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 Palgrave Studies in Modern
European Literature

Series Editors
Shane Weller
School of European Culture and Languages
University of Kent
Canterbury, United Kingdom

Thomas Baldwin
Centre for Modern European Literature
University of Kent
Canterbury, United Kingdom

Ben Hutchinson
Centre for Modern European Literature
University of Kent
Canterbury, United Kingdom
Linked to the Centre for Modern European Literature at the University of
Kent, UK, this series offers a space for new research that challenges the
limitations of national, linguistic and cultural borders within Europe and
engages in the comparative study of literary traditions in the modern
period.

More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14610
 Kaisa Kaakinen

Comparative
Literature and the
Historical Imaginary
Reading Conrad, Weiss, Sebald
Kaisa Kaakinen
Comparative Literature
University of Turku
Turku, Finland

Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature

ISBN 978-3-319-51819-0 ISBN 978-3-319-51820-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-51820-6

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For my friends
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book was written on two continents and in four cities – and at times
while traveling between them. The intellectual and geographic journey
that led to completing this project would not have been possible without
the help of several individuals and institutions, and I am delighted to be
able to extend my gratitude to them.
The exceptionally rich intellectual exchange at Cornell University
sparked the questions that developed into this project, and I am grateful
to the faculty and staff at the departments of Comparative Literature and
German Studies at Cornell, the fellow graduate students and the broader
Cornell community for providing the best possible environment for the
formative research phase of this book. My special thanks go to my dis-
sertation advisors Leslie A. Adelson, Dominick LaCapra and Natalie
Melas, who encouraged me to follow my intuition that this comparative
experiment would bring interesting results. I am eternally grateful to
Leslie A. Adelson for the opportunity to learn from her nuanced approach
to literary imagination and transnational cultural analysis, as well as for her
untiring help with navigating the different phases of writing this book. I
continue to be impressed by her analytical rigor as scholar and generosity
as advisor. I want to extend my deepest gratitude to Dominick LaCapra,
who was always willing to share his broad intellectual expertise at the
intersection of historiography and literary studies in seminars and long
discussions, which made a deep and lasting impact on me. I would not
have been able to pose the questions of this book without the perspectives
opened by his way of posing problems and making important distinctions.
Natalie Melas’s compelling and sophisticated work on cultural comparison

vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

changed the way I think about comparative literature, and her articula-
tions of postcolonial comparison provided a pivotal inspiration for my own
work on transnational European literatures. I thank her for her probing
questions and inspiring feedback.
I have conducted the final stages of writing at the University of Turku,
Finland, where I have profited immensely from Hanna Meretoja’s wide-
ranging work on narrative hermeneutics and her ability to create produc-
tive and pleasant research environments. I am very grateful to Hanna for
inviting me to join her research project “The Experience of History and
the Ethics of Storytelling in Contemporary Arts” (2013–2015, funded by
the Emil Aaltonen Foundation), which gave me the opportunity to devote
time to writing this book and to share my work with other scholars in
Turku and beyond. I also wish to thank the other project members, Mia
Hannula, Ilona Hongisto, Riitta Jytilä and Lotta Kähkönen, for stimulat-
ing discussions and pleasant company. The research project culminated in
the conference “Ethics of Storytelling: Historical Imagination in
Contemporary Literature and Visual Arts” (Turku, June 2015), where I
had the privilege to exchange ideas with scholars from several continents,
sharing an interest in the intersections of storytelling and history. I thank
them for one of the best conference experiences I have had. I wish to
thank professor Liisa Steinby, Tintti Klapuri, Päivi Kosonen, Tiina Käkelä-
Puumala, Aino Mäkikalli, Jouni Teittinen and other colleagues at Turku
for comments on the introduction, inspiring seminar discussions and great
collegial support.
I am very grateful to the Emil Aaltonen Foundation for granting me a
scholarship to work on this book for ten months. I also wish to extend my
gratitude to the Fulbright Commission for supporting my first year at
Cornell, and the staff at the Fulbright Center Finland for their advice at
the beginning of the process that led to this book. I thank Cornell
University for crucial funding in the form of the SAGE scholarship and a
research travel grant. I am grateful to the Thanks to Scandinavia
Foundation for their generous financial aid in 2007-2008 and the
German Academic Exchange Service DAAD for funding that made it
possible for me to conduct research in Berlin during the 2011-2012
academic year. The Archiv der Akademie der Künste in Berlin, Germany,
and the Jagiellonian University Joseph Conrad Research Centre in
Kraków, Poland, shall be thanked for the kind permission to use their
resources.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix

Several scholars have read parts of this book and provided important
feedback. My special thanks go to Eneken Laanes for reading the entire
manuscript and giving me invaluable insight especially into the intersec-
tions of postcolonial and post-Soviet frameworks of cultural analysis. I
thank Colin Davis and Robert Eaglestone for their intelligent feedback on
the introduction. Joseph Vogl gave astute comments on the early version
of the Weiss chapter, and I also thank him for welcoming me to his
doctoral colloquium at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Kamila
Kehoe’s help with the early versions of this book and with the translations
of Peter Weiss from German to English was crucial, and I remain thankful
for her encouragement to go on. I am also very grateful to the two
anonymous reviewers who provided insightful and encouraging feedback,
as well as to the staff at Palgrave for their professionalism.
It was a pleasant surprise to meet Markus Huss and Jenny Willner in
Berlin and to be able to discuss even the obscurest aspects of Peter Weiss’s
oeuvre with them. I thank Jenny and Markus for the animated and multi-
lingual discussions on Weiss, literature and life, conducted in several cities
of “Northeast Europe.” I thank Gizem Arslan for the inspiring and
enjoyable cooperation on a conference panel “Literary Configurations of
the Present” at the ACLA Conference at Harvard in 2016, and the panel
members for their thoughtful contributions on the concept of the con-
temporary. Margaret-Anne Hutton shall be thanked for the excellent
conference “What is the Contemporary?” at the University of St.
Andrews in 2014, where I also had memorable exchanges with Leigh
Wilson and other remarkable scholars.
The Department of Comparative Literature at the University of
Helsinki gave me the opportunity to test some of my ideas on the inter-
sections of literature and history by teaching a seminar as a guest lecturer,
for which I am very grateful. I also wish to thank The Finnish Academy
research project “Styles of Mimesis” for their rigorous and multifaceted
work on the concept of mimesis, which inspired me greatly when I was
conceiving this project.
While writing this book I was happy to be drawn to the activities of the
literary association Nuoren Voiman Liitto, which distracted me from too
much solitary scholarship and gave me the opportunity to experience
many inspiring literary readings and to get involved in creative forms of
cultural activism. My most heartfelt thanks go to my family – Eero and
Saara Kaakinen, Leena Kaakinen and Tomi Kokkonen, Timo Kaakinen,
Henna Jaurila and Maiju Jaurila – for always being there for me and for
x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

believing that I would finish this project one day. Finally, my warmest
thanks go to Gizem Arslan, Juana Awad, Henry Berlin, Daniel Fink,
Fabian Goppelsröder, Valentin Goppelsröder, Kamila Kehoe, Tamara
Jugov, Katariina Kaarlela, Pınar Kemerli, Anna Louhensalo, Maria
Fernanda Negrete Martínez, Asako Miyasaki, Judy Park, Matti
Pikkujämsä, Lili Di Puppo, Aino Rajala, Sharinne Sukhnanand, Ulla
Tarvainen, Henriikka Tavi, Sabine Till, Floora Välikangas and Jarmo
Välikangas, whose warmth, intelligence and generosity sustained me dur-
ing the long and at times arduous writing process. This book is dedicated
to my dear friends, who have taught me immensely about relationships of
affiliation across time and space.
 CONTENTS

