Editor's Column: Vectors of Comparison

??? COMPAKATIST EDITOR'S COLUMN: VECTORS OF COMPARISON Vectors, once they are separated from their sinister medical meaning, highlight some key connections among this year's articles in The Comparatisi . As a term that some of us recall from analytical geometry, it encourages questions about cultural locations and frames of reference; as a word at times overheard on airplanes, it suggests rapidly shifting movement in space as well as time. Vectors of both these kinds recall two of Edward Said's most influential contributions to our field. Thus at one level the word evokes the surge ofinterest in East-West cultural transactions following Orientalism, still a major force after a quarter century. Less often cited (for how much scholarship can rival that book?) is "Traveling Theory," from 77ie World, the Text, and the Critic. Critiquing the potential rigidities ofhigh theory, Said shows by example how changing cultural contexts can alter the function and meaning of critical ideas. Our first unit invokes a forum in this journal several years ago, on "Literary Canons After the Canon Wars." These canons, ofcourse, were Western ones, though comparatists who read both Allan and Harold Bloom, the champions in those wars, probably noted that the first favored philosophy and social thought over literature while the other tilted toward an English-department vision of Western literature. Our essayists return to this topic with two questions, to which they give contrasting yet complementary answers. To what extent can the Western tradition truly be seen as an isolated, monolithic whole and, second, what role do definitions of the Renaissance play in shoring up such assumptions? On the first issue, Abdulla Al-Dabbagh takes Said as his point of departure, most obviously by revisiting the East-West divide treated in Orientalism but now with an eye on Western scholars like Maria Rosa Menocal who have worked to promote a better understanding of the Islamic East's achievements during the West's Middle Ages. But he also shares Said's more recent concern with "worldliness," one of whose aspects reappears in Al-Dabbagh's term "modern universalism." The emphasis here falls on the scholarly effort to study cultures worldwide as created by human beings, not by absolute or supernatural fiat, and hence capable of communicating with each other. As a key example, Al-Dabbagh discusses Renaissance humanism in the West, which he connects, by direct influence in part (for example, the al-Andalus of medieval Spain) but more importantly in spirit, to the earlier revival of learning in the Muslim world. From this perspective the familiar urge to study the Western literary canon in isolation is misleading, a hollow myth that obscures a broader, implicitly global network of motifs and aspirations. José María Rodríguez García, on the other hand, studies William Carlos Williams's polemics with T.S. Eliot to identify some points of contention within the Western tradition. For Eliot, who helped mold awareness of that tradition in the English-speaking world, the canon was essentially Latinate. Rome's success in absorbing prior Greek models Vol. 27 (2003): 1 EVITOK'S COLUMN created a classical synthesis—but also a potentially imperialistic closed system—that later could itself be transmitted to various Western néoclassicisme , including the Renaissance and Eliot's own version of modernism . Thus Eliot's Shakespeare was the author of the Roman plays, and neither German nor even Spanish (much less Al-Dabbagh's al-Andalus ) had a place in his canon. Williams, however, emphasized Shakespeare 's modernity, with Hamlet as his central play, thereby vectoring him away from a classic Mediterranean world. This break in the transmission of Latinity Williams then connected with a "New World" mystique ofseparation from Europe, with a special twist added by Williams's Anglo-Puerto Rican roots. His tradition was thus hemispheric rather than transatlantic, open to multiculturalismi at home (especially native American indigenism) but, even as it scorned a neoclassical Eurocentrism , potentially neglectful of other global regions beyond Europe. If, therefore, for Al-Dabbagh the Western monolith dissolves due to an awareness ofcultural vectors coming from outside, for Williams debating Eliot it splits apart to reveal a variety oflocations and traditions within. The next unit, on interplay between...