Postcolonial Publishing and Indigenous Publishing, like Hegel's Africa, are Often Imagined to be Without a History. Indeed, in A Companion to the History of the Book, published by Wiley Blackwell in 2009 and heralded by Adrian Johns as particularly exemplary in that the editors “take the term book in a broad sense to include not only codex volumes and scrolls, but also periodicals, ephemera, and even ancient Babylonian clay tablets” (Review of Companion 782), no region of the global South gets a chapter to itself, and Africa gets only two entries in the index: in a one-sentence remark about Middle Eastern and North African Islamic book production before 1100 and in a parenthetical reference to slavery in a chapter on libraries that mentions colonization. Johns himself has written a huge work on “the book”—that is, about early modern Britain (Nature). In David Finkelstein and Alistair MacCleery's recently reprinted An Introduction to Book History, “the book” is unapologetically introduced as a Western form: the introduction makes it clear that the topic of the volume is overwhelmingly “Western European traditions of social communication through writing …” (30). The definite article is fearless in book history and occludes the history and travels of the book elsewhere, reinstalling it, time after time, in the North Atlantic regions that seem to be its natural habitat.

Large-scale industrial processes and networks of extraction, slow violences wrought across toxic landscapes, and rapidly shifting atmospheric, oceanic, and hydrologic cycles are altering the conditions of human and nonhuman existence in ways that challenge the limits of existing media technologies. The last of these transformations—the fluctuating distributions of water—is the focus of this essay. Hydrologists are struggling to model and predict the intensities of drought, the changing supply of watersheds, the dispersions of chemicals through streams and rivers, and the failures of aging infrastructure. Water transports contaminants too small to identify by sight, requiring technologies that can register tiny particles on a massive scale. Water complicates boundary-making projects—it moves easily across local and regional zones, human and nonhuman bodies, and atmospheric, terrestrial, and marine ecologies. Global weather patterns and distribution infrastructures shape its circulation, yet its material effects depend greatly on local conditions.

In the Autumn of 2002, I Gave a Lecture on Mourning the Dead to Final-Year Undergraduates at the University of Cambridge studying the compulsory course on tragedy. The lecture covered the care devoted to the dead body in Sophocles's Antigone and Hamlet's reflections, over Ophelia's grave, on the “fine revolution” of the material corpse (5.1.82-83). But it also extended its range to include the then very recent excavation, for eight and a half months, at Ground Zero in search of the remains of the dead victims of the attack on the World Trade Center, and the simultaneous daily publication in the New York Times of “Portraits of Grief.” These portraits, I maintained, fulfilled a similar function to tragic drama by refocusing attention on the individual life and by finding a narrative arc to each victim's story, like Aristotle's tragic plots, which must have “a beginning, a middle, and an end” (26). While the firefighters' digging equipment at Ground Zero searched in vain for the missing remains of about 1800 people and eventually hit bedrock, the newspaper reinvested each lost person with significance, finding a value and a pattern in the person's life.

In this essay I address the remediation of the centuries-old East African practice of poetic dialogue in the twenty-first-century digital social network of Facebook. Focusing on an online duel between two young poets from Mombasa, I demonstrate how East Africa's new media are transforming traditional poetic conventions in Swahili. Even sites that endeavor to preserve authentic literary Swahili have become in practice controversial crossroads of language, culture, and identity. By bringing voices of Swahili cultural authority, which draw from the East, into sustained contact with voices of the contemporary urban youth culture, which draws from the West, these new media are ultimately opening new terrains for literary production and debate.

This essay makes a case for the centrality of premodern Persian literary criticism to understanding Islamic virtue ethics as a world tradition of civility. It argues that this body of criticism took the form of two distinct if overlapping interpretive postures, the charismatic-allegorical and the humanist-philological, and that these two postures assumed and furthered two forms of friendship: a vertical form of Sufi hierarchy and a horizontal form of humanist-philological tutelage. Pointing to the centrality of both kinds of friendship to the urban settings in which Islamic virtue ethics has situated itself, it then sets forth how these presupposed models of friendship conditioned literary commentary by considering representative passages from three Mughal commentaries on Sa‘dī's canonical The Rose Garden of 1258. It closes by expanding on its opening remarks on the relations between metaliterary discourse and virtue, speculating on the ethical limits of this body of Persian literary criticism in relation to the modern practice of critique.

This essay identifies “selling out” as an enduring yet evolving concern in anglophone literary history, from the late nineteenth century's divided literary field to the “program era” to the increasingly global circuits of contemporary literary commerce. It begins with Henry James, showing how his canonical statements on modern narrative form emerged from commercial negotiations—an economic prehistory of “craft.” Selling out becomes a salient concern as intellectuals come to see commercial success as antithetical to modern art. This cultural anxiety changes, however, once creative writing programs begin systematically reconciling craft and commerce. Turning to Nam Le's celebrated short story collection The Boat, the second section shows how selling out came to entail a fear that minority writers might betray group solidarity through reductive or essentialist portrayals of identity. Finally, the essay's third section closes by situating Le within a global market for postcolonial fiction and its attendant concerns over commodifying exoticism.

