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A VIEW FROM MY BALCONY: PERSPECTIVES ON COMPARATIVE LITERATURE IN 1995 Jean-Pierre Barricelli As a member of the second generation ofAmerican comparatists, following that of, among others, Friedrich and Frenz, PoggioU and WeUek, Clements and Levin, Balakian and Aldridge, Remak and Bloch, and therefore stAl—God knows—a pioneer in the '50s and '60s, I find myself in the self-contradictory situation of having to attempt a definition of Comparative Literature in 1995 when I reaUy do not want one. For when I came into academic being long after the '20s, the decade usuaUy attributed to the rise ofcomparatism, I remember admiring the historical example of Goethe's Uterary cosmopoUtanism two centuries ago, and its more recent appUcation by FarineUi at the outset of our century. Expanding on this background, I beUeved firmly, over 40 years ago when I received my doctorate, that the energy and attractiveness, excitement and seduction, value and beauty of what I had studied and was preparing to teach lay in its open undefinabAity, in its rejection of national boundaries, in its embracing not only of belles lettres in the most international sense ofthe expression, but also of ars humanitatis in the broadest, including interdiