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  • Michael Palencia-Roth Answers Dorothy Figueira
  • Dorothy M. Figueira

df: You started as a Professor of Comparative Literature and retired as a Professor of Comparative and World Literature. Do you see a seismic shift here?

mpr: I remember two rather brief conversations I had with my faculty advisers at Harvard in 1970. I had been there for about a year and was beginning to be somewhat restive about the limitations that were being imposed on me while in graduate school. By that time, I was already actively auditing three or four seminars and courses each semester in addition to taking the normal four seminars for credit. I was just hungry to learn, and it did not occur to me then that I was doing anything that might be considered odd or atypical. These classes were in Philosophy, the Intellectual History of Europe, and Latin. My advisers then were Professors Walter Kaiser and Harry Levin, neither of whom I ever met with for more than a few minutes at a time. I had begun my graduate studies with a declared specialization in three literatures—English, French, and German—and in the modern period (Romanticism to the present). At the end of my first year I had shifted things around, placing German as the major field and English and Spanish (Peninsular) as minor fields. I was doing Latin on my own and was not anticipating formal examinations in Latin literature. However, since my main areas of study as an undergraduate had been in Literature (English, primarily, but also Spanish and French) and Philosophy, and since my love for Philosophy had not diminished, I asked Professors Kaiser and Levin on two occasions to be allowed to present the History of Western Philosophy as a separate and additional field for my general examinations, what we here at Illinois call the preliminary examinations. From this request, my advisers became aware of the number and nature of the courses I was auditing. In a tone that I still remember as being sympathetically dismissive, each of them answered that it was not permitted to add Philosophy as a formal field. (Yet I was not asking to substitute Philosophy for one of my literatures; I was simply asking to add to them.) Both Professors Kaiser and Levin went on to say that I was a student of “literature,” with the adjective “comparative,” and that I was not formally a student of “philosophy” or of an interdisciplinary subset called “philosophy and literature,” or indeed of anything else other than literature. They encouraged me to drop my audits and went on to say that I should not try to make a difficult field like comparative literature even more difficult for myself. That experience was perhaps [End Page 5] the first time that the profession defined “comparative literature” to me in such a way as to tell me in no uncertain terms what was legitimate and what was not. The comparison was to be between and among literatures, not between and among literatures and other disciplines. That may sound quaint today, given the explosion in literary theory since the late 1970s and the increasing interdisciplinarity of education generally, but that was the nature of Comparative literature at Harvard in the 1960s and ’70s: traditional, conservative, rigorous, demanding, and rather sure of itself concerning the nature of the field.

Anyway, I silently disobeyed my advisors and, without telling them, continued to audit Latin, Intellectual History, and Philosophy classes (symbolic logic with Quine; Plato, Kant, Hegel, aesthetics, phenomenology, and ethics with other professors). Although I chafed under the command not to study philosophy, I eventually came to appreciate one of the important consequences of that command: the literatures that I did study at Harvard I came to control as well (or as badly) as graduate students who were single-literature specialists in single-literature departments. I became comfortable linguistically with each of the literatures I studied and, because of that, also became comfortable with philology, with archival research, and with wide swaths of literary history from the Middle Ages on. Ironically, perhaps, after leaving Harvard I became one of the co-founders of a journal called Philosophy and Literature, which is currently edited...

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