The Un-Americanness of American Literature

Abstract

Taking stock of recent trends in American studies, Watson uses Malcolm Lowry's neglected novel Lunar Caustic (1968) as an entry point into an exploration of the implications for readers and teachers of movements in American studies in a transnational direction. He argues that Lowry's novel can be read as a precursor and allegory of current attempts to position American studies and culture within a transnational and cosmopolitan network: Lowry re-imagines and re-interprets American literature and popular culture without centralizing and naturalizing their relationship with the cultural and national imaginaries of the American nation-state. Instead, American culture is depicted as a component of a transnational system, which constitutes and determines America as much as it, in turn, is modulated by the globalization of American culture. Lowry's novel maps and foregrounds this transnational terrain, constituted by a series of reciprocal movements between the local and the global, and challenges thereby a pedagogy grounded in the area studies model of literary scholarship.