Tracing ideas of the sublime in American literature from Puritan writings to the postmodern epoch, Rob Wilson demonstrates that the North American landscape has been the ground for political as well as aesthetic transport. He takes a distinctly historical approach and explores the ways in which experiences of the American landscape instill desire for other kinds of vastness: self-expansion, national expansion, and American political power. As Wallace Stevens put it, the American will takes "dominion everywhere." Wilson sets the stage for his "genealogy" with a discussion of the classical notion of the sublime (taken primarily from Longinus) and the ways that notion was pragmatically transformed by its American setting and appropriated by American poets. He follows this transformation in successive chapters on the Puritans (Bradstreet) through the Naturalists (Livingston and Bryant), from the epitome of the American sublime (Whitman) to the greatest of the modernists (Stevens) and its present-day incarnations (Ashbery and others). Writing today under the sign of Hiroshima, contemporary writers must struggle with the concept of the sublime within a context of spiralling technologies and nuclear force that calls into question the long-standing American sacralization of power. Throughout American Sublime, Wilson engages in an original theoretical inquiry into "the sublime" as term, topic, complex, and controversial idea in literary and critical history. Furthermore, he undertakes his historical study from an avowedly postmodern perspective, one that draws on and extends the work of Jameson, Lyotard, Foucault, Lentricchia, Harold Bloom, and others.
Wilson's reconceptualization of the American project of conversion begins with the story of Henry 'Ōpūkaha'ia, the first Hawaiian convert to Christianity, torn from his Native Pacific homeland and transplanted to New England. Wilson argues that 'Ōpūkaha'ia's conversion is both remarkable and prototypically American.
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Globalization discourse now presumes that the “world space” is entirely at the mercy of market norms and forms promulgated by reactionary U.S. policies. An academic but accessible set of studies, this wide range of essays by noted scholars challenges this paradigm with diverse and strong arguments. Taking on topics that range from the medieval Mediterranean to contemporary Jamaican music, from Hong Kong martial arts cinema to Taiwanese politics, writers such as David Palumbo-Liu, Meaghan Morris, James Clifford, and others use innovative cultural studies to challenge the globalization narrative with a new and trenchant tactic called “worlding.” The book posits that world literature, cultural studies, and disciplinary practices must be “worlded” into expressions from disparate critical angles of vision, multiple frameworks, and field practices as yet emerging or unidentified. This opens up a major rethinking of historical “givens” from Rob Wilson’s reinvention of “The White Surfer Dude” to Sharon Kinoshita’s “Deprovincializing the Middle Ages.” Building on the work of cultural critics like Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Kenneth Burke, The Worlding Project is an important manifesto that aims to redefine the aesthetics and politics of postcolonial globalization withalternative forms and frames of global becoming.
Discusses the makings of the "American Pacific" locality/location/identity as space and ground of cultural production, and the way this region can be linked to "Asia" and "Pacific" as well as to "American mainland
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