1 Introduction: Comparative Readings in the Twenty-First

Century 1
Active Readers and Heterogeneous Audiences 1
Reception Aesthetics in the Twenty-First Century 5
Modern Temporal Regime and Heterogeneous Contemporaneity 9
Untimely Questioners 13
Parataxis, Imperial Comparison, Unimplied Readers 18
Contact Narratives 23
Notes 26
Bibliography 30

Part I Outlining the Future: Peter Weiss’s Die Ästhetik des

Widerstands and the Parataxis of History

2 Sensory Representations and Untimely Reference in Peter

Weiss’s Die Ästhetik des Widerstands 37
Narrating a Heterogeneous Present 37
Poetics of the Outline 44
Dante in Berlin 50
Senses as Catalysts 56
Immersion and Distance 64
Notes 73
Bibliography 77

xi
xii CONTENTS

3 Coordinates of Comparison in Die Ästhetik des Widerstands 81

Drawing Outlines with Brecht 82
Transmission and Parataxis: Karin Boye and Rosalinde Ossietzky 90
Stepping Outside the Frame: Beyond Europe 97
Reading Weiss after 1989 103
Notes 108
Bibliography 111

Part II “I Would Not Even Invent a Transition.” (Re-)

Contextualizing Joseph Conrad

4 Imperial Comparison and Postcolonial Reading 115

Conrad’s Heterogeneous Afterlife 115
Active Readers and the Discourse of Civilization 120
A Reader Not Implied? Locating Conrad’s Readers 129
Notes 141
Bibliography 143

5 Conrad as a Bridge 145

“Polish Background” 145
Conrad’s Outsides in Contact 154
Implied, Unimplied, Unwelcome Readers 163
Notes 165
Bibliography 169

Part III Analogy and the Narration of Trauma

in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz and Die Ringe
des Saturn

6 Repetition and Digression: Sebald’s Narratives of Trauma 175

Transnational Trauma Narratives 175
Poetics of Juxtaposition in Austerlitz 182
Coherence and Digression in Die Ringe des Saturn 191
Notes 200
Bibliography 203
 CONTENTS xiii

7 Configurations of the Present in Sebald 207

Contact Narratives – Degeneralizing Comparison 208
Melancholic Identification 214
Narrative Offshoots 223
Sebald in the Twenty-First Century 228
Notes 230
Bibliography 234

8 Conclusion: Present Futures 239

Notes 247
Bibliography 247

Index 249
 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

ÄDW Peter Weiss, Die Ästhetik des Widerstands, vol. I-III (Suhrkamp: 1983)
HoD Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Norton: 2006)
RS W. G. Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn (Fischer: 1997)
UWE Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes (Penguin: 2002)

xv
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Comparative Readings

in the Twenty-First Century

ACTIVE READERS AND HETEROGENEOUS AUDIENCES

In his essay-travelogue Die Ringe des Saturn (1997; The Rings of Saturn,
2002), the German émigré author W. G. Sebald (1944–2001) tells epi-
sodes from the early life of a Pole named Konrad Korzeniowski.1
Korzeniowski spent his childhood in the turmoil of the Polish uprisings
against the rule of the Russian empire in the mid-nineteenth century and
was later to become known by the name Joseph Conrad. Sebald’s narrative
follows Korzeniowski and his revolutionary parents sentenced by the
Russian authorities to exile and eventually recounts Korzeniowski’s jour-
ney to the Congo, which would serve as a backdrop to Conrad’s most
famous story, Heart of Darkness (1899). Sebald draws attention here to
Conrad’s meeting in the Congo with Roger Casement, who reported on
atrocities committed by Belgian colonists and was later involved in the
Irish revolution against British rule. By pointing to Conrad’s Polish back-
ground, Sebald defamiliarizes for contemporary readers the subject posi-
tion of Conrad, who is commonly understood by scholars to be a British
imperial writer. Through this entangled narrative of Conrad and
Casement meeting in the Congo, Sebald also suggests a linkage between
different instances of colonization on the edges of the Western European
imperial center, that is to say, between Ireland and Poland. Furthermore,
against the background of Sebald’s extensive preoccupation with the

© The Author(s) 2017 1

K. Kaakinen, Comparative Literature and the Historical Imaginary,
Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-51820-6_1
2 1 INTRODUCTION: COMPARATIVE READINGS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

historical trauma of the Holocaust in mid-twentieth-century Europe, the

narrative on Conrad suggests an unspecified link between imperial and
Nazi genocides.
Sebald’s analogies can be said to mobilize readers by drawing simul-
taneous attention to both a gap and a connection between historical
contexts and narratives. At the same time, it is unclear to what exactly
Sebald’s readers are mobilized. As the status of the evoked relation is
not given, one must ponder the nature of the linkage between two
events or contexts brought into relation. But since Sebald’s texts
revolve around histories of imperialism and genocide, the analogies
also operate under very specific historical pressures. The lingering
effects of imperial and genocidal histories direct and limit readers’
activity of linking. Furthermore, this also poses a question about how
readers’ different historical experiences and narratives affect their acts of
reading. The specific position of readers in relation to these histories is
bound to have a profound effect on the way they link the ambiguous
analogies into historical narratives.
W. G. Sebald’s (1944–2001) chapter on Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)
invites us to look more closely at the relationship between the literary projects
of these two writers, who wrote at the opposite ends of the twentieth century
about Western European imperialism. The work of these two Central
European authors, who both emigrated to Britain, frames this book’s project
of rethinking critical perspectives to transnational modes of historical narra-
tion in twentieth-century literary fiction involved with the history of imperi-
alism, war and genocide. However, the book opens with a chapter on a third
European émigré writer, Peter Weiss (1916–1982), a German-language
author read and admired by Sebald but not conventionally linked to
Conrad. Weiss is included in this book because of the strong relevance of
his extraordinary novel Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (1975–1981, see Weiss
1983; The Aesthetics of Resistance, Weiss 2005) for contemporary compara-
tive analysis of historical narration. Weiss’s thoroughgoing concern with
mobilizing readers’ historical imagination illuminates how Conrad’s readers
have used Conrad’s texts in their projects of historical orientation and how
Sebald’s narratives operate with historical analogies at the beginning of the
twenty-first century, when multiple historical experiences and narratives
come increasingly into contact in transnational public spheres. This constella-
tion of authors enables a renewed look at the notion of an active reader, who
bridges textual gaps and “provides the other half of the book,” to quote the
words of Joseph Conrad (Jean-Aubry 1927, 208).
 ACTIVE READERS AND HETEROGENEOUS AUDIENCES 3

The comparative experiment of linking these three European twenti-

eth-century authors, who did not all work in the same language, the same
cultural context or even the same time period, brings out an important and
often overlooked challenge to analyzing European twentieth-century lit-
erature. Historical pressures through the past century have not only posed
demands to authors and their stylistic choices but also call for heightened
critical attention to context-specific reading and readers’ engagement with
historical legacies and orientations in both timely and untimely ways. This
book’s analyses of Conrad, Weiss and Sebald will demonstrate in practice
the necessity to pose more explicit questions about specific effects that
occur when literary narratives meet a heterogeneous readership. They
bring attention to the intricate ways in which historical experiences and
perspectives both manifest in literary form and may prompt readers to use
literary texts as media of historical imagination, as they link them with
other concrete, situated historical experiences. All three authors wrote
texts that touch upon transnational histories of violence and are bound
to divide readers in highly specific ways. They responded to complex and
traumatic historical situations specific to the Central European region in
the twentieth century, while also referring to global historical phenomena
such as imperialism and its prolonged aftermath. Conrad, a writer, sailor
and a naturalized British citizen of Polish descent, has a canonical position
in histories of early British modernism, but during the twentieth century
his work also became an important point of articulation in postcolonial
studies, as both scholarly references and postcolonial literary responses to
Conrad’s texts indicate. The postwar author Peter Weiss, who lived in
Sweden and wrote the main body of his oeuvre in German, responded
both to the devastation of the world wars and to the division of Europe
and parts of the world into two opposing political blocks. W. G. Sebald,
one of the most crucial writers to tackle poetic challenges posed by
historical trauma in the late twentieth century, emigrated from his native
Germany to Britain but published his literary works in German during the
1990s and early 2000s, achieving a wide international reception. The
analyses of these three authors’ work in this book aim to expand critical
vocabulary used in the study of reading, so that comparative literary
studies can better account for historically specific reading positions beyond
a literary text’s most overtly implied historical and cultural imaginary.
In addition to the historical frame of the twentieth century, the book is
organized around a stylistic feature in Conrad, Weiss and Sebald’s texts
that cuts across literary periods and national literatures. The analyses focus
4 1 INTRODUCTION: COMPARATIVE READINGS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

