The transnational and hemispheric “turn” taken by the field of Americanist literary studies in the past decade is by now familiar enough that the directional subject can stand to lose its scare quotes. This shift in the field, at once ideological, methodological, and dedicated to canon reformation, is in part invested in recognizing the artificiality and intellectual limitations of national boundaries in studying forms of literary and cultural influence and circulation.Footnote ¹ Out of this movement, and yet standing in many ways apart from it, comes Paul Giles's extraordinarily broad-ranging work. In The Global Remapping of American Literature he seeks to distinguish what he calls the “national” period of the American geographical imagination – that is, the period between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of Ronald Reagan's presidency – from the deterritorialized, transnational Americas that pre-date the Civil War and continue to extend from the 1980s. Indeed, argues Giles, the literary output of the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries holds in common more of a global awareness than either of those two centuries shares with, say, the late nineteenth century. This is a smart and persuasive argument and a provocative interruption of the usual telos of American literary history.

One of the book's most striking features is the sweep of its range and Giles's magisterial command of its evidence. While sustained attention is given to a few authors (Longfellow, Roth) or places (the South, the Pacific Northwest), Giles otherwise invokes scores of works over hundreds of years. It is quite an achievement of reading, and yet still provides ample space for other scholars to expand upon the necessarily glancing treatment given to most of the material at hand. The sheer number of textual invocations raises methodological questions, however; outside a literary history, what kind of critical work is accomplished by one-paragraph or one-page readings of individual texts? This book is not framed as a student's textbook, or as a broad companion to American literature, for which such coverage would be essential. As such the reader wishes for a more explicit logic for treating so very many works in so brief a fashion; the risk is that Giles's enormous achievement of reading could seem opportunistic. (And given the expansive possibilities for inclusion in a book structured this way, Giles might have included more noncanonical writers in his analysis in the first two-thirds of the book.) What makes this organizational choice notable is that in several places he chides other scholars for not reading as fully into the oeuvres of writers like Cotton Mather (“The Magnalia is thus in every sense a more capacious work than has normally been assumed, particularly by those scholars, more numerous than they should be, who have made assumptions about this major work without having ever read it through properly” (55)) or Ralph Waldo Emerson (“my point is that by foregrounding a highly selective version of Emerson's writings … American critics in the wake of Matthiessen have tended to hypostatize a partial version of Emerson as patriot that is not justified by a wider reading of his works” (75)). While I think that his point about Emerson is an astute one, such claims about cherry-picking could invite their application to Giles's own work in ways that a more explicit methodological consistency might have forestalled.

In marking forms of relation, influence and exchange, Giles argues for a global network of associations that helped to shape the works of “classic” American authors, whose works constitute much of this book's focus. As such, The Global Remapping of American Literature at times reads like the transnational version of David Reynolds's Beneath the American Renaissance (1988). In the wake of a couple of decades of canon reformation, and of a recognition of the twentieth-century ideological constructions of the categories of “high” and “low” literature, this is an interesting move. It also could be seen as a belated one; it is hard to think of scholars in the past ten to fifteen years who have argued that American literature was produced in splendid isolation. Giles's observations on the forms these global relations took will nonetheless be sure to have a strong impact on the field. In the book's opening chapters, on pre-1900 literature, his argument relies in good part on taking aim at a presumed critical consensus that finds his subjects stuffy or conservative. He maintains that other critics have missed the playfulness or worldliness of what Giles calls “Augustan American literature”; the baroqueness of eighteenth-century literary expression, he suggests, shares formal qualities with postmodernism in its “art of translation and transposition, the displacement of Puritan epic into mock-epic, the reorienting of neoclassicism as burlesque” (68). Giles describes the technological and commercial innovations that produced, in turn, networks of transportation and media exchange whose function was to produce national solidarity and homogeneity. As he observes, the forces of both assimilation and resistance to this nationalizing model were “mutually complementary” (115). The middle section of the book finds Giles reading postwar and postmodern fiction in the glare of the television and the computer screen. The book closes with a comparative description of the global South (an area of hugely renewed interest in Americanist work), and a wonderful and fresh exploration of the Pacific Northwest as literary region.

Because of the enormous potential power of Giles's insights about the trans-temporal consanguinity of the pre-1865 and post-1981 American periods in their tenuous and skeptical attachment to the space of the national (if they are not liberated from it), and the interest I expect the broader field of American literature will take in engaging with his work, I wished for a more consistently applied epistemic structure for the book. I wonder how Giles is conceiving his evidentiary exigence when he writes,

There are curious presumptions of causal relationships in this line (as there are in many similar ones in the book, often orchestrated around a quirk of biographical detail) that can distract from this book's impressive achievements.

