Crossed Histories: Social Formations in Friction 1783–Present

Abstract

This Chapter focuses on distinct moments of transculturation in distinct contexts. I begin with Dickens’s late novel Little Dorrit (1857), written at the height of the British Industrial Revolution and emergent scrutiny of the “Morals of Trade,” and end with George Gissing’s “The Hope of Pessimism” (1882), when Britain was becoming conscious of the social costs of market society and commercial competition. In between, I consider literatures of modernization as a kind of genre, one distinctive enough in presenting total environments that most of these have won Nobel Prizes for Literature, although they were not selected on that basis. This chapter is also experimental in that it provides an outline for a course on global modernisms in WReC’s sense in Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature: the literature of the capitalist world-system since the nineteenth century (Collective et al. in Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature. Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 2015). If the novels and manifestos discussed in Chapter 7 are introduced in each case by a specialist in the appropriate language and literary tradition, students will have a thoroughgoing introduction to global modernity as it was experienced or critiqued by its greatest writers. Such a course transcends barriers within Anglophone cultures and between English and Modern Language Departments, showing that English and “Modern Languages” have been inextricably interconnected throughout modernity. For their parts, faculty in comparable “domestic” and “foreign” literature departments globally might consider moving to departments of Modern Literatures tout court, as actively reflecting a globalized world. Fictional and theoretical texts have been selected for their depictions of modernization both across unequal cultures and within them: the Cuban Jose Martί’s “Nuestra America Our America” (1891), Uruguayan Jose Enrique Rodo’s critique of US foreign policy Ariel (1900), Norwegian Knut Hamsun’s Markens Grode Growth of the Soil (1917), Guatemalan Miguel Angel Asturias’s Hombres de Maiz Men of Maize (1949), Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiong’o’sWeep Not, Child (1964), Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Cien Aňos de Soledad One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), Rajasthani Vijay Dan Detha’s “Alekhun Hitler” “Untold Hitlers” (1984), US Americans John Williams’s Butcher’s Crossing (1960) and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985), and Chinese Jiang Rong’s Lang Tuteng Wolf Totem (2004).