This paper considers the story of the making of Paul Bowles's novel The Sheltering Sky as a case study for the emergence of the art novel as a commercial niche after World War II. Bowles's novel expresses disdain for American culture and depicts its characters' flight to the Sahara, but its subject matter contrasts with the story of the novel's creation: an unlikely collection of American mass-culture and high-culture institutions, including Doubleday, the William Morris Agency, and the avant-garde publisher New Directions, collaborated in the production and promotion of The Sheltering Sky. The story of the novel's making and of its immediate commercial success, the product of a New Directions marketing campaign that effectively advertised Bowles's distance from American culture, exemplifies a neglected aspect of postwar cultural history, when institutions from across the cultural spectrum recognized the existence of a growing market for avant-garde detachment. (EB)

La Gracia Triunfante en la vida de catharina tegakovita (“Grace triumphant in the life of catherine tekakwitha”), an account of the miraculous life of Kateri Tekakwitha, an Iroquois Indian from New France, traversed language and space to be published in Mexico City, New Spain, in 1724. Juan de Urtassum, a Basque Navarran Jesuit who had spent many years in Mexico, translated his fellow Jesuit Pierre Cholonec's hagiographic text from its original French (first published in Paris in 1717). Two appendixes accompanied the translation. In the first, a learned theological apology, the Mexican cleric Juan Castorena y Urúsa extolled the piety of indigenous women whom he deemed fit to be nuns; the second consisted of short narratives detailing the exemplary lives of New Spanish indigenous women. Urtassum and Castorena compiled the volume in order to advocate for the foundation of convents for indigenous women, presenting Tekakwitha's piety as evidence of indigenous women's capacity for Christian virtue (Díaz, Indigenous Writings 56; Greer, “Iroquois Virgin” 237). While Tekakwitha's sanctity helped Urtassum's case, his knowledge of and indeed interest in her provenance were scant. He locates the Iroquois Nation (the “Provincia de los Iraqueses”) on the northern frontier of New Spain (today's New Mexico), where indigenous groups had resisted Spanish attempts at colonization and evangelization for centuries. He “domesticates” the distant Iroquois for the New Spanish reader, comparing them with the Araucanian Indians of Chile, whose bravery Alonso de Ercilla immortalized in his epic poem La Araucana and who, though geographically distant from Mexico, seemed familiar through the Spanish colonial condition they shared with Urtassum's readers. In a telling moment, in the dedication to his patron that precedes the translation, Urtassum refers to “todo este emispherio” (“this entire hemisphere”). It is clear, however, that this reference encompasses only Spanish imperial possessions, including the recently founded California missions. The distant Iroquois Nation, located in geographically indistinct New France, does not figure in this geopolitical economy, nor do other American territories in the possession of rival imperial powers.

Working at the intersection of translation theory and medical humanities, this article interrogates the term brain fever, which Constance Garnett, adhering to clichés of English sentimental fiction, uses in reference to a wide variety of medical conditions in the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Garnett's choice has become useful shorthand for the narrative function of delirium in Dostoevsky's works, but it obscures the sensitivity to medical terminology that informs the Russian texts. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky stages the conflict between Enlightenment rationality and religious mysticism by satirizing the terminology of medical authorities and contrasting it with the language of faith, which posits its own etiology for mental diseases. Garnett's abundance of interpolated brain fevers can be read not as a simple mistranslation but as marking the roles of translation and diagnosis in mediating the various cultural paradigms produced in fictional worlds.

Virginia Woolf's “A Sketch of the Past” (1939–40) develops her most radical ontological and pedagogical insights, which are inseparably connected by her concept “moments of being”—redefined in this essay as pedagogical accidents. This redefinition opens readers to an unexplored dimension of Woolf's late thought: namely, the reorientation of learning and teaching around the creative function of accidents, the unhinged temporality of “sudden violent shock[s]” that repeat their difference across one's lifespan, and the prioritization of feeling. The nonlinear, nonrealist, and nonsequential temporality of these events serves Woolf as a model not only for the memoir but for the double task of learning how to write her life otherwise and of teaching her potential readers the shapes and intensities of their own selves and lives. My reading of Woolf's memoir as a work of “sensuous pedagogy” attempts to account for the importance of feeling to this task.

“I hope my attitude will not be regarded as irreverent,” Maurizio Ascari declares before launching into a critique of Franco Moretti's critical methods (3). By contrast, I undertake no critique of Moretti's methods, but my attitude toward his work is at least somewhat irreverent, if also appreciative. I titled an early draft of this essay “Distant Reading and the New Poetics of Enchantment; or, Toward a Literary History That Is Spiritual but Not Religious.” This title was self-consciously outrageous, since there is little that is overtly enchanted, let alone spiritual, about Moretti's criticism. Indeed, one of the recurring rhetorical fillips in his book Distant Reading involves the disparagement of close reading as a kind of theology: “At bottom,” close reading is “a theological exercise—very solemn treatment of very few texts taken very seriously—whereas what we really need is a little pact with the devil: we know how to read texts, now let's learn how not to read them. Distant reading: where distance … is a condition of knowledge” (48; see also 33, 67, 89, and 113). By invoking enchantment and spirituality to describe his work, then, I was looking to underscore, a little cheekily, how rigorous engagement with his “pact with the devil” reveals similar features to those Moretti partly discredits—namely, credulity, “superstition” (Johnson 84), and “mystery” (Goodwin xiii). In essence, my aim was to employ close reading—of distant reading—as a kind of return, if not revenge, of the repressed.