I return to the question of Giles's methodology in this book out of my sense that questions of methodology will be fundamental to the ongoing process of defining the parameters of transnational work. On one level, transnational work can involve a recognition that texts travel, and that the print-cultural specifics of their production, transmission, and reception can be traced beyond the boundaries of the local or the state. Ideas travel, as do languages, and such circulations can be apprehended in various theoretical and archival ways. While many of the best practitioners of transnational and hemispheric work have been working with literature in languages other than English, a frequent critique of the hemispheric turn in American literary studies has been that it can replicate structures of imperial possession on intellectual and cultural levels. On the other hand, some have used transnationalism as metaphor or analogy. The “remapping” of this book's title, for example, and Giles's interest in a “cartographic dimension” (267) to literary study, seem themselves to reside in the realm of the metaphorical. In a now globally expansive field for US literature, the famous Edinburgh Review question of 1820 takes on new resonance: “In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?” Now that the agents of exchange for books – American and otherwise – are stationed with far less regard for geographical or political checkpoints, we should think anew about the products they are exchanging, and how they are declared (to force the customs figure). What resources, specifically, are at stake in Giles's global remapping of the field of American literature? What kind of critical labor is required for the extraction of such resources? This substantial, provocative work leaves us with a number of questions for the ongoing recalibration of critical literary study; it is to Paul Giles's great credit that we have new means of posing them.

Whatever other discussions it may spark, Paul Giles's The Global Remapping of American Literature is bound to reignite the disciplinary quarrel that comparatists continue to have with Americanists who adopt transnational approaches. Although neither “comparative” nor “transnational” appears in its title, the book revolves around a challenge to what Giles sees as the field's persistent attachment to the nation – both as imagined spatial limit of our object-choices as literary critics, and as the temporal determinant of our sense of period and tradition. Spanning the seventeenth century to the twenty-first and including authors from Cuba and Canada, Remapping shows Giles pushing beyond the transatlantic scope of his first three books – a formidable trilogy on the co-presence of British and US letters. Here he argues that Americanists in a global era need, more than ever, to marshall critical reading practices to “demystify metaphorical maps of the world that position the US as their subliminal center” (262). Bringing about such a perspectival shift is also a foundational goal of the International American Studies Association (of which Giles is past president) and journals like Comparative American Studies (of which he is a longtime associate editor). Giles is exceptionally well positioned, then, both to report on the often intense debates that have surrounded the “transnational turn” of the past twenty years, and to advance the critical conversation about its scope, method, and language. Disappointingly, the book falls short on both counts.

In its readings across periods and spatial borders, Remapping often hits upon something new and compelling, especially in the sections about contemporary fictions of globalization. Yet the Introduction and Conclusion, which develop Giles's field-intervention in greater detail than do the other six chapters, resound in a kind of time warp. He states, curiously, that comparative approaches are “rarely brought into conjunction” with American literature, incurring “a risk of a Comparative Americanist approach appearing theoretically more unusual than it might be in another area of literary study” (265). Now that every important journal in American literary studies has sponsored at least one special issue on transnational, comparative, and/or multilingual approaches, and several university presses have established book series on this theme, it seems safe to say that the call to “reconceive American literary studies in global terms” (259) has been heard and heeded. Granted, monographs often face a long path to publication, but Giles does a fair amount of finger-pointing at the uninformed traditional Americanist, a straw man who collapsed some time ago. “To draw a global map of American literature is to suggest how the subject could be configured differently” (267), he writes – but differently than what? Noting that “a comparative methodology can perform useful work” for the study of American literature (a category assumed to be self-evident, even after a discussion of the history of the discipline chips away at its integrity), Giles cautions us to “be specific about the ideological implications of any given comparative approach” (264). Yet it is unclear how this awareness of institutional positionality informs his reading practices in the principal chapters. His comparative method “involves the use of spatial and temporal coordinates,” showing how these are themselves “metaphorical constructions” by which “geographical consciousness enters subliminally into American cultural narratives” (2), many, but not all, of which are considered within a loosely Deleuzean framework of deterritorialization.

If this dual time–space axis recalls Wai Chee Dimock's Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (2006), it is because both attempt to erect a wide scaffolding of globality that would reveal fresh ways of seeing familiar texts and put them in conversation with unexpected ones. While Dimock focusses on extended influence studies and problematizes questions of linguistic and cultural translation, Giles puts more emphasis on geographical perspective. The first chapter revisits that old chestnut, the Puritan origins of the American self, and asks provocatively how “the narrative of New England itself might change if the South, rather than the North, were to become a discursive focal point” (43). Turning first to that polymath paterfamilias of the American intellectual tradition, Cotton Mather, Giles describes Mather's dialogue with English writers within a new spatiotemporal category, “Augustan America.” Magnalia Christi Americana gets suggestively reframed as a “plantation epic,” linked to Cook and Byrd rather than to Puritan sermonists. This perspectival shift might be even more radical if it ventured outside the anglophone world: the title of Eliga Gould's influential review essay, “The English-Speaking Atlantic as a Spanish Periphery,” indicates the magnitude of the cognitive remappings that have already taken place among historians of the colonial period.Footnote ¹