on poetic strategies that rely on stylistic, informational and sensory gaps of

various sorts and create what I call weak analogies of relation and compar-
ison. The literary projects of Conrad, Weiss and Sebald have a very
different relationship to historical narration, but each of them employ
poetic strategies that emphasize in their specific ways the labor of embo-
died readers, who are prompted to create historical linkages between
things brought into an indeterminate relation in the text. Focusing on
the stylistic strategy of weak analogy allows for an analysis of situated
effects of transnational historical writing on audiences that do not share
the same historical background and imaginary. What is characteristic
about the unspecified analogies studied in this book is their ability to
open both a generalizing and a particularizing dynamic of interpretation.
The weak analogies – such as the relation Sebald evokes between Poland
and the Congo – both unhinge the literary narratives from a singular
relationship to context and encourage readers to cultivate specific histor-
ical linkages. On the one hand, readers may be led to consider whether and
how an evoked ambiguous relation is embedded in some notion of total-
ity, be it narrative or historical. One might say, for instance, that Sebald’s
analogical mode, which relates traumatic histories across time and space,
creates a cumulative sense of history as a traumatic condition. On the
other hand, however, his weak analogies may also encourage a centrifugal
but still situated mode of reading influenced by the specific historical
narratives readers bring into the event of reading. An important goal of
the book is to demonstrate why this reading mode, which I will call
rehistoricizing, should not be understood simply in terms of textual play
that exists in mere tension with history but as a mode that may articulate
temporally and geographically displaced but nonetheless material forms of
historical relation.
While this book traces historical conditions of interpreting certain
literary texts through the twentieth century and across historical transi-
tions and geographical borders, its own primary context is the contem-
porary discipline of comparative literature. At the beginning of the twenty-
first century, the discipline is confronted with the challenge to rethink
comparison in the prolonged aftermath of imperialism and the historical
divisions of the Cold War. After a phase when Western comparatists
focused mainly on literature written in major European languages, the
discipline of comparative literature is now faced with an increasing pres-
sure to take into account the whole world as a horizon of analysis. But as
comparatists such as Natalie Melas, Gayatri Spivak and Pheng Cheah have
 RECEPTION AESTHETICS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY 5

emphasized, a global scope of comparative literature not only highlights

the need to extend comparative analysis to formerly marginalized texts but
also calls for a more profound reconfiguration of the very tools and
methods of literary analysis (see Melas 2007; 2009, 566–567; Spivak
2003; Cheah 2016). According to this logic, the comparative analysis of
reading positions should not simply add more contexts of reception into
the discussion but should also examine critically the very premises that
operate in analytical approaches to reading. The three case studies of this
book illuminate from different angles how culturally and linguistically
more heterogeneous reading contexts give rise to new analytical problems
with special force in the current historical moment, when historical experi-
ences previously discussed by comparative literature in more circumscribed
frameworks undergo new and proliferating forms of contact. The analyses
of Conrad, Weiss and Sebald examine crucial linkages between postcolo-
nial reconsideration of comparative literature – most often discussed in
reference to postcolonial literatures outside Europe – and the study of
transnational European literatures, the focus of this book. They outline
postcolonial, postgenocidal and post-Cold War reading positions, which
enable a more differentiated investigation of conditions of historical narra-
tion and cultural comparison through the twentieth century. They also
demonstrate that the fact of diversifying audiences challenges not only
analyses of contemporary literature but also those that focus on older
literary texts and their complicated afterlife.

RECEPTION AESTHETICS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

The analytical approach that recognizes historically situated dimensions of
reading but does not fix them in a single historical narrative or context
makes it possible to differentiate between multiple ways in which readers
engage with gaps in literary texts. Conrad’s idea of a reader providing the
other half of the book seems to invite readers to be equal participants in
the creation of meaning. But what if a text does not allow all kinds of
readers in? This is what Chinua Achebe argued in 1977 about Conrad’s
texts in his groundbreaking essay “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness” (Achebe 2006), as he demonstrated manifestations of
racism in Conrad’s texts. The implied racially and culturally selective
address of Conrad’s texts demonstrates well that while “dialogue” is a
common term to describe the relationship between a text and a reader,
some texts may actually make it impossible for certain readers to enter into
6 1 INTRODUCTION: COMPARATIVE READINGS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

a relationship of dialogue. Thus, some relationships between a text and a

reader have to be described in a more nuanced critical vocabulary. A more
focused critical attention to “socially circumscribed limits of interpreta-
tion” (Sommer 1999, 9) should influence the way contemporary com-
parative literary studies approach manifestations of history and historicity
in literary texts and their reception.
When one poses the problem of heterogeneity in the study of reading
twentieth-century literature, it is also relevant to ask how the particular
strain of twentieth-century literary theory directly concerned with the
study of conditions of reading, reception aesthetics or reader-response
theory, engaged with this analytical problem. As might have already
become apparent, my book shares some important theoretical concerns
with the work of the Constance School theorists Wolfgang Iser and Hans
Robert Jauss, who developed an analytical school of reception aesthetics in
the second half of the twentieth century. However, the three case studies
also make it possible to perceive a certain lack of engagement in Iser and
Jauss’s theories with the situatedness of reading. I therefore propose that
the questions they posed about reading as both orchestrated by the text
and influenced by the context of reception should be posed again in the
context of new comparative literature sensitive to the effects of decoloni-
zation and globalization.
Drawing on the tradition of philosophical hermeneutics, and especially
on Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jauss and Iser investigated how literary texts
coordinate reader response. Wolfgang Iser’s writings articulated how gaps
or Leerstellen are crucial in the interaction of text and reader, mobilizing
readers into being active participants in the production of meaning (see
Iser 1974, 1978). But instead of understanding readers as historically
situated, Iser builds his central concept of implied reader into a “trans-
cendental model which makes it possible for the structured effects of
literary texts to be described” (ibid.). This implied reader “embodies all
those predispositions necessary for a literary work to exercise its effect –
predispositions laid down, not by an empirical outside reality, but by the
text itself” (Iser 1978, 34). In Iser’s words, a literary text “[anticipates] the
presence of a recipient without necessarily defining him.” Thus, Iser does
not differentiate between different kinds of historically or culturally con-
crete reading positions, because he sees this abstraction as a heuristic move
necessary to understand the way in which literary texts orchestrate their
effects. But while Iser assumes that his concept of the implied reader
“provides a link between all the historical and individual actualizations of
 RECEPTION AESTHETICS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY 7

