Reading with the Grain: The Ecologies of The Lowland

Abstract

Contemporary US literature is as twisted as the genome of a white whale. The vocabularies of postmodernism and its various iterations have done their work, while writers on the cutting edge of their discipline (and often oblivious to, or dismissive of, narrow pigeonholes) reshape its contours only later to be assimilated by the critical establishment. When Rachel Adams speaks of an emergent “American literary globalism,” she breaks open calcified norms to understand contemporary writing in the United States as being more fluid and inclusive than in the past (even if such a theoretical gesture is not without limiting constraints). Largely diasporic and including practitioners that might write from anywhere and about anything, such work is often elastic and reactive in ways that correspond to a more global sensibility. “Relatively unburdened by the legacies of Euro-American modernism or the politics of the Cold War,” such work “reacts against the aesthetic sensibilities of high postmodernism while providing American literature with a new set of genealogical, geographic, and temporal referents” (Adams 251).