Moving forward in the next chapter to the early nineteenth century, Giles does show how an awareness of England's former colonial rivals persists in Timothy Dwight's Travels in New England and subsequent meditations on American space, as they help create the architecture of westward expansionism. He capably synthesizes recent transnational scholarship, but for the most part his early national America, like “Augustan America,” stops at the edge of the continent before reaching the West Indies. Likewise, the capable but brief readings of major and minor texts of the American Renaissance in the remainder of chapter 2 follow a path back to England, sometimes in a way that doggedly avoids other linguistic traditions: Giles reads Longfellow's neo-medievalism, for instance, by way of Tennyson, rather than through any of the other European and circum-Mediterranean sources that so fascinated this noted polyglot. After an intervening section on national boundaries in the twentieth century, however, chapter 5 returns to the period of national formation in just such an adventurous manner. From a discussion of William Bartram's Travels, it segues into a wonderful reading of William Gilmore Simms's The Cassique of Kiawah, which Giles calls “a doppelgänger of The Scarlet Letter” (192) because, in contrast to Hawthorne's identification of the national past with the space of New England, Simms insists on recalling the wider colonial “world of multiple, autonomous regions – stretching from Jamaica and Barbados across to Florida, Virginia, and the Carolinas … a legitimate precursor and pre-history to the nineteenth-century Confederacy” (192). This striking example of the possibilities of a more geographically revisionist literary history falters, however, when it turns to the late nineteenth-century writing of José Martí.

While Giles's reading of Martí as an example of the “bifocalism” of North and South comprises just over five pages (193–98) of Remapping, it stands out as the most extensive discussion of texts written in a language other than English. As such it cuts to the heart of the quarrel between comparative literature and transnational Americanism, for Martí's inside-the-monster essays from New York have become one of the most common reference points of hemispheric and transnational scholarship. Lamentably, this section lapses into the very geocultural solipsism that Giles intended this book to cure. Giles argues that “Martí's geographical displacement of America from north to south is matched by an equivalent displacement from a material to a metaphysical imaginary” (198) – but it is only a US reader who would feel “displaced” by Martí's use of “América,” not the Latin American newspaper readers who first encountered his essays, or the many successor generations of Spanish readers since. If the message here is that reading Martí can productively reorient us – can make US Americans a little less assured in their claim to the name of the hemisphere – this unobjectionable move is undercut by the rest of the analysis, which characterizes Martí's thought as an “intertextual rotation of Emerson” (198). Certainly, as other critics have noted, Martí read Emerson, and they drew from some of the same wells of German, French and English political, social and scientific philosophy, although differently encountered and refracted – in Martí's case, through the Spanish liberal reinvention of the Scholastic tradition. To reduce the complexity of Martí's copious output (twenty-eight volumes in the authoritative Cuban edition) into an “almost pastiche version” of Emersonian contradiction (198) is to negate the fact that Latin American thought has an existence of its own, one that pre-dates both Martí and the era of US imperialism.

Even the differences between Emerson and Martí that emerge in Giles's analysis betray a perspective on Latin America that is ridden with clichés: Martí's “extravagant sacrifice of himself in a war when he understood little about the strategies of battle is only another version of his persistent attempt … to adorn the quotidian world with a tantalizing spiritual grandeur” (the Transcendentalists did the same, but presumably less extravagantly). His aesthetic, we are told, “owes much to Catholic styles of transsubstantiation” and – inevitably – “anticipates the style of magical realism” (198), since magical realism has become the universal go-to concept that explains all things Latin American. Whether such generalizations can be sustained by bits and pieces of an author's output cited, and possibly read, in translation is for other readers to judge. I want to give Giles due credit for venturing beyond his comfort zone, and I absolutely do not advocate a narrow territorialism about who is or is not permitted to comment on certain texts. The issue here has rather to do with the ethics of citation. Those who work in the anglophone sphere of knowledge production enjoy great privileges of access to scholarship from around the globe, including Latin America, that are not reciprocal. By not availing himself of that privilege to absorb, or mention, even a fraction of the Latin Americanist scholarship on one of the major figures of global modernism (some of it available in English), it is hard to see how Giles is helping to imagine the US in a more relative position to the rest of the world.

This point about the “trade imbalance” of transnational Americanist scholarship has been made by Robert McKee Irwin, Sophia McClennan, and Claire Fox and Claudia Sadowski-Smith – ironically, in the very pages of Comparative American Studies.Footnote ² It is one of the central complaints about the field that have arisen from within comparative literature, expressed most recently in a 2009 special issue of the discipline's flagship journal. In their Introduction, coeditors Lois Parkinson Zamora and Silvia Spitta take “New Americanists” to task on three counts: for appropriating Latin American material within US ideological constructs, for not working in languages other than English, and for failing to engage in dialogue with scholars and scholarly traditions outside the US. As with similar statements by Djelal Kadir, I find this an ungenerous position, backed by a reductive and cursory review of a by-now crowded field. Moreover, what it would mean to “speak and write and know the Other otherwise,” as Zamora and Spitta implore, seems just as maddeningly imprecise as Giles's mandate to see American literature “differently.”Footnote ³ But although Giles does not live on this side of the pond, their assessment of “the insularity of U.S. academic work” seems to be borne out by his foray into Martí studies.