the text” and “makes them accessible to analysis” (Iser 1978, 38), this
theoretical construct is not altogether helpful for capturing the more
situated problems of address important for the contemporary comparative
analysis of reading.
Hans Robert Jauss’s approach comes closer to my own as he makes
changing historical conditions of reading his central focus. His work
answered to the impasses of both formalist and orthodox Marxist
approaches unable to provide a satisfactory account of the relationship
between literature and history. Jauss analyzed the way in which a literary
work is both a mediated response to the context of its production and
responded to by readers, who read it in relation to their specific expecta-
tions that change through time. Influenced by Gadamer’s discussion of
the hermeneutic logic of question and answer and fusion of horizons (that
of the past text and the present), Jauss’s notion of horizon of expectation
(Erwartungshorizont) conceptualized the dialectic of how texts draw from
existing literary (and social) forms and produce new forms that may
surpass the expectations of the literary public, until those norms become
new conventions. A text also continues to produce responses by future
questioners, whose questions cannot be anticipated in the context of the
text’s production. Jauss proposed that this problematic should be the basis
of a new kind of literary history that mediates between literature and other
historical processes by taking into account the history of reception (Jauss
1982, 18).
But although the dynamic of changing horizons of expectation
described by Jauss informs the following readings, the increasing circula-
tion of literary texts across the globe foregrounds questions of address and
audience that have to be analyzed with more differentiated tools able to
distinguish between different kinds of historically situated reading posi-
tions and conditions of interpretation active in the same present. The case
studies of this book demonstrate in practice why we need to rethink the
temporal and historical concepts that underpin theoretical approaches to
reading. They also show that this should influence the way in which the
notion of dialogue central in hermeneutic theories of reading is concep-
tualized. This need for a more differentiated analysis of reading positions
and constructions of address is linked in this book both to certain kinds of
textual strategies and to the pressure of certain histories on reading. First,
my analyses focus on narrative strategies that imply the reader’s act of
locating them in a specific time and place. Hence, their analysis does not
allow for the bracketing of location. Second, the need to reconfigure tools
8 1 INTRODUCTION: COMPARATIVE READINGS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

of analysis becomes especially apparent when literary texts revolve around

histories of violence, as in the case of Conrad, Weiss and Sebald, whose
texts touch upon historical experiences such as imperialism and the
Holocaust. These experiences are prone to divide readers in highly specific
ways, because readers are likely to be implicated in some way in the violent
legacy of traumatic historical events or hierarchical social structures. The
effect of this complicated pressure of history on the texts by Conrad, Weiss
and Sebald is not only a footnote to their analysis but should be brought
to its center.
The relationship between the problem of a heterogeneous readership
and Iser and Jauss’s approaches becomes clearer if we think more carefully
about temporal frames that have informed literary study in the past.
Although Jauss argued for the need to go beyond a diachronic perspective
to literary history and to recognize the heterogeneity of “a synchronic
cross-section of a moment in the development,” his discussion of histori-
city of literature still depends on a focus on discovering a unified line of
development and an “overarching system of relationships in the literature
of a historical moment” (see Jauss 1982, 30). Jauss seems to assume that
texts are read by only one audience with its set of expectations – or that the
fact that they may be read by several different audiences does not change
his general description of the dynamic of reception.2 Although Jauss,
whose approach is more historically oriented than Iser’s, draws attention
to the need to discard the tendency to understand a historical context or
period as homogeneous (see Jauss 1982, 12, 17, 36–37), certain problems
related to synchronic heterogeneity, notably hierarchies between different
reading positions, are directions of analysis that he himself did not make
central.
The relative lack of engagement by twentieth-century reception aes-
thetics with questions of power and hierarchy is linked to more general
hermeneutic premises that critical hermeneutics has addressed, seeking to
develop hermeneutic theory to become more sensitive to situatedness and
difference (see Roberge 2011, Meretoja 2014, 225, 229). Feminist readers
of Gadamer, for instance, have argued for going beyond Gadamer’s reliance
on a notion of a single cumulative human tradition, which in his framework
is needed for “fusion of horizons” or “understanding” to occur, and
beyond a conception of dialogue that can be argued to treat difference in
an instrumental and subsumptive manner (see Fleming 2003, 109–131;
Vasterling 2003, 169–178). My readings can be seen to operate in the
spirit of critical hermeneutics, as I study the consequences of adopting
 MODERN TEMPORAL REGIME AND HETEROGENEOUS CONTEMPORANEITY 9

analytical perspectives sensitive to different situated readers and the spe-

cific forms of incommensurability between their positions.3 I seek to
bring the concepts and perspectives of reception aesthetics into contact
with postcolonial studies and their questions on hierarchies and subversive
reading. Although the notion of situated reading has been widely used in
literary criticism, the analytical categories of reader-response criticism have
not yet been updated to account for the extensive research into opposi-
tional reading positions in fields such as feminist and postcolonial criti-
cism.4 Doris Sommer, who has engaged with the tradition of reader-
response criticism in her work on minority writing in the Americas, points
out that “Gadamer does not often worry about what is burned away
when we fuse the ‘alien [into] our own’” (Sommer 1999, 24). Sommer’s
turn of phrase focuses attention to the potentially violent power relations
not captured by benign conceptions of dialogue and understanding.
Certain reading positions have to be obscured if reading and historical
understanding are tied in hermeneutic theory solely to the vocabulary of
fusing, sharing and coherence. Sommer calls for a “version of hermeneu-
tics” that “locates what we cannot know, in both epistemological and
ethical senses” and recognizes “the asymmetry of positions [that] restricts
a reader’s travel from one place to the other” (Sommer 1999, 24, 9).5
These analytical perspectives, which focus on difference and historically
and socially particular limits of understanding on the one hand and
emancipatory reading on the other, should encourage comparatists to
find new critical approaches that account for more varied ways for readers
to engage with textual gaps.

MODERN TEMPORAL REGIME AND HETEROGENEOUS

CONTEMPORANEITY
A tendency to base analysis of reading positions on a single historical
trajectory or tradition can be illustrated with a passage from Iser, in
which he writes about contemporary readers as participants and later
readers as observers:

For the contemporary reader, the reassessment of norms contained in the

repertoire will make him detach these norms from their social and cultural
context and so recognize the limitations of their effectiveness. For the later
reader, the reassessed norms help to re-create that very social and cultural
context that brought about the problems which the text itself is concerned
10 1 INTRODUCTION: COMPARATIVE READINGS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

with. In the first instance, the reader is affected as a participant, and in the
second as an observer. (Iser 1978, 78)

Iser operates here with a temporal model in which the growing temporal
distance moves readers to the position of observers. He seems to take it for
granted that contemporary readers can be described as “participants” in
equal measure. But can distance be thought here only in terms of temporal
distance based on a single historical continuity? Is it not also the case that
some readers contemporary to a text’s moment of publication may find
themselves in a position that resembles more the position of an observer
than that of a participant?
We begin to notice here a difficulty inherent in the notion of the
“contemporary,” a concept that posits a community of individuals who
share the same time.6 The notion projects a shared ground between a
multiplicity of people and phenomena but has an uncertain basis in terms
of experience or empirical evidence. As Peter Osborne observes in refer-
ence to Kant and Heidegger, the contemporary is a speculative concept,
because it “performatively projects a non-existent unity onto the disjunc-
tive relation between coeval times,” and it is impossible to be experienced
as such, “since it only exists as the differentiation or fractured together-
ness of the other two temporal modes (past and future), under the
priority of its futural dimension” (Osborne 2013, 23). In other words,
the present has a particularly uncertain status between the other temporal
modes of the past and the future, and the “contemporary” assumes a
unity of heterogeneous experiences. While the first problem raised by
Osborne has to do with the general structure of temporality, the second
opens to the more historical problematic of dealing with heterogeneity in
conceiving the present and its historical dimensions. Osborne also points
out that the concept of the contemporary is “fundamentally socially
disjunctive,” because “there is no socially actual shared subject-position
of, or within, our present from the standpoint of which its relational
totality could be lived as a whole,” and “nonetheless, the concept of the
contemporary functions as if there is” (ibid.). The contemporary consti-
tutes a moving present that is predicated on a group of people, who
define its limits and give it more concrete meanings. It is used to
demarcate the historical period, in which the users of this word are
themselves situated, from its predecessors, but it also demarcates a certain
community that implicitly excludes others. In a more careful examination
of the notion, it becomes clear that a “pragmatic suspension of
 MODERN TEMPORAL REGIME AND HETEROGENEOUS CONTEMPORANEITY 11

