Faulkner Networked: Indigenous, Regional, Trans-Pacific

Beginning with the Nagano Seminar that Faulkner gave in post-war Japan, this paper discusses his regionalism as one strongly inflected by a sense of being on the losing side of history. Regionalism understood in this way not only comes with a distinctive Southern accent, it also serves as a spur, an outward momentum, a disposition to make common cause with other groups also on the losing side. Faulkner\u27s networks are both indigenous and trans-Pacific for that reason: Native Americans as well as Japan after World War II carry a special emotional charge for him, a bond of kinship forged in humiliation and defeat

Introduction to American Literature in the World

Wai Chee Dimock, introduction to American Literature in the World: An Anthology from Anne Bradstreet to Octavia Butler, ed. Wai Chee Dimock et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 1–18

Introduction to American Literature in the World

Wai Chee Dimock, introduction to American Literature in the World: An Anthology from Anne Bradstreet to Octavia Butler, ed. Wai Chee Dimock et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 1–18

Criminal Law, Female Virtue, and the Rise of Liberalism

The contemporary Law and Literature movement has revolved around a central question, the question of interpretation, offered not only as its analytic focus but also as its conjectural problematic: as a well-defined point of convergence between the two disciplines. In this essay I want to explore a different point of convergence, somewhat less well-defined, marked not by the overlapping concerns of legal and literary hermeneutics but by the interlocking relations of legal and literary history. This focus-on the historical and historically shifting relations between law and literature--opens up a different set of questions: questions about the alignment of institutions within a cultural order, about the evolving boundaries between adjacent domains, and about the possibility of residual formations supplementary to emergent ones. Focusing more specifically on the nineteenth-century novel, on its language of gender - a language not only robustly punitive on the subject of female virtue, but also robustly figurative in its ability to shadow forth the broadly prescriptive within the narrowly punitive - I analyze this signifying latitude both as a residual supplement to the contracting boundaries of the criminal law and as an index to the more general problems of polity and morality in the transition from classical republicanism to modern liberalism

Residues of justice: literature, law, philosophy

In this arresting book, Wai Chee Dimock takes on the philosophical tradition from Kant to Rawls, challenging its conception of justice as foundational, self-evident, and all-encompassing. The idea of justice is based on the premise that the world can be resolved into commensurate terms: punishment equal to the crime, redress equal to the injury, benefit equal to the desert. Dimock focuses, however, on what remains unexhausted, unrecovered, and noncorresponding in the exercise of justice. To honor these "residues," she turns to literature, which, in its linguistic density, transposes the clean abstractions of law and philosophy into persistent shadows, the abiding presence of the incommensurate. Justice can only be a partial answer to the phenomenon of human conflict.In arguing for justice as an incomplete virtue, Dimock draws upon legal history, political philosophy, linguistics, theology, and feminist theory; she discusses Aristotle and Augustine, Locke and Luther, Marx and Durkheim, Michael Sandel and Carol Gilligan, Noam Chomsky and Mary Ann Glendon. She also examines an unusual configuration of nineteenth-century American authors, pairing figures such as Herman Melville and Rebecca Harding Davis, Walt Whitman and Susan Warner.The result is a book both passionate and scholarly. It invites us to rethink the meanings of literature, law, and philosophy, and to imagine a language of community more supple and more nuanced than the language of justice