While some comparatists will continue to hold the line on questions of language proficiency, many others – Dimock among them – have made the case that translation itself can provide a useful critical method as well as new objects of analysis. There is room for reasonable disagreement about whether, and how far, transnational American scholarship should go outside the realm of English. My own position is that it is important to keep the question of language at the forefront: prior to European contact, at least three hundred languages were spoken in the area that is now the United States; even today, nearly 20 percent of the nation's population regularly speaks a language other than English, with thirteen of those languages having at least half a million speakers. Giles devotes a section in chapter 3 to a thoughtful synthesis of recent work on the pressures toward linguistic and cultural homogenization at the turn of the twentieth century, mentioning the existence of multilingual American literatures, only to discount their influence after World War I. Despite these gestures, the “global” in the title of the book ultimately implies “Global English” – precisely the collapsing of usages that comparatists have warned against.Footnote ⁴

At any rate, it is far from the case that comparative and transnational approaches have taken over American literary study – and multilingual approaches even less so. Some quarters of the field have, instead, retrenched themselves within more familiar boundaries of nation-state and region, not necessarily from a will to return to American exceptionalism but with a thoughtful regard for the rigors and limits of their training. Whether the current wave of interest in “remapped” and intersectional treatments of texts from and about the United States will continue depends on many factors – not least among them, whether this field can more satisfyingly address unresolved questions about its method, scope, and linguistic diversity.

Paul Giles's most recent book delivers on the promise made by its title: the study truly is a Global Remapping of American Literature. Close readers will note that I have made one change to the title – switching “the” with “a.” I do so not as subtle critique but rather to indicate, at the outset, that there may be more than one “remapping,” and if there is a flaw to this comprehensive and engrossing study, it lies in its effort to comprehend so much in such detail. Would that more books would suffer from this defect!

Readers picking up the book will immediately appreciate how carefully Giles has chosen his title. He does indeed take a global approach – one made more likely by the fact that he is writing from a distance – the book was written in England during his tenure at Oxford and then completed at the outset of his appointment to the faculty at the University of Sydney. But perhaps the geographical distance is less important than is the shift in time zones – not for Giles the scholar, but rather for his subject matter. A major feature of Giles's remapping is its critical refashioning of eras, epochs and periods that one associates with European culture, staking a claim to a broader swath of Western history than Matthiesen did when he dubbed the mid-nineteenth century “the American Renaissance.” Giles retrieves – and establishes links to – periods as distant as the Augustinian and medieval periods, drawing through his analysis of what he calls “Temporal Latitudes” in the first third of his study.

Maps are substantial sources for this study because they record the provisional nature of nationhood; as boundaries shift and details get filled in, so, too, do the mythologizing narratives begin to solidify – if not stultify – what constitutes “American literature.” Giles's interest is to restore the imaginative act of nation-building that the maps reveal, seeking to leverage the critical acts of imagination we call “American literature” against a larger and longer narrative of global culture. Close attention to the map that served as the frontispiece to Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana or The Ecclesiastical History of New England (1708), for instance, helps readers see how, in Giles's terms, both the map and the text are fraught acts of “renegotiation.” Bringing the map and text into a critical relationship shows Mather's massive treatise wrestling with “the historical contradictions and terrestrial ironies” as Jacob wrestled with the angel.

Close scrutiny is given to more than just literary culture, however. Following Martin Bruckner's important work on cartography, Giles further traces the rise of geography as a compulsory subject for American schoolchildren by documenting its material presence on the book market. Giles has a remarkable way of linking literal and material facts to limn the outlines of a broader picture without losing the granular nature of his examples. Indeed, his eye for the way detail can be used to create an image might be most closely linked to the pointillist movement in art, in which the larger image is made up of a mass of individual marks. One needs physical distance to discern the image or one risks getting lost in the myriad of dots that speckle the surface. His approach to detail is part of what makes this a most demanding read; Giles expects his readers to have a command of the archive of American literature that spans the early colonial period on through David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers.

This may be a tall order for most readers and the book is clearly directed to a scholarly audience. Giles is aware, however, that many of his readers may not have quite as long a view of the literature as he does; thus he is careful to contextualize the examples he draws on from both a literary and a historical vantage point. The book therefore offers a rich education as well as an important addition to recent efforts to think beyond the nationalistic paradigms that academic departments of literature (and history, for that matter) have created in order to chart a course for themselves.

Giles's study will most benefit those who are intrigued by ideas of “deep time,” as Wai Chee Dimock calls it, but who also want to give some credence to temporal architecture that has been the bedrock of historical analysis. For instance, Giles's “Medieval American Literature” chapter dwells on the intellectual impact of the discovery of Native American burial grounds dating back to 1050. Positing a medieval history buried beneath the “New World” served, according the Giles, a range of needs – not the least among them was the need for more of a history than conventional records had afforded. These burial mounds – and the extensive civilization they portend – provide important historical leverage to Giles's analysis and to readers who long for more than metaphorical resonances in the term “medieval.” Giles tracks the visible presence of the burial mounds on the landscape as well as in the intellectual history of the period. From “a four-tiered pyramid covering fourteen acres and rising one hundred feet into the air” that stood “the tallest manmade edifice in the United States until 1867” (87) to mention of the mounds and the people who built them in texts by Jefferson and Bryant, Giles documents the degree to which this history gave the young nation the pride (and perplexity) of a prehistory, a term first coined in 1851.