noncontemporaneity” (de Sousa Santos 2007, 434), here the bracketing

of the fact that different narratives of history are being constructed in the
same present, is easier if the group of people included in this contempor-
aneity is rather limited. As Benedict Anderson’s analysis of nationalism
has shown, the idea of a national community depends on an emphasis on
linear, developmental time, as the nation is imagined as a coherent entity
“moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty time” (Anderson
2006, 26–27). But what happens when the unit of analysis is thought to
be the whole world? Does this immense horizon make it impossible to
pursue historical analysis of reading horizons, as one would have to take
into account an innumerable amount of experiences and narratives?
The open question about the consequences of a planetary horizon of
analysis informs both the contemporary self-understanding of the disci-
pline of comparative literature, especially in the United States, and the
current surge of scholarly contributions that address the “contemporary”
as an analytical category. The “noncontemporaneity of the present” was
discussed through the twentieth century in various ways, most famously by
Ernst Bloch (see Bloch 1977), but the problem of the heterogeneity of the
present seems to pose itself more intensely in the early twenty-first century.
As Lutz Koepnick points out in his study on slowness as a strategy in
contemporary art, individuals and collectivities now “live in multiple times
and spatial orders at once, in competing temporal frameworks where time
often seems to push and pull in various directions simultaneously”
(Koepnick 2014, 3). The increasing interest in the “contemporary” not
only as an adjective linked to an object of study (as in “contemporary
literature” or “contemporary art”) but also as an analytical concept that
itself needs a more careful scrutiny appears as linked to the need to rethink
analytical approaches to the present in an era that can no longer rely on
what Aleida Assmann calls the temporal regime of modernity (kulturelle
Zeitregime der Moderne) (Assmann 2013). This temporal regime, which
structured the consciousness of Westerners for several centuries, conceived
time as a linear continuum flowing securely from the past to the future
through a present understood as a mere transition. Assmann argues that
the last decades of the twentieth century did not mark only the end of a
century but also of the unquestioned status of the temporal paradigm of
modernization (Assmann 2013, 18–20).7 Assmann is careful to articulate
that although she – as well as other scholars such as Andreas Huyssen,
Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht or François Hartog (Huyssen 2000, Gumbrecht
2014, Hartog 2015) – locates the shift away from the modern temporal
12 1 INTRODUCTION: COMPARATIVE READINGS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

regime to the last decades of the twentieth century, one should not
understand it as a striking, clearly demarcated “turn” but rather as a
gradual, surreptitious change of consciousness, in which the central pre-
mises of the Western temporal order change. The shift in temporal regime
has made it possible to define the modern temporal regime as an object of
analysis, because, as Assmann’s study makes clear, the cultural and histori-
cally changing dimensions of temporal consciousness can no longer hide
so conveniently behind an objectifying, abstract understanding of time
inaccessible to human manipulation (Assmann 2013, 20).
One may argue that the modern temporal regime could secure the
present by defining the past and the future in a posited and unquestioned
continuity, predicated on a collective entity moving in time and conceived
as at least relatively homogeneous. In contrast, contemporary theorists –
responding to the intensified flows of global capital, to the emergence of
digital media and to the changed status of futurity in the present due to the
growing awareness of the limited resources of the planet – are under a
stronger pressure to bracket the notions of development and continuity
and to account for the present as a contested concept. If in the modern
temporal regime the present could be conceived as a mere transition, a part
of a single posited narrative, the more heightened sense of a heterogeneous
contemporaneity demands a different conception of the present as a site in
which historical narratives and orientations are constructed, debated and
contested. Instead of a site of transition, the present is increasingly experi-
enced as a site of disjunctions, a “constant experience of radical disjunctures
of perception, mismatching ways of seeing and valuing the same world, in
the actual coincidence of asynchronous temporalities, in the jostling con-
tingency of various cultural and social multiplicities” (Smith 2006, 703).
Although there have been several moments in the twentieth century
when the notion of progress has been called into question in the West, I
would underline that what is particular to the more recent paradigm shift,
observed from its different dimensions by Assmann and others, is its stron-
ger linkage to an awareness of a contemporaneity that spans the whole
globe. According to anthropologist Marc Augé, the current experience of
contemporaneity can be distinguished from earlier moments of global
circulation and contact through its intensity. “Past worlds were not simple
either, but they didn’t ‘communicate’ with each other (in the sense that
different spaces in the same house are called ‘communicating rooms’), or
only rarely, and at any rate less than they do now. In this sense they were not
each other’s contemporaries” (Augé 1999, 52–53). Augé asks the same
 UNTIMELY QUESTIONERS 13

question that has been asked in comparative literature about the conse-
quences of the fact that the “horizon and reference for all human beings
today is the planet as a whole.” The task of contemporary cultural critics is
to find ways to “conceive together the unity of the planet and the diversity
of the worlds that it comprises,” the fact that the worlds that constitute the
contemporary world are “heterogeneous yet linked” (Augé 1999, 16, 90).
The particular problems this poses to literary studies are investigated in this
book from the point of view of analyzing literary texts that engage with and
prompt readerly engagement with historical narratives. Reading twentieth-
century literary fiction in relation to the twenty-first-century reading context, I
ask how the study of reading should adjust to the contemporary condition in
which people from various geographical locations and cultural backgrounds
are increasingly in contact with each other in the same present but operate
with vastly different – and in specific ways different – historical experiences and
orientations. What is important in this gradual turn for my own analysis is that
the problem of heterogeneity does not concern only content – what kind of
historical narratives people operate with – but also the more fundamental
temporal conditions of narrating history. Peter Osborne, who writes about
contemporaneity in relation to philosophy of contemporary art, articulates
insightfully the sense that time as a unity of experience has thus become more
problematic. He stresses that what is specific to the twenty-first-century
experience of time and the present is the sense of “coming together not simply
‘in’ time, but of times: we do not just live or exist together ‘in time’ with our
contemporaries – as if time itself is indifferent to this existing together – but
rather the present is increasingly characterized by a coming together of
different but equally ‘present’ temporalities or ‘times’, a temporal unity in
disjunction, or a disjunctive unity of present times” (Osborne 2013, 17).
Osborne further points out that “the problem of the disjunctive unity of
times is the problem of the unity and disjunction of social space – that is, in
its most extended form, the problem of the geopolitical” (ibid., 25), connect-
ing his analysis of disjunctive present to sociopolitical perspectives. The
“broadening” of the present described by Osborne and others demands
more attention to the present as a contested and unequal space.

