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The Global Remapping of American Literature (review)

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