as a key player in the longstanding debate between punitive justice and reparative justice. Beginning with Faulkner’s attempt to make amends to Japan after the Second World War, the chapter explores his parallel effort to make amends to the displaced indigenous populations in Mississippi. Largely wishful on Faulkner’s part, this attempt at reparation becomes more grounded only when it is accidentally crowd-sourced, distributed to a weak network, with James Barnes and Lucien Stryk as newly added, input-bearing mediators.

This chapter attempts to reclaim Faulkner as a “regional” writer: but regional in a new sense, embracing a new set of geographical coordinates, and a new set of historical references. What brings all of these into play is a psychology locally felt yet globally shareable, a sense of being somehow on the wrong side of history that different groups must have experienced at different points, when they have fought for something and fought in vain. It is not a good feeling, but some good might come of it nonetheless. It has the most potential for good when it is oriented outward, imagined as a principle of connectivity extending beyond Mississippi, a basis for reaching out to other localities with not much else in common. This transregional arc might turn out to be one of the most enduring aspects of Faulkner's thinking about history. This kind of regionalism is referred to a “networked” regionalism.

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).

"Whatever we see could be other than it is," and "whatever we can describe at all could be other than it is," Wittgenstein writes in the Tractatus Logico-Philosoph icus (58). Wittgenstein is speaking here of a world that he refers to as a "limited whole." It is the world that we call "empirical"?the one that is manifest to us, that can be documented or demonstrated, and that appears to be the only world there is. This apparent totality is deceptive, Wittgenstein says, for the empirical world is actu ally no more than a fraction, a subset, however self-contained, of a much larger uni verse. That larger universe includes not only phenomena that have taken visible form but also phenomena that have not: a world resting just below the threshold of actual ization, made up of could-have-beens and could-still-bes. These counterfactuals are, by our common parlance, non-events. They are not considered part of history. Yet not only are they real alternatives?cousins or even siblings to the real events?they are often comparable to the latter in their degree of likelihood, their probability of oc currence. There is no logical reason why they should not have happened and, had they done so, what is now called "otherwise" would have been no more and no less than the real thing. The stark antithesis between the two is a semantic distinction, in deed a fluke. It is a happenstance, a tightening of the causal net in one direction rather than another, one that, often for no good reason, drastically thins out the range of available options, reducing a multitudinous world to a few hard facts. Wittgenstein highlights just this random narrowing of a once-populous field. He reminds us that what prevails as reality often does so haphazardly, at the expense of a much larger pool that has no compelling reason for not staying large. "All that hap

How many continents can we realistically embrace, what time frames be come necessary, and do these yield a new morphology of genres, along with new longitudes and latitudes? What is the relation between scale and scope in this exercise, between details observable at close range and patterns discernable from afar? In what follows, I propose to go back to the ancient world?to Egypt? to make a case for a literary history with just this broad compass. Cru cial to this undertaking is what Anne Freadman calls an "inter-generic" landscape, populated not by discrete classes of literary objects but by the breakdown of that discreteness, a process of transposing, adapting, and cross-fertilizing, enacted on every route, every locale.1 The his tory of genres, told as a formal diaspora?a history of scattering and recombining?calls for a theater of maximum length and width, for to the extent that movement has always been a human propensity, choreo graphed by words no less than by bodies, the relational arcs generated must span several continents and several thousand years. Far-flung kin ship emerges here as key. Lyric and novel, not ordinarily imagined as having much to do with each other, are recast and reintegrated by these enlarged coordinates. Their kinship is counterintuitive, though I hope

wai chee dimock is the William Lampson Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University. She is the author, most recently, of Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (Princeton University Press, 2006) and coeditor, with Lawrence Buell, of Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature (Princeton University Press, 2007).

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 exactly are genres? Are they a classifying system matching the phenomenal world of objects, a sorting principle that separates oranges from apples? Or are they less than that, a taxonomy that never fully taxonomizes, labels that never quite keep things straight? What archives come with genres, what critical lexicons do they offer, and what maps do they yield? And how does the rise of digitization change these archives, lexicons, and maps?

What can one say about transnational, citizenship, and humanities? The three key terms, combined in this fashion, probably sound novel, but do they bring anything new? Each of the contributors to this issue has proceeded with some degree of caution. We simply put three terms on the table, fully aware that each is fraught, that each can be ironized, and that their intimated directionality might be no more than an illusion. Rather than acting as a spur, three arrows pointing toward a brave new future, transnational, citizenship, and humanities might look like the latest symptoms of a world spinning out of control, occasioned on the one hand by the diminished sovereignty of the nation-state and on the other hand by the diminished value of our own work, both unstoppable, it seems, a downward spiral. As the bombings in New York, Madrid, and London make abundantly clear, the continued existence of national borders only highlights the shared hazard of those inside those borders. And the continued existence of English departments only highlights the across-the-board decline of the discipline, the sense that innovation is now coming from fields other than our own. It is in this context, as we are being lumped again and again into corporate units-often with a less-than-happy profile-that aggregation becomes a pressing issue. Aggregation: not only as it produces random and nonrandom sets of casualties, but also as it generates different kinds of filiations on different scales, opening up the question of what counts as an entity, the platform on which it emerges, the agency available to it, and the pressure that this scalar variety exerts on more conventional forms, such as the form of the nation. The work of Aihwa Ong is exemplary here. As an anthropologist, Ong tends to aggregate down rather than up, towards fairly small, empirically-constrained units; her goal is to test grand concepts against the delimited data of ethnographic fieldwork. On what scale should we study the transnational? How does it mesh with the

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