UNTIMELY QUESTIONERS
The words “participant” and “observer” appear in a different light if we no
longer link them to a single historical continuity. This also gives us a new
perspective to historical contexts in which the modern temporal regime
14 1 INTRODUCTION: COMPARATIVE READINGS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

operated, such as the time of high imperialism in which Joseph Conrad

wrote. The category I proposed above, a “contemporary” reader who is
more an observer than a participant, becomes crucial if we connect it to
Johannes Fabian’s analysis of modern temporal consciousness in his book
Time and the Other (1983), a critique of how traditional Western anthro-
pology has construed its object. Fabian argues that although anthropolo-
gists have gathered their research data in dialogue with their object of
study, traditionally members of non-Western communities and cultures,
they have tended to present the thus acquired knowledge in a peculiar
temporal mode that Fabian characterizes with the notion “denial of coe-
valness”: “a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of
anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthro-
pological discourse” (Fabian 1983, 31). Traditional Western anthropol-
ogy relegates different societies into a different time in a civilizational
scale, to the past of the “more advanced” Europeans. In this temporal
consciousness, non-European Others do not share the same time with the
Western anthropologists and can never participate in a conversation with
them in the present.
Fabian’s work crucially demonstrates how the seemingly neutral manner
of conceiving the present as a simple transition concealed its exclusive and
coercive dimensions: the fact that it depended on a select few who were
conceived as participants in the conversation on modernity. The hierarch-
ical aspects of the modern temporal regime in the context of the project of
imperialism have been illuminated poignantly by Homi Bhabha and
Natalie Melas, who have given comprehensive historical and theoretical
analyses of the temporal underpinnings of cultural comparison (Bhabha
1994; Melas 2007, 2009). Both Melas and Bhabha stress the consequences
of how particularly the category of race has functioned as a basis of exclu-
sion in the modern era. In her article “Untimeliness, or Négritude and the
Poetics of Contramodernity” (2009), Melas addresses the temporal posi-
tion of postcolonial subjects in relation to Western discourses of moder-
nity.8 An important background to Melas’s essay is Homi Bhabha’s critique
of Foucault’s genealogy of modernity in his essay “The Art of Telling the
Truth” on Immanuel Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?”. In this text first
published in 1984, Foucault argues that what distinguishes modern philo-
sophy from that of earlier periods is the new way of posing the present as a
self-reflexive question – the inquiry after the present “as the philosophical
event to which the philosopher who speaks of it belongs” (Foucault 1994,
140). Foucault sees this as novel, because philosophy had used to pose the
 UNTIMELY QUESTIONERS 15

question about modernity as a “longitudinal” one, in relation to the

Ancients (ibid., 141). Foucault’s genealogy of modernity as a self-reflexive
question can be seen as important to current postcolonial approaches to the
“contemporary” in that it opens the possibility for a perspective that
“expands” the present toward a perception of its heterogeneity.
However, Foucault’s own essay does not examine the status of the “we”
that conducts the conversation about the present in the name of human-
kind. Homi Bhabha criticizes Foucault for obscuring how only a select few
have posed the questions and posited who can answer them (Bhabha 1994,
348–352). Melas, in turn, analyzes the specific, untimely temporal condi-
tion of postcolonial subjects and its poetic articulation in Martinican poet
Aimé Césaire’s poem Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939/
1947/1956). In the opening lines of Césaire’s poem, the speaker inter-
rupts the coercive questioning of modernity’s present through a gesture of
“banishing the interlocutor,” that is, by an act of cursing (Melas 2009,
573). Melas’s analysis crucially demonstrates that in addition to Foucault’s
master questioners of the present, analyses of narratives of modernity
should take into account other questioners who have come “too late” to
the conversation that has posited the unified present of modernity. These
belatedly arrived questioners face a present that has already been consti-
tuted. In the case of Césaire’s poem, the postcolonial questioner responds
to this condition not by entering into a dialogue but by refusing it. The
time lag of postcolonial subjects in relation to the master questioners, who
make commands upon them, creates conditions of speaking that differ
fundamentally from the conditions of those who voice Foucault’s ques-
tions. As Melas puts it, in the postcolonial era the “unspoken unity” of
modernity’s present “cannot be maintained with so many unanswerable
questioners at its edges” (Melas 2009, 572).
On the most fundamental level, this book seeks both to make the
narrative and discursive effects of imperial comparison more visible and
to contribute to the project of readjusting comparative literary analysis
to the contemporary condition of coming together of different historical
trajectories in the same present. In the following readings I investigate
how the critical awareness of historically specific “unimplied” and “unti-
mely” readers changes our perspective to the texts by Conrad, Weiss and
Sebald, three important twentieth-century authors, whose works pose
the problem of asymmetrical historical context in different ways. I argue
that taking into account certain unimplied reading positions throws
important light on how these texts function as literary narratives
Another random document with
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marbles have been used to adorn some of the finest buildings in
America, including the National Capitol.

Fig. 67. On the Campus of the University of Tennessee

Around Knoxville are fine farms also, just as we find them about
Harrisburg, Hagerstown, Winchester, and almost everywhere else in
the Great Valley. Our view (Fig. 52) is taken near Knoxville and
shows sloping fields always ready to bear good crops. The soils
have been made by the wasting of the top parts of these same beds
of marble and of other rocks found along with it.
In Knoxville, on the edge of the city, is the University of
Tennessee, with many buildings upon its campus. It is an excellent
school and an old one as well, having been founded in 1794. It was
first named Blount College, from one of the prominent public men of
the valley at that time, and is now one of the foremost schools of the
South.
Only seven years before that date two old Revolutionary soldiers
rode through the woods and picked out these lands, which were
given to them as a reward for their service in the war. Here they built
as a defense against the savages a wooden fort, with log cabins at
the corners and a stockade with a stout barred gate. Such a fort was
greatly needed in those days whenever a new settlement was made.
After the two soldiers had planted corn they went back to North
Carolina to bring their families over the mountains. This was the
beginning of Knoxville, which grew up around the fort and soon
spread over the hills and down to the river. The settlement was
named in honor of Henry Knox, who was an able general in the
Revolution and a good friend of George Washington.
Now the railroads reach out in every direction. They bring in the
iron ore and the limestones of the valley. They also run up into the
Cumberland Gap, and to Harriman, Tennessee, and bring back
stores of coal, thus making Knoxville a place for working iron. To the
east the Southern Railroad leads up the French Broad (Fig. 61)
through deep gorges into the heart of the Great Smokies at
Asheville, and across the Blue Ridge to the lowlands of North
Carolina.
All this is very different from the samp mortars and the puncheon
floors of early times, but the pioneers had a keen eye for the soil and
the waters and the trees, and it is these which have helped to make
the valley rich to-day.
 Fig. 68. Marble Quarry near Knoxville
We must not forget that off to the west James Robertson had
founded a city that is even older than Knoxville. In the great bend of
the Cumberland, on its south bank, in northern Tennessee, stands
Nashville, as we have already seen.
If we visit a large city in one of the countries of Europe, we are
quite likely to be told, or to read in our guidebook, that its history
goes back hundreds of years, and any town that was started only a
hundred years ago would there seem young. But we measure age
differently in America, and a town like Nashville, founded in 1780, we
think is old indeed. It is not easy to remember, as we ride along the
streets and see the shops and mansions of Nashville to-day, that this
was once a place of log cabins, and that the first settlers had to
sleep always with one ear open for the Indian’s war cry.
 That James Robertson had to learn to read from his wife did not
keep Nashville from becoming one of the centers of education and
refinement in the South. It would take several lines to record the
names of all the colleges and universities that now have their seat in
this city. Robertson was the sort of man who, with the opportunities
of to-day, might have been the president of one of these schools, or
he might perhaps have gained a fortune with which to help in their
support. Farther west, on the Mississippi river, stands Memphis, a
city still larger than Nashville; indeed, few southern states can boast
of so many cities as Tennessee possesses. Besides these, there are
fertile valleys, fine rivers and mountains, productive forests, beds of
iron ore and coal, comfortable farms, and thriving towns. The state is
rich, too, in historical associations. Every part of Tennessee saw the
dark days of the Civil War, and in the fields south of Nashville a great
battle was fought.
When John Sevier went down the Tennessee river on his Indian
raids he noticed that the stream, making a great bend, turns away
from the valley and flows by a deep gorge through the highlands of
the Cumberland plateau. We can take the train now at Knoxville, and
a ride of a little more than a hundred miles will bring us to this place.

