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Taskography: Translation as Genre of Literary Labor

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Emily Apter
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Extract

Wai Chee Dimock's chapter on genre as world system, in her recently published book Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time, performs a thoroughgoing interrogation of paradigms of periodization and planetary comparatism: “What would literary history look like,” Dimock asks, Her book answers these questions by applying fractal modeling to the scaling of literary chronotypes and geopolitical territories. Dimock uses Benoit Mandelbrot's concept of indeterminate lengths to imagine a literary field of serried shapes, lacy ground, pocked sponges, coiled twine, clumped shapes, cystlike protuberances, and warped intervals (84). “Such irregularities are not limited to just one scale,” Dimock specifies; “they are much more transitive, and much more robustly self-propagating. They carry over tenaciously from one metric to another, spewing out countless copies of themselves on countless dimensions” (77). Dimock's concept of fractals as a self-duplication of literary forms produced in manifold sizes and temporal dimensions and endowed with entropic powers of extension allows her to plot feedback loops between the “gnarled contours of the globe [and] the gnarled contours of every single node” (78). Despite her concern that theorizing genre as a world system delivers “the large literary canvas” at the expense of the text, Dimock insists that such “scalar recursiveness” can in fact “thicken comparative morphology,” diversifying the conceptual grounds of comparison (79).

Type
Special Topic: Remapping Genre Coordinated by Wai Chee Dimock and Bruce Robbins
Information
PMLA , Volume 122 , Issue 5: Special Topic Remapping Genre , October 2007 , pp. 1403 - 1415
Copyright
Copyright © 2007 by The Modern Language Association of America

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