Key terms that have a particularly spatial cast are also derived from concrete references to historical, scientific and literary history. “Parallax” is one that figures prominently throughout the book and thus deserves some attention here. Strictly speaking, the term refers to a method of measuring distances through an angle of vision that takes in two lines of sight. For the purposes of this study, the notion helps Giles name the function of comparison for the writers and thinkers that he discusses. For Cotton Mather, moving “backward and forward in time to create both temporal and spiritual conjunctions,” the parallels between New England and antiquity – biblical and otherwise – prove to be a primary teaching tool.

However, the term “parallax” – in its complexity – has greater purpose when it comes to analyzing American literature as a field of study, the other project of this book. This more explicitly conceptual application is at the center of the chapter called “Hemispheric Parallax.” Here Giles uses it to meditate on “how the contours of [American literature] have changed over time by examining the shifting geospatial dynamics associated with two specific areas of the contemporary United States: the South and the Pacific Northwest” (183). Through the figure of “parallax,” Giles deftly calls attention to how ideas of space are as informative to the construction of our field as they are to the literary stories that constitute it.

The model of time (and space) employed by Giles might put some readers in mind of the French philosopher/critic Gilles Deleuze as it resembles his concept of the rhizome. Indeed, Giles repurposes Deleuze and Guatarri's “deterritorialization,” a term taken from their Anti-Oedipus, in order to prevent the idea of mapping from being overly consolidating. Rather, Giles means to release the energies of divergent histories across time and space to give new meaning to the term “transnational.” He does not wish to supersede geography, the temporal, or the empirical bases upon which they operate, but rather wrest from them the power to suggest stability, coherence, and a sense of inevitability. This is a book for scholars about scholarship and the limitations of its practices as much as it is a book about American literature.

The Global Remapping of American Literature challenges the idea that American literature, as an imaginary construct, corresponds mimetically with historical and existing geographical boundaries of the United States. Instead, Paul Giles conceives of “American literature” in relation to discursive forms of geographic consciousness and intertexual dialogues between the local and the global. By liberating, or, in Giles's term, “deterritorializing,” writers from an imperative to represent their geographic location, Giles presents writers across space and time via a dynamic “interplay of near and far,” in a way that resists the traditional, or “territorializing,” forms of geographical essentialism we associate with American literary studies. Deftly and on a dizzying scale, Giles amasses a wide range of close readings of texts written in the United States (in any of its geographic configurations) that establish the global attributes of the local and, relatedly, the localizing properties of the global. When he taps into transnationalizing texts that challenge a self-identifying US unitary subject, Giles offers us a United States at home in – or interrelating with – the global, and not a world apart, or a “city on a hill.”

Giles takes aim at the American exceptionalist tradition of literary criticism in part by delimiting the reach of a truly “national” tradition to the historically specific political boundaries of the United States as it existed between the US Civil War in 1865 and the beginning of the Reagan presidency in 1981. In this regard, Giles joins other scholars in American studies who have foregrounded the Cold War politics that bolstered earlier formations of American exceptionalism. Specifically, Giles mobilizes an alternative literary antinationalist tradition that relates American literature to the amorphous, unstable and fluid sense of territorial shifts of the earlier period, and the “deterritorializing” effects of a post-Fordist globalized US. It is the United States “as one of the objects of globalization, rather than as merely its malign agent” or as a site of “convergence and divergence” that guides this “alternative literary history” (23). Obviously, Giles anticipated complaints of the neocolonizing potential in this version of American globality because he is careful to stress what it does not mean:

In the service of this alternative literary history, Giles's book offers a series of fascinating counterreadings of American literature that covers a truly global reach, temporal and spatial, from Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana (1702) and Ebenezer Cook's The Sot-weed Factor: or A Voyage to Maryland (1708) to David Foster Wallace's magnum opus Infinite Jest (1996). Through lively and creative readings of books ranging across time and space and a variety of subjects that includes postmodernism, media broadcasting technology, mercantile history and environmental humanism, Giles brings to light numerous and heterogeneous forms of geographic–literary consciousness. That Giles can adumbrate a literary trajectory some three hundred years long speaks to the exciting potential such a discursive “remapping” offers for enriching recent historicist and neoformalist impulses in contemporary literary criticism.

The book's originality lies in the way Giles reconfigures various modes of US literary periodization as his key tool for remapping the temporalities and spatial boundaries of the received American literary tradition. Principally, he disposes of “self-authenticating” narratives like “early,” “Republic,” or “antebellum,” as the products of backward-looking, or proleptical, readings of American literature that infer the inevitable growth of the Republic from particular events and periods. These he replaces with “Augustan” and “medieval” as aesthetic categories that best illuminate the previously hidden convergences and dialogues in the literature pre-dating the nationalizing period of 1865–1980. At the risk of reproducing the very temporalities to which Giles objects, it serves to identify these aesthetics as corresponding roughly to the colonial and antebellum periods.

