Abstract
For more than a decade, I have taught a course entitled New World Poetics, in which the readings include a number of early modern European texts about the Americas, contemporaneous writings representing influential discourses of the same moment that often intersect with representations of the new world (e.g., Petrarch, More, Machiavelli), and an array of modern and postmodern responses—from Brazil, Mexico, Peru, and the United States—to European definitions of American reality. The course presents itself as an investigation into how American cultures are realized through the intersections of events, writings, and large-scale systems of thought, and assembles its own comparative account of ideologies such as utopianism, genres such as the love lyric, and works such as The Tempest. It would be possible to approach this material in a number of different ways, but I have deliberately treated it in view of the negotiations between worldviews rather than authors, discrete texts, or national traditions. In practice this means that the course entails some of the attention to local reading that figures in most literary study, but avoids the familiar trajectory of purpose toward conclusions about authors and their works. Instead, the emphasis typically falls on discursive currents that move through several texts and traditions, on the inflection of one standpoint by another, and on transhistorical dialogues over formative new world issues carried out across differences of race, language, institution, and nation.
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Notes
For some of these disputes, see Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, ed. Charles Bernheimer (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), and Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization, ed. Haun Saussy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming).
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 6.
Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1976), and Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1978);
and C.S. Lewis, Studies in Words, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 214–268, offer definitions of “world” from which I adapt my usage of the term.
For a discussion of Goodman’s philosophy of worldmaking, see Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 93–105.
José Piedra, “The Game of Critical Arrival,” Diacritics 19 (1989), 50.
Charles Bernstein, “Poetics of the Americas,” Modernism/Modernity 3:3 (1996), 1–23.
Since this essay was first published in 1996, approaches of this sort have been demonstrated continually by scholars whose work I would consider germane to new world studies. See, for example, on the eighteenth-century “dispute of the New World,” Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); on the question of subalternity,
see John Beverley, Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in Cultural Theory (Durham: Duke University of Minnesota Press, 1999); on the problematic nature of Latin American studies,
see Roman de la Campa, Latin Americanism, Cultural Studies of the Americas 3 (Minneaspolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); and on the linkages between the imperial power of the United States and its domestic culture,
see Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002).
Manuel Castells, The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements, California Series in Urban Development 2 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), xv–xxi
and 291–301; New Social Movements: From Ideology to Identity, ed. Enrique Laraña, Hank Johnston, and Joseph R. Gusfield (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), esp. 3–35;
and Paul Routledge, Terrains of Resistance: Nonviolent Social Movements and the Contestation of Place in India (Westport, CT Praeger, 1993), esp. 22–24; I appropriate the term “terrain” from Routledge’s study, to denote “real geographical ground” (xi) on which cultural negotiations take place.
Castells, The City and the Grassroots, xvii. Again, questions like this have been addressed in fresh ways over the past ten years. See, for instance, two complementary studies of race mixture against the background of the European and colonial past: José F. Buscaglia-Salgado, Undoing Expire: Race and Nation in the Mulatto Caribbean (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003),
and Marilyn Grace Miller, Rise and Fall of the Cosmic Race: The Cult of Mestizaje in Latin America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004) 9. “Introduction,” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (New York: Routledge, 1995), 2.
Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 3.
Mario de Andrade, Paulicéia Desvairada, in Obras completas, 10 vols., 5th ed. (Sao Paulo: Livraria Martins, 1979), 1:32–33.
On the racial ambiguities in Andrade’s work, see David T Haberly, Three Sad Races: Racial Identity and National Consciousness in Brazilian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 135–160.
An exemplary reading of Andrade and other poets in terms of what I am calling new world studies is Richard Morse, New World Soundings: Culture and Ideology in the Americas (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 61–91.
William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 153 (Act 2, Scene 1, lines 142–161).
José Carlos Mariátegui, “El anti-soneto,” Amauta 17 (September 1928); rpt. in Martin Adán, Obra Poética 1928–1971 (Lima: Instituto Nacional de Cultura, 1971), 237–239.
In Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), the chart appears in slightly different form in several essays, at 161–162, 194, and 209–210.
John Donne, Poems, ed. Herbert J.C. Grierson, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1912), 1:120–121.
Clay Hunt, Donne’s Poetry: Essays in Literary Analysis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), 20.
Augusto de Campos, O anticrítico (Sao Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1986), 54–57; Caetano Veloso, Cinema Transcendental, Verve 314512023–2, 1979.
On Veloso’s work, see Charles Perrone, Masters of Contemporary Brazilian Song: MPB 1965–1985 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989), 46–88, and—for a still wider context—the same author’s Seven Faces: Brazilian Poetry Since Modernism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996). An interview with Veloso appears in Transition 70 (1996), 116–138.
On Howe’s project, see Ming-Qian Ma, “Poetry as History Revised: Susan Howe’s ‘Scattering as Behavior toward Risk,’” American Literary History 6 (1994), 716–737;
Peter Quartermain, Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and the essays on Howe collected in Talisman 4 (1990).
Minas Gerais, ed. Carlos Drummond de Andrade (Rio de Janeiro: Editora do Autor, 1967), is an invaluable anthology of colonial and modern sources on Minas Gerais.
The dating of the new historicism at about 1982 reflects the appearance of a special issue of Genre in that year, edited by Stephen Greenblatt and entitled “The Forms of Power and the Power of Forms,” in the introduction to which Greenblatt first used the term “new historicism.” The issue was reprinted the same year as The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance (Norman, Oklahoma: Pilgrim Books, 1982). For a retrospective account, see Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Green Blatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
The recasting of Petrarchism in explicitly political terms largely hinged on the work of Nancy J. Vickers and Ann Rosalind Jones in the early 1980s: see especially Vickers, “Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme,” Critical Inquiry 8 (1981), 265–279, rpt. in Writing and Sexual Difference, ed. Elizabeth Abel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 95–109; and Ann Rosalind Jones, The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric in Europe, 1540–1620 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).
For humanism, see Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifieenth-and Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), among other work by these scholars. For the eventual recasting of the baroque and the picaresque, see Baroque Topographies: Literature/History/Philosophy, ed. Timothy Hampton, Yale French Studies 80 (1991);
José Antonio Maravall, The Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, trans. Terry Cochran, Theory and History of Literature 25 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986);
Peter N. Dunn, Spanish Picaresque Fiction: A New Literary History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993);
Javier Herrero, “Renaissance Poverty and Lazarillo’s Family: The Birth of the Picaresque Genre,” PMLA 94 (1979), 976–986
and Giancarlo Maiorino, At the Margins of the Renaissance: Lazarillo de Tormes and the Picaresque Art of Survival (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003). 28
David Palumbo-Liu, ed., The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, and Interventions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 17, 19.
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© 2006 Joan Retallack and Juliana Spahr
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Greene, R. (2006). New World Studies and the Limits of National Literatures. In: Retallack, J., Spahr, J. (eds) Poetry & Pedagogy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-11449-5_6
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