Fig. 69. State House, Nashville

 By the river is a steep, high ground known as Cameron hill. Let
us go up to the top and look around. Stretching away at our feet on
the east is Chattanooga. Part of the city as we see it from Cameron
hill is shown in the picture (Fig. 70). Beyond is the Tennessee, and
we are looking up the river to the northeast. The bridge which we
see is the only bridge across the river at Chattanooga, even though it
is now a large and busy city. In the distance is high ground, a part of
Missionary Ridge, famous in the story of the Civil War.
If we turn around and look southward, we shall see Lookout
Mountain, rising fifteen hundred feet above the river. A battle was
fought on the steep slopes of this mountain also; and a few miles to
the southeast is Chickamauga, one of the bloodiest battle grounds of
the war. On the edge of the city, kept with care, is the National
Cemetery, where rest the bodies of more than twelve thousand
soldiers, northern and southern, who perished in the neighborhood
of Chattanooga. Now all the region is peaceful, and only the tablets
of iron and bronze, set up by the government on every battlefield in
the neighborhood, tell the story of the conflict as it raged about the
city.
Like Knoxville, Chattanooga has much coal and iron, is the
center of a number of railways, and does much business. The
railways run up the valley to Virginia, and south to Atlanta and
elsewhere in Georgia. They stretch even further southward to Mobile
and New Orleans, while the lines to the west reach Memphis and
Nashville. Chattanooga is sometimes called the “Gate City” because
it stands near the opening of the Great Valley into the wide plains
along the gulf of Mexico. The place, originally called Ross’s Landing,
was not settled until 1836, when Knoxville and Nashville were about
fifty years old. It has a noble site and may well become a great city.
Here passed the boats that bore the first settlers to Robertson’s
colony on the Cumberland. There are no Indians now to shoot from
the banks, and you will see on the river only rafts of logs floating
down from the forests in the mountains.
Fig. 70. Chattanooga, looking Northeast from Cameron Hill.
Missionary Ridge in the Distance
Atlanta also is often called the “Gate City” of the South. It stands
more than a thousand feet above the sea, in northern Georgia,
where the Appalachian mountain range is tapering down toward the
southern plains. Because Atlanta is so high it is cooler in summer
than most southern cities, and is always free from the scourge of
yellow fever and cholera.
It is a natural site for a city, for here at the end of the great
mountain system the long lines of railway that follow the Atlantic
coast swing around to the west, passing on to the Mississippi and
down to Mobile and the ports on the gulf of Mexico. Other railways
reach Atlanta from Chattanooga and Knoxville in the Great Valley,
and still others lead the way to Savannah and the Atlantic coast.
Thus twelve lines of railway reach out from Atlanta like the spokes of
a wheel and connect the city with all parts of the South. Let us take a
map of the United States and draw a line through Richmond,
Louisville, Nashville, and New Orleans. Notice how many states lie
southeast of this line, and remember that of all the towns which they
contain Atlanta is the largest and most important. Indeed, in trade
and influence it surpasses many northern cities which are much
larger.

Fig. 71. Atlanta: Broad Street, looking North

 Atlanta saw stirring times in the Civil War. It was small then,
having but about ten thousand people. In 1864 most of it was burned
to the ground, and we may truly say that it has grown to its present
size in the short period since that time. To-day its population
numbers more than one hundred thousand. During the recent
Spanish War the Department of the Gulf made its headquarters here,
so that Atlanta appears to be sought both in war and in peace. The
city was used as the capital of Georgia soon after the Civil War, and
in 1877 the people of the state voted that it should always be the
seat of government. Since that time they have erected a capitol
costing a million dollars, adorning the interior with marbles from their
own quarries.

Fig. 72. Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills, Atlanta

A few years ago an exposition was held at Atlanta to show the
world the achievements and hopes of the great South. Everybody
knew that the South raised cotton, but Atlanta wished to prove that
the South could also spin and weave her famous product. Mr. W. G.
Atkinson was the governor of Georgia at that time. During the
exposition a day was chosen in which something unusual should be
done. Men went out into a field in the morning and picked some
cotton. It was ginned and spun and woven in double-quick time.
Then tailors took some of the cloth, cut it, fitted it, and sewed it into a
suit of clothes. Governor Atkinson put on the suit and visited the
grounds of the exposition. In the morning the cotton was in the field,
in the evening it was on the governor. Suits are not made so quickly
as that on ordinary days, but the South spins and weaves millions of
dollars’ worth of cotton, turning the mill wheels with southern coal or
with the waters of swift southern streams.

Fig. 73. Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta

Atlanta is not only at the southern end of the mountains, but it is
on the divide which separates the streams of the gulf from those of
the Atlantic. On the one hand, not far away, is the Ocmulgee, flowing
to the ocean, while westward, and distant but a few miles, the
Chattahoochee flows toward the gulf. The latter river has been
harnessed by man, and eleven thousand horse power measures the
amount of energy that can be carried over the wires to Atlanta to
move its cars and turn the wheels of its factories. The mills not only
spin the cotton of the gulf plains but also turn out fertilizers, work up
the timber of the region, and make a multitude of other things to
swell the city’s trade with her neighbors.
 Fig. 74. Iron Furnace, Birmingham
Appropriate to her needs, Atlanta has had since 1887 a school of
technology, in which she teaches her sons how to develop the great
resources of the South. Here are shops and departments of
engineering, and, not least, instruction in making textiles, so that the
cotton of southern fields need no longer go to Massachusetts or to
England to be spun and woven.
The youngest great town of the southern mountain region was
started on an old cotton plantation in 1871, thirty-four years before
the writing of these lines. The people knew that in Alabama as well
as in Tennessee coal and iron are found close together. So men built
an iron town and called it, after one of the greatest furnace towns in
the world, Birmingham. It is a noisy, busy place, with wide streets,
swift electric cars, and blazing furnaces. To see it grow is like
watching a new Pittsburg rise up in the heart of the South.
 From the Berkshire country at the north to the southern end of
the Appalachians, there are to-day thriving towns and fertile fields.
No longer does the mountain wall cut off the products of the West
from the markets of the East. Yet hardly a hundred years ago the
eastern strip of country was practically shut off from the whole
territory drained by the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Indian trails and
rough roads were the only means of communication between the two
sections. Great as are the natural resources of both regions, their
prosperity has been bound up in the development of roads and
railways, and is due in large measure to the energy, foresight, and
self-sacrifice of those who crossed the barrier and made it easy for
others to follow them.
 INDEX

Adams, Charles Francis, cited, 7

Adams, John Quincy, 100
Adirondacks, 32
Albany, N.Y., 6, 10, 15, 16
Alexander, Mt., 130
Alexandria, Va., 41, 86
Allegheny Front, 74, 78, 80, 82
Allegheny Portage Railway, 75, 76, 80
Allegheny river, 111
Allentown, Pa., 79
Altoona, Pa., 77;
description of, 81
Amsterdam, N.Y., 20
Ann, Fort, 32
Annapolis, Md., 88
Antietam, 132
Appalachians, southern, 174
“Arks” on the Susquehanna, 41
Arnold, Benedict, 37
Atkinson, Gov. W. G., 178
Atlanta, Ga., 174–180
Auburn, N.Y., 57