The “Augustan” aesthetic that Giles identifies challenges eighteenth-century American exceptionalism with irreverent exposés of the discrepancies between epic and profane, mind and matter, which cut across the grain of the Puritans' typological (or mythic) narratives. Against the ideological tack promoted by the Puritans, who represented the New England settlements as instances of the epic and the sacred, Giles points to the links between Puritan communities in America and in England as warranting the conceptualization of this literature within, rather than outside, “a British imperial imaginary” (47). The Puritans' utopian representations of their settlements, Giles demonstrates, not only obscured the relevance of the English Civil War and the existence of cross-ocean ties between these communities, they also obscured the contests between religion and mercantilism that characterized this Civil War and resulted in “new” world settlements that served as strategic market expansions. It fell to poets like Ebenezer Cook and Samuel Butler to form a countertradition of “clownship” that highlighted the discrepancies between utopian ideals and commercial origins as the “incongruous interpenetration between spirit and matter” (33). More importantly, the salience of such transgressive incongruities proves that a connection to the past does not have to be reactionary, or anachronistically nostalgic; hence Giles offers counterintuitive readings of Phillis Wheatley's neoclassicism as a “lowbrow form” that turns the classical archetype inside out, and the “manic tenor” and “black comedy” in the art of Puritan church elder Timothy Dwight as investments in religious “infidelity” (58, 60).

Giles's counterreadings of established and unknown writers are central to his formulation of a metaphoric legacy of “medievalism” that links Old and New World temporalities and explodes the basis of Americanness in a colonial rupture from the Old World. This medieval counternarrative not only disputes the assumption of social rupture, it helps “tease out a different version of national identity, one neither so beholden to the idea of the nation-state as an independent, autonomous entity nor so concerned with the imponderable question of ‘origins’” (72). Framed within this medieval legacy, American writers appear more continuous with, rather than radically outside, “the reactionary power of feudal aristocracy,” and, as such, less identified with the “progressive narrative of rational freedom” associated with Americanness.

This new periodizing aesthetic results in rich and creative readings that are at the core of this book's strengths. Within such a medieval framework, Poe stands alongside, rather than opposed to, the “Renaissance” writers, his Gothicness not simply reactionary, but a tool intended to puncture national stories of “sentimental uplift” (74). Emerson exists in dialectical tension with European influences and history rather than solely in terms of New England nationalism; he also appears more appreciative of the creative possibilities inhering in intertexuality, authorship, tradition and history when he affirms that “all works of literature are Janus-faced and look to the future and the past” (75). Correspondingly, we are invited to reevaluate Longfellow as a “worldly” writer who has been unfairly dismissed in the twentieth century for his failures to adhere to Puritan rhetoric and transcendentalism, and to view Hawthorne's obsession with genealogical “entanglement” as signaling the author's refusal to split off “internecine feudalism from progressive democracy” (98).

Giles's discussion of an archaeological imagination that taps into densely populated Native American “prehistories” speaks to one of the most novel implications of recovering a “medieval” continuity between New and Old World temporalities. Pointing to the interest around mid-nineteenth-century archaeological excavations of the mound-builders of Cahokia (in present-day Missouri), Giles traces American writers' interest in pre-Columbian civilizations to the potential that a Native American “usable past” offered to challenge British colonialism: “The specter of medieval culture … operated for mid-nineteenth-century American writers as a tantalizingly distant real, a parallel to the relics of Indian civilization with which they were surrounded on their own continent” (101). This perspective on Native America as an Old World formation reconfigures territorial borders, belies the “truncated temporal span of the new nation,” and challenges the Whitmanesque idea of America as “a world primal” (92).

Next, Giles addresses the tensions he sees between nationalizing and counternationalizing impulses during the hundred years between the Civil War and 1980 that Henry Luce defined as “the American Century” (111). Not surprisingly, this process of nationalist incorporation was marked and defined by the tension between forces – the “arcs of modernism” – tending to American assimilation, and the resistance of myriad immigrant groups and US writers like William Dean Howells to melting-pot politics. Giles sees this period as a potentially globalizing “moment” associated with a form of ethnic “federalism” that could reconcile Americanization and ethnicity without “smothering” ethnic or regional difference; contra nationalist exceptionalism, ethnic federalism offered “a capacity to align old countries with the new continent and to establish U.S. culture through a play of similarities and differences, rather than by projecting a romance of the new nation alone” (120). The problem, however, was that the United States after the Russian Revolution and World War I retreated into increasingly isolationist positions that negated the potential of this globalization, and it was out of the devolution, one might say, of this global moment that an organicist ideal of Americanness emerged. As most clearly formulated by F. O. Matthiessen's The American Renaissance (1941), this renewed emphasis on transmuting the foreign into an American idiom relied on an allegorical reading of US geography that represented the environment as a source and guarantor of Americanness.

