On Foreign Grounds: Toward an Alternative US Literary History, Archive, Methodology

Abstract

There is a certain irony in the tendency of the term transnational to draw attention to what it negates—that is, to the continued significance of the national. There is more wool and flax in the fields. This essay argues for the importance of the question, “What is US ‘American literature?”’ and for a sharp break with predominant modes of answering it. It does so to introduce the Foreign Literatures in America (FLA) project, a new online, open-forum digital archive, inspired by, but not reducible to, an alternative approach to conceiving US “American literature.” FLA is a multipartner endeavor, developed in conjunction with the Maryland Institute for Technology and the Humanities (MITH), with funding from various sources and in consultation with the Library of Congress and faculty from universities worldwide. The project is a digital laboratory platform for the construction and use of archives concerning the reception of non-US American authors and non-US-authored literary texts in the US. Below, I describe first the alternative conception of US literary history giving rise to the project. Its particular conjunction of global/transnational impulse and national framing follows one of many plural possibilities of reimagining literary history that may be realized through individual FLA archives. Then, I consider the enterprise in closer detail, attending to a) its implications for US literary studies, b) its value as a project emphasizing questions of reception, and c) the opportunities it offers for combining humanistic with computational and quantitative methods. FLA thus prompts and facilitates multiple tiers of questions concerning “American” literature, its conception and historicity, and fresh methodologies intertwined with its horizons of conceptual possibility.