Bald Eagle valley, 80

Baltimore, Md., 53, 86, 101;
growth of, 107
Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, 99, 101, 102, 110
Barges on the Ohio, 116, 118
Barton, Clara, cited, 82
Bay Road, Mass., 4
Bedford, Pa., 71, 77
Bemis Heights, 38
Bennington, Vt., 38
Berkshires, 5;
railway through, 9, 10
Bethlehem, Pa., 79
Binghamton, N.Y., 52
Birmingham, Ala., 181
Black Rock (Buffalo), 47
“Blackbeard,” 130
Blockhouse at Pittsburg, 112
Blount College, 170
Blue Grass country, 127, 151, 166
Blue mountain, 79
Blue Ridge mountains, 88, 130
Boone, Daniel, early life, 144;
training, 145;
portrait, 145;
moves to North Carolina, 146;
serves with Braddock, 146;
camps in Kentucky, 147;
visits Cumberland Gap, 148;
founds Boonesborough, 148;
buys lands of the Indians, 149;
marks out the Wilderness road, 149
Boonesborough, 148
Boston, Mass., 1, 2, 7, 12
Braddock, General, 69, 90, 91, 146
Braddock, Pa., 83
Brant, Joseph, 33
Bristol, Tenn., 134
British, in New York, 32;
in the Ohio country, 156
Brownsville, Pa., 93, 117
Buffalo, 52, 57, 60, 110;
growth of, 61
Burgoyne, General, 32, 37
Burnside, General, 168
Business, increase of, 114, 118

Cambria Steel Company, 83

Cameron hill, 173
Campbell, William and Arthur, 160
Canajoharie, N.Y., 24
Canals, 44;
Erie, 7, 46, 48, 50–52;
Pennsylvania, 74;
Chesapeake and Ohio, 98–101, 107;
Delaware and Hudson, 53;
at Louisville, Ky., 127
Carlisle, Pa., 71, 79, 132
Carroll, Charles, 101
Carry to Schenectady, the, 19, 22
Catch-me-if-you-can, 2
Catskill mountains, 15, 32
Chambersburg, Pa., 71, 132
Champlain, lake, 31, 37
Charlottesville, Va., 142
Chattahoochee river, 179
Chattanooga, Tenn., 135;
description of, 173–175
Cherokee Indians, 139, 149
Chesapeake bay, 86
Chesapeake and Ohio canal, 107;
building of, 98–101
Chicago, 110
Chickamauga, 174
Chissel, Fort, 135
Cincinnati, Ohio, description of, 123–127
Clark, George Rogers, raises an army, 156;
portrait, 157;
captures Kaskaskia and Vincennes, 158
Clay, Henry, stories of, 96, 114
Cleveland, Benjamin, 160
Clinch river, 134
Clinton, De Witt, 44, 49;
stirs up legislature, 40;
portrait, 43;
train, 53, 54
Coal, 104, 118, 122, 153, 170, 181
Cohoes, N.Y., 22
Coke ovens, 108
Columbia, The, 2
Columbia, Pa., 69, 74, 76
Columbus, Ohio, 94
Conemaugh river, 75, 82
Conestoga creek, 67
Conestoga Traction Company, 70
Conestoga wagons, 77
Connecticut river, 4
Construction, early railway, 105
Cooper, Peter, 106
Cornstalk, 155
Cornwallis, Lord, 158
Cotton, 178
Cumberland, Fort, 89, 90;
city of, 93, 95, 102
Cumberland Gap, 142, 148, 150, 152
Cumberland mountains, 134, 142
Cumberland river, 164, 174
Cumberland road, 93
Cunard, Samuel, 2
Cunard line, 2, 8

Dams, use of, 119

Danforth, Mr., and salt making, 27
Deerfield valley, 8
Delaware and Hudson Canal Company, 53
Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad, 60
De-o-wain-sta, 23
Detroit, 41, 156
Dickens, Charles, 126
Dinwiddie, Governor, 89
Doak, Rev. Samuel, 160
Dongan, Gov. Thomas, 40
Dunlap’s creek, 96
Dunmore, Lord, 155
Duquesne, Fort, 91
Dutch, in New York, 14, 18, 31

Earle, Mrs. Alice Morse, cited, 55

Easton, Pa., 79
Edward, Fort, 31
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, cited, 1
Empire State Express, 56
England, interest of, in fur trade, 18;
railways of, 55
Erie canal, 7, 42, 46, 48, 50–52
Erie, lake, 18, 42, 98
Erie Railroad, 60
Euphrates river, 130

Fairfax, Lord William, 88

Falls of the Ohio, 127, 146, 152
Farms in Pennsylvania, 66
“Feeders” of Erie canal, 52
Ferguson, Patrick, 159
Finley, John, 146, 148
Fishing interests, 104
Flag, perhaps the first American, 34
Flatboats, 117
Floyd, Gen. William, 22
Forbes’s road, 71
Forts:
Orange, 17;
Stanwix, 22, 23, 34, 37, 61, 149;
Schuyler, 23;
Johnson, 26;
Edward, 31;
Ann, 32;
Ticonderoga, 32, 37, 38;
Cumberland, 89, 90;
Duquesne, 91;
Chissel, 135;
Sanders, 168
Franklin, Benjamin, 4, 69, 130
“Franklin,” state of, 166
Frederick, Md., 93
French, in Ohio country, 89
French and Indian War, 69
French Broad river, 135, 159, 170
Frostburg, Md., 90, 93
Fur trade, 18, 24, 40
Furnaces near Pittsburg, 121

Gansevoort, Col. Peter, 34

Gas, natural, 120
“Gate City,” the, 174
Genesee road, 24, 25
Genesee street, Utica, 23
Geneva, 24, 25
George, Mt., 130
Georgetown, D.C., 100
Georgia Institute of Technology, 179
Germans in Pennsylvania, 66;
in Tennessee, 136
Ginseng, 24
Gist, Christopher, 89
Glass mills, 122
Gray, Captain, 2
Great Kanawha river, 155
Great Smoky mountains, 134, 170
Great Valley, the, 71, 130, 132, 134, 136, 139
Gulliver’s Travels, 150
Gypsum, 104

Hagerstown, Md., 25, 132, 165

Half Moon, the, 15
Halifax, 2
Hambright’s Hotel, 70
Hamburg-American line, 108
Hamilton, Col. Henry, 156
Hancock, Gov. John, 2
Hanks, Abraham, 149
Harlem, 14
Harpers Ferry, 107, 130, 132
Harriman, Tenn., 170
Harrisburg, Pa., 74, 85, 132;
description of, 78
Henry, Patrick, 156
Herkimer, Nicholas, 29, 33, 35, 36
Hessians, 33, 38
Hill, Gen. A. P., 142
Hit or Miss, the, 77
Hiwassee river, 135
Hollidaysburg, Pa., 74
Holston river, 134
Honesdale, Pa., 53
Hoosac mountain, 5, 8
Hoosac tunnel, 9–11
Hoosick river, 5
Housatonic river, 5
Howe, General, 32
Hudson, Henry, 15, 16
Hudson river, 15
Huguenots, 136
Hulbert, cited, 105

Illinois, 158
Indiana, 158
Indians, 144, 149, 163, 164;
in New York, 14, 17, 18, 33;
at Watauga, 138;
at Point Pleasant, 155
Indies, hope of reaching, 15
Iron works, 121, 129, 170, 180
Iroquois Indians, 18

Jackson, “Stonewall,” 133

James river, 133;
gap, 134
Jefferson, Thomas, 156
Johns Hopkins University, 108
Johnson, Fort, 26
Johnson, John, 36
Johnson, Sir William, 20
Johnstown, N.Y., 20
Johnstown, Pa., 75, 76, 82
Joppa, 92
Juniata river, 74

Kaskaskia, Ill., 116, 157

Kentucky, 127, 154, 164;
becomes a state, 165
Kings Mountain, 158, 160
Knights, Sarah, 4
Knox, Gen. Henry, 170
Knoxville, 134, 166, 170

Lake Shore Railroad, 110

Lancaster, Pa., 65, 72, 78
Lancaster pike, 65, 67, 70
Lee, Arthur, 113
Lee, Richard Henry, 98
Lee, Gen. Robert E., 132
Legislators allowed boat hire, 87
Lewis, Andrew, 155
Licking river, 124
Limestones, 104, 132, 151, 169