Turning to the globalizing pressures of the post-Reagan era, Giles discusses how twentieth-century writers have simultaneously contested and shored up Americanness in response to the communicative and technological forces of globalization. In this view, older American writers like Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, John Updike and Don DeLillo display anxieties about the fragmentation of national space in a global media market; in contrast, younger authors, members of the “MTV generation” like David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers, try to reimagine a utopian frequency that parlays the immediacy of media – the coming to you “live,” the bringing the very distant close in that characterizes postmodern flows – into an aesthetic of immediacy that dissipates hegemonic nationalist energies. Beyond a retread of liberal humanism, this generation, Giles claims, offers the best hope for an ideal of “digital posthumanism” (171) and “cynicism and naivete” (citing Wallace) that reformulates communities in relation to communication networks, rather than to regional, geographic coordinates: “in the work of Wallace and Eggers, [a] national metanarrative is dissolved into a different kind of ecosystem, one organized around the global flow of information, where ethical affinities are grounded not in direct relations to territory or patrimony but in more circuitous ways” (180). We could distill this ethos for discursively formed communities into Wallace's imperative for living in a fluid, multinational world: “we have to get along and communicate with other people” (172). Yet this idea of building communities through communication hardly seems new, postnational, or postmodern: public-sphere theorists like Michael Warner, Nancy Fraser and Jürgen Habermas have long explored the role of print “spheres” in modern nation-making, which raises the question of what makes digital technology, in theory, distinct from the localizing and nationalizing character of print. From this perspective, one should not view “imagined-digital communities” as characterizing the global, a priori; the specificity of digitization and its distinctive structuring of “global” publics needs yet to be formulated and should not be assumed.

This last argument about the communicative imperative inhering in globalization aptly represents the odd, and almost apolitical, nature of Giles's efforts to kill off the “vampire” of American exceptionalism (to riff on his phrase “the unquiet corpse of American exceptionalism” (648). Giles's use of Deleuze and Guattari's principle of “deterritorialization” – a principle framed alongside a desire for social transformation – would suggest that there is some payoff in terms of a critical theory that can offer insights into the politics inhering in the structures of globalized communicative domains. But The Global Remapping of American Literature stops short of theorizing the politics of globalized representation even as it raises potentially important questions: how do authors respond to the uneven access populations have to means of communication, Facebook and Twitter notwithstanding; or, more importantly, how might a postnational or transnational form of Americanness offer a potential space for building new political structures and reconfiguring political alliances across “the nation” and globally?

While Giles offers a formidable range of historical, cultural and literary knowledge, in the end he abstains from taking into account the wide terrain of social conflicts in which the local, national and global reaches of the nation are imbricated. Giles is strangely reticent to take on some of his potential interlocutors, like those who offer “hemispheric” or “transatlantic” perspectives on the US, who have worked to undermine American exceptionalism generally, and are particularly critical of the way the political entity of the United States continues to be enshrined as the ultimate designatee and representative of “American,” over and above the other cultures occupying the Americas.Footnote ¹ This is a theoretical blind spot for Giles, who does not recognize the ultimate debunking of vampiric American exceptionalism as a collaborative task that has engaged scholars across disciplines for the last decade, if not longer. Giles is far from the first, and one of many, to drive in that stake, and in this way he overstates the transformative potential of his alternative literary history. Scholars like Kristen Silva Greusz, Anna Brickhouse, Robert Levine, Caroline Levander and others have, for some time now, firmly established American exceptionalism as an ideological, territorially derived discursive construct aimed at “domesticating” social conflicts, fragmented histories and messy counterhistories. Their work has advanced the field in terms of identifying and outlining those troublesome counterhistories across a range of registers – political, legal, mass culture and literary – that testify to the perennially contested and unstable perimeters of US nationalism.

One can imagine that Giles sees these recent efforts in relation to “hemispheric” or “transatlantic” analytical rubrics as reinforcing the geographic essentialism of which he is so critical. But this raises the question of the potential, and ultimately the limits, of “deterritorialized” literary methods: can we read “American” literature as a historical formation radically detached from geographic referents, without presupposing a transcendent, global-spanning perspective that again reinforces the political legerdemain at work in the nationalist foundation of “American studies”? How can Giles invoke, let alone define, the “American” literature to which his title refers if we disarticulate it from the geographies of this unstable political entity and take especial note of the ways that “American” relates intertextually to global spaces and temporalities?

The Global Remapping of American Literature offers creative close readings and raises questions that are now very important in American literary studies; on this basis it will significantly bolster ongoing critical debates about the asymmetrical discursive dynamics that structure exchanges between the global, national, regional and local.

