Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization (review)

I accepted the invitation to review the latest "Report on the State of the Discipline" with great eagerness, hoping to learn where we are and, above all, to find out the answer to the grand question: "Are we there yet?" At the very beginning of Haun Saussy's introductory essay I learned that not only are we already there, but we have evidently been there for quite a while without knowing it; unfortunately, however, everybody else got there with us, so that no one seems to notice that it is we who are there.

Saussy's mutating metaphors for the state of the discipline begin in the genetic experiments of agribusiness. At one early point in the essay we read that comparative literature is a "laboratory" of ideas, followed a few paragraphs later by the image of commercially modified plant genes getting loose into nature (or, more exactly, into everyone else's "fields") and changing the surrounding vegetation. This is paired with an alternative model of poor farmers having to pay for genetically modified seed stock, echoing an earlier speculative proposal that non-comparative literature departments be required to pay a tax whenever they cite "Auerbach, de Man, Said, Derrida, or Spivak" (4). Saussy eventually argues for the virtue of unwitting and unremunerated donation of intellectual genes that are useful to the general good of the humanities and allied fields. A wistfulness, however, about "intellectual property" (the corporate property of the discipline rather than of any individual identified with it) haunts the opening essay.

The current Report, at least as represented by Saussy's opening essay, is less upbeat than the preceding report. It is haunted by budget cuts, by the weakening of the infrastructure of national literature departments that guarantee the identity of comparative literature, by the spread of literature taught in translation ("nothing of the work may survive of the process but the subject matter"), and by Google (14). Our corporate identity sounds like nothing so much as a high-end, but very threatened multinational corporation, lacking a definite object but relying on "our identification with the processes of interchange, our investment in methods rather than in subject matter" (11). We can gain by exploiting "weak ties" of interdisciplinarity, yet "we may find ourselves more and more acting as the archeologists of the information order of print, the people who remember the tacit knowledge that necessarily precedes any reading" (33). The title of Saussy's essay is appropriately "Exquisite Cadavers Stitched from Fresh Nightmares."

Reading the report reminded me of nothing so much as a harpsichord suite by Louis Couperin, beginning with an unmeasured prelude, wondrously intricate, deft, and always faintly melancholy, followed by dances in shifting sequences of mood, from David Damrosch's tripartite division of canon, with buoyant suggestions on how to link "hypercanon" to "countercanon," to Djelal Kadir's sharp tract on comparative literature's complicity in existing, politically grounded global structures of (one-way) power and knowledge, to Françoise Lionnet's "Cultivating Mere Gardens?," drawing back to the intimate and the local areas of knowledge.

One does not look in these decennial reports for consensus, nor does Saussy ask it of the contributors. It is a remarkable exercise, with so many of the most thoughtful scholars in the field doing their best to take stock of the enterprise. We do hear some of Saussy's motifs coming back, sometimes echoed and sometimes countered. David Ferris too asks if humanities might be a "thing of the past" and that comparative literature "can only take its method, comparison, as its subject if it is to survive its own history" (90-91). Gail Finney gives a retrospective on the history of feminism, suggesting that, like comparative literature, its success is also its diffusion into other disciplines.

Here on the brink of world literature, the encounter of incomparable texts (and the virtues of comparing anyway) comes up in various guises. It appears in the last part of Ferris's essay...