Introduction: The Francophone Uncle Tom's Cabin

The Overlooked American Francophone Novel Le Vieux Salomon, Ou Une Famille D'Esclaves Au XIXE Siècle (OLD SOLOMON; OR, A Slave Family in the Nineteenth Century), by Charles Testut (1819-92), offers a contemporaneous description of slavery as a global commerce with international causes and effects. The novel's geographic scope, as well as Testut's interest in contrasting the life in the French Caribbean with slavery in the United States, makes Old Solomon an ideal text through which to examine the representation of economic and cultural circulation in the Americas. Old Solomon is a clear response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), with some similar characters and situations, but is more trangressive and violent.

The chapter titled the “Reading of Bookes” in Francis Meres'S 1598 Palladis Tamia offers two competing prescriptions for the allocation of readerly attention. The first suggests that too-close reading spoils some books: “As the s[c]ent of spices and flowers is more acceptable somewhat off then close to the nose: so there are some things that please, if they be lightly passed over; which being exactly looked into do loose their grace” (266v). The second reverses that logic by way of a fresh analogy: “Those things that live long, doe not soon spring up: so that worke which thou wouldst have alwaies to be read, ought to be throughly laboured in, and seriouslie scanned” (267r). On the face of it, Meres's book—a six-hundred-and-sixty-five-page-long compendium of moral and practical precepts, each cast in the repetitive syntax of the similitude—is evidently the first sort of text. At once dizzingly various and mind-numbingly repetitive, Palladis Tamia is a book to “be lightly passed over”—“scanned” in the modern, not the sixteenth-century, sense of the word. That is certainly the case today, when Palladis Tamia is known primarily for a single chapter, “A Comparative Discourse of Our English Poets, with the Greeke, Latine, and Italiane Poets,” Meres's pioneering survey of English Renaissance writing, and above all for a handful of sentences in that chapter, which offer a rare glimpse into the early career of William Shakespeare. “As the soule of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras: so the sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honytongued Shakespeare,” Meres declares. “As Epius Stolo said, that the Muses would speake with Plautus tongue, if they would speak Latin: so I say that the Muses would speak with Shakespeares fine filed phrase, if they would speake English” (281v, 282r).

I chose the title of this essay in part because I will be discussing Leo Bersani's work on painting and cinema, and Doing so as a friend rather than a rival or adversary. But the three words in my title also describe how Bersani himself approaches the visible world: when he sees something, he looks with it, not at it. He is drawn to artists who look in the same way—artists who challenge the notion that seeing is a one-way action, which a seer performs on a visual object. Terrence Malick is a particularly good example of this type of artist, since he not only looks with the world but also makes this action the center of his films. As Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit put it in their discussion of The Thin Red Line, Malick shows us both “the world his characters are registering” and “the imprint of the act of looking on the subject of the looking” (Forms 146).

“I Can't Go on, I'll Go On.” Both Parts of This Bleak Acknowledgment By Samuel Beckett's Unnamable (407) seem to me appropriate (if not particularly gracious) responses to the honor of the preceding essays, which grow out of a distinguished 2008 MLA panel on what the program called my “career in writing.” First, there is, inevitably, a finalizing or conclusive connotation inherent in both the event and the reference to a “career,” a career that, at least for the purposes of the event meant to celebrate it, can only be located behind me. So the only way to avoid the entombment, the modest monumentalizing, unintentionally (I assume) accomplished in these essays is to insist, as Beckett does, that I must go on. If, to continue on another Beckettian note, there has been a career in writing, it has perhaps been because, somehow, I have not succeeded in failing, or I have at least (or at most) insufficiently failed. The Beckettian voice's exasperation at never having failed enough has always seemed to me to have something to do with the experience of the energizing effect of failures in language, an energy that prevents a voice from entering, and being locked into, the presumed history of a presumed culture.

By giving a brief history of emotivism in close reading, this article offers a new context for understanding the contemporary uneasiness about close reading and about the proliferating array of alternative kinds of reading it has prompted. Emotivism refers to the subcurrent of linguistic thought that shaped the institutional formation of New Critical closeness by distinguishing propositional from emotive meaning. Instead of amending our closeness to texts by dispensing with critique, or focusing on surfaces and description to the exclusion of textual depth, either of which might inadvertently encourage new kinds of emotivism, this article suggests we bear in mind—as the conversation goes on—the mid-century counteremotivist critics, such as Kenneth Burke, who advocated a kind of reading attuned to the interactive processes held in apparent stasis by literary form.