I am grateful for these responses to The Global Remapping of American Literature, all of which raise interesting questions about the work. As Augusta Rohrbach astutely remarks, the book is as much about the remapping of time as of space, and it suggests ways in which traditional periodizing categories of American literature can often obscure as much as they illuminate. By extension, in response to Hester Blum's point about potentially “opportunistic” styles of reading, I would recall Franco Moretti's observation that any kind of “close” reading can also offer its own distortions of perspective.Footnote ¹ My own preference in this project was to combine close and distant, near and far, and to try to illuminate particular texts by reformulating them according to a logic of temporal and spatial juxtaposition. It is of course true, as Xiomara Santamarina and the other respondents observe, that many other scholars have been engaged over recent years in critiques of American exceptionalism, and it was by no means my intention to undervalue the contributions of various colleagues whose work I value highly, many of whom I cite in my book.Footnote ² But my overall aim here was not to get sidetracked into too many local theoretical disputes, but rather to imagine what a synthetic version of transnational American literary history might look like. Despite a plethora of particular comparative inquiries, it is, as these commentators acknowledge, by no means the case that such approaches have become the orthodoxy in American literary study more generally, and this book represented a specific attempt to imagine how the broad contours of the field might change if remapped from a global perspective.

As is often the case, it is the hostile critique that perhaps reveals most about the limitations and mutual incompatibilities of particular critical positions. Kirsten Silva Gruesz is actually wrong when she refers to “the transatlantic scope” of my “first three books,” since my second book, American Catholic Arts and Fictions, was published by CUP as far back as 1992, pre-dating the transatlantic trilogy by several years, and it contained a chapter on Donald Barthelme's representation of cultural Catholicism as an antidote to more traditional Americanist narratives organized around ancestral Protestantism. There is no reason why Gruesz should know or care about this, except that her isolated account of my reading of Martí in The Global Remapping misrepresents the larger purpose of this chapter, “Hemispheric Parallax,” which contains a similar reading of how Donald's younger brother, Frederick Barthelme, reconceives the landscapes of Mississippi and Texas in relation to the Catholic culture of Latin America, as well as how Elizabeth Bishop refers specifically to Martí (208) and engages with South America in her poems. In this chapter I argue that “to categorize Martí merely in terms of a politics of anti-imperialism, as a staunch Latino opponent of U.S. power, is to flatten out his view of American culture,” and I cite here Gruesz's work as an example of such a one-dimensional tendency (194). I do not, in fact, disagree with Gruesz about ways in which thick linguistic description can enrich particular critical projects, but I also think that language can at times be used as a barrier to protect the supposed autonomy of certain academic areas, often with deleterious consequences. As I discuss in The Global Remapping (221), some Latin Americanists have been dismissive about US writing on the grounds that it offers only a vulgar, commodified version of modernista dissensus, but this overlooks how the complex forms of texts such as those of Barthelme, Bishop and Zora Neale Hurston emerge in every way out of a condition of hemispheric hybridity.

The larger question of how language relates to comparative studies is a complicated one, about which, as Gruesz acknowledges, there are many different scholarly views. Although as an expert on “Latino writing” she herself expresses a professional interest in keeping “the question of language at the forefront,” others, such as David Damrosch, have described “world literature” as “writing that gains in translation.”Footnote ³ Gruesz misrepresents my argument when she says I discuss “the pressures toward linguistic and cultural homogenization at the turn of the twentieth century, mentioning the existence of multilingual American literatures, only to discount their influence after World War I”; my point was never simply to “discount” this influence on my own account, but rather to suggest that certain social, historical and institutional pressures during the 1920s led Norman Foerster and others to direct American literary study away from multilingualism towards a more monolingual version of national literary formation, on analogy with the national version of American history then being promoted by the likes of Frederick Jackson Turner (123). Again, I do not disagree in principle that multilingualism is likely to become increasingly important for American literary studies in the twenty-first century, and this is something I impress upon my current graduate students in Australia, whose familiarity with a variety of Asian languages, particularly Chinese, suggests ways in which the subject may eventually move in intriguing new directions. But there are an almost infinite number of linguistic horizons that might be brought into play here, and the crucial task for scholars of American literature is not simply to accumulate new idioms but to think through ways in which they might be brought into a coherent dialogue with, and thus significantly impact, US national narratives. My general point is that the separatist privileging of any given special interest, whether based on ethnic, linguistic or historical specialization, can induce a parochial myopia to the larger contours of the Americanist field.

So far as Gruesz's comments on Comparative American Studies go, before the journal was first established by Sage Publications in 2003 I argued for the use of the word “comparative” in the title, rather than the more fashionable “transnational,” on the ground that the older, less restrictive term might enable contributors to define the emerging sphere in the way they best saw fit. I am pleased the journal published some of the formative early articles in this area and that it continues to flourish today under the editorship of Nick Selby. As Blum acutely observes, however, I would recognize my own work as coming “out of this movement, and yet standing in many ways apart from it.” The Global Remapping has, I think, some of the same kind of interest in hypothetical cartographies as Virtual Americas, and though it points towards key theorists of the postnational state such as Habermas (257), I would consider it beyond either my remit or my competence to undertake the weighty task of what Santamarina calls “theorizing the politics of globalized representation.” I sent a copy of The Global Remapping to Ursula Le Guin, who was very helpful in allowing the Press to reproduce a fictional map from her science fiction novel Always Coming Home, and Le Guin emailed back to say that, despite a few reservations about my treatment of her work, she hoped the book would “have a thoroughly unsettling and disorienting effect on the often very outdated maps of American literature used in our universities.” If The Global Remapping could make a contribution towards that end, I would be entirely content.