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Globalit, Inc.; or, The Cultural Logic of Global Literary Studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Ian Baucom
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Abstract

“Charter'd Companies may indeed be the form the world has now increasingly begun to take,” announces Charles Mason in Thomas Pynchon's 1997 novel Mason and Dixon. Taking that cryptic comment as a starting point and drawing on Giovanni Arrighi's account of the recurrent organization of capital by metropolitan “spaces-of-flows,” this essay investigates what it might mean for Mason's comment to be true of both his late-eighteenth-century moment and the late-twentieth-century moment of the novel's publication and asks what such a reading of the “form [of] the world” implies for contemporary attempts to rethink literary study under the sign of the global. The essay offers “laws” of such a global form (expansion contracts, contraction enriches, enrichment haunts) and deploys them to read the two modes of globalized literary study that have achieved dominance of late: global literary study as method and as project—the key method in question understood here as a type of global historicism and the key project as the appeal to reconfigure literary study as the study of something called global literature.

Type
Talks from the Convention
Information
PMLA , Volume 116 , Issue 1: Special Topic: Globalizing Literary Studies , January 2001 , pp. 158 - 172
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2001

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