8/4/2023 0 Comments Phileas fogg books in orderDamrosch avoids diffuseness by seizing on spatial coincidences. Joyce compounds languages, but Damrosch commutes between them, and in doing so he rebukes 'ethnic nationalism'Īn undertaking such as this risks seeming random, as frantically improvised as Fogg’s itinerary when he misses an onward connection. Damrosch mistrusts such expropriations: he therefore includes poetry by the Aztec victims of the Spanish conquistadors, and applauds Derek Walcott for Creolising Homer’s name when he translates Omeros into “our Antillean patois”. When Keats read Homer, he thought he was voyaging through “realms of gold” and annexing their riches like the explorer Cortés. With the same seditious intent, Damrosch decolonises literature. The Bible is here, but Damrosch treats it as the testimony of migrant workers or persecuted refugees and celebrates its “viral spread” around a world “newly integrated” by Rome, whose empire it undermined. This is no round-up of the usual classics, like Harold Bloom’s hieratic inventory of The Western Canon. Omitting Australia, he then heads home to an island off the coast of Maine to complete the record of his imaginary expedition. Subsequent forays take Damrosch through Africa, Asia and Latin America. A detour to Baker Street entices him to follow Sherlock Holmes on a “train of reasoning” whisked along by a notional Eurostar, he emerges in Paris, where a route back to a remembered paradise unexpectedly opens for Proust in the Bois de Boulogne. He starts by trailing Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway as she strolls through Westminster, then hops sideways to Arnold Bennett’s Clerkenwell. Damrosch proceeds at a more leisurely pace, though he occasionally makes weightless associative leaps as if hitching a ride in a hot air balloon. Needing to win a wager, Fogg bribes drivers and pilots to increase their speed and desperately strips wood from a steamship in mid-Atlantic to feed its furnace. David Damrosch, a Harvard specialist in comparative literature, projected himself further afield: when conference dates in Tokyo and a smattering of European venues were cancelled, he decided to circumnavigate the globe without leaving his library.ĭamrosch took his cue from Phileas Fogg, the London clubman who speeds across continents and oceans in Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days. Housebound in London, I reread Dickens and wistfully accompanied his characters on their perambulations through a city that was out of bounds to me. Passing through exotic lands and dangerous locations, they seize whatever transportation is at hand - whether train or elephant - overcoming set-backs and always racing against the clock.R eading is travel – an epic trek, a picaresque pursuit, a lyrical flight – and last year it offered release to those of us still itchy after a daily circuit of the local park. Breaking the well-established routine of his daily life, he immediately sets off for Dover with his astonished valet Passepartout. One night in the reform club, Phileas Fogg bets his companions that he can travel across the globe in just eighty days. Jules Verne's most famous adventure, now in a beautiful clothbound edition Passing through exotic lands and dangerous locations, they seize whatever transportation is at hand - whether train or elephant - overcoming set-backs.
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