{"id":9650,"date":"2011-12-07T12:09:09","date_gmt":"2011-12-07T17:09:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mith.umd.edu\/?p=9650"},"modified":"2020-10-08T16:02:42","modified_gmt":"2020-10-08T20:02:42","slug":"beginnings-fla","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mith.umd.edu\/beginnings-fla\/","title":{"rendered":"Beginnings\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"

Call me Ahab: I\u2019m the leader of the merry band of pirates about to set sail on the Foreign Literatures in America<\/a> (FLA) project. If there\u2019s one thing I like most about this project, it\u2019s the white whaleness of it all: none of us is sure exactly where we are headed, but we are all equipped with charts and tools, sextants and harpoons, hints and intuitions, hypotheses, methodologies, and curiosities, furled into the service of a collective determination to sail as far away from conventional understandings of \u201cAmerican literature\u201d as possible, seeking new horizons of its terms in the most distant and elusive spaces\u2014whose \u201cforeign\u201d composition becomes ultimately understood as a global constituent of U.S. literature and culture itself.<\/p>\n

I expect enemies to this project\u2014I certainly hope for some!: it would be no fun without them\u2014but I must confess (un-Ahab-like as this sentiment may be: I fear I am growing soft) that new horizons of friendship and collaboration, far beyond what I have ever personally experienced in the humanities beyond the special teacher-student relationship, are the most exciting aspect of this project thus far. Let me explain\u2014though do please keep this \u201cnice\u201d stuff between us. I have a reputation to maintain, and the whales are always listening.<\/p>\n

At some basic level, FLA is predicated on the generative assumption and insight\u2014one I argue for at length in my book Our Conrad: Constituting American Modernity<\/em><\/a> (2010), and one I am further elaborating in a new book project on the history of foreign authored literature in the U.S., entitled On Foreign Grounds: Reimagining American Literature<\/em>\u2014that we make a mistake in traditionally defining \u201cAmerican literature\u201d in terms of literary works written by national citizens of the U.S. In fact historically speaking, some of the most influential literature in the United States\u2014as a matter of literary significance, material circulation, and social, cultural and political force\u2014has been written by non-American authors from across the globe, as well as non-American immigrants living within the U.S. This is not a matter of \u201cAmerican\u201d literature being parsable in both national and hemispheric terms, nor is it a matter of \u201cAmerica\u201d being an explicit subject in planetary literature, or a place a foreign author once visited and wrote about. It\u2019s a matter of the terrain of U.S. literature and culture\u2014what the literature of the U.S. itself has been\u2014being constituted just as much by “foreign\u201d authored as \u201cnative\u201d authored texts. This interweave between the two plays a vital role in the construction and contestation of the nation \u2013 space and \u2013 state of the fluctuating territorial expanse of the U.S. and its relation to the rest of the planet.<\/p>\n

\u201cForeign Literatures in America\u201d is not a project of reinforcing the distinction between \u201cforeign\u201d and \u201cAmerican\u201d: it is a project of evoking so as to neutralize this very distinction. The \u201cforeign\u201d here becomes indigenous to, integral of, recovered as a material constituent of the U.S. itself\u2014not filtered out through some abstract conception of \u201cAmerican\u201d literature; it is restored as part of the terrain and earth of what literature has been in the U.S.<\/p>\n

Though I had expected enemies to this project\u2014it rifles its fingers through many controversial elements of both Americanist and world literature discourse, humanistic versus scientific inquiry, distant versus close reading, without confining itself to any\u00a0 opposition\u2014I\u2019ve noticed as we\u2019ve moved forward, truly remarkable networks of collaboration, productivity, genuine friendship and intellectual generosity that are the defining note of our \u201cvoyage\u201d thus far. Through the collective effort of a crack team of undergraduates in the University of Maryland Gemstone Honors Program<\/a>, and different teams of remarkable doctoral students and faculty scholars at and outside the University of Maryland, FLA has begun to generate not only archives but questions<\/strong> that I don\u2019t think any of us had foreseen at the outset. The friends we keep making, and depend on very much for collaborative scholarship, are absolutely integral to our project.<\/p>\n

This raises the second element of FLA. Everything I\u2019ve just said about dialogue and cooperation also applies to the interactive work and conversations that have been happening between us \u201chumanists\u201d and the digital humanities and computational experts who are\u2014so very generously\u2014working with us at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH)<\/a>. The methodology of parsing both the strategic database archives we are assembling and the \u201cbig data\u201d that is already out there, through topic modeling and sentiment analysis tools, have generated re-orientations of thinking about the reading of human culture. The bridging of American and world literary coordinates and the bridging of the humanistic and quantitative strategies come together in this project\u2014which also allows for abrasion between these neat dyads too. But both what<\/strong> we understand as American literature and how<\/strong> we understand and interpret this new American literature becomes dramatically changed, or at least opened, by this project, as a matter of its defining mission and aspirations.<\/p>\n

If this sounds a bit contradictory and uncertain, well, so it is, so it is. Our plan is to immerse in the destructive element, and let the deep, deep sea keep us up.<\/p>\n

Peter Lancelot Mallios is a MITH Faculty Fellow. He directs the Foreign Literatures in America Project and is a professor in English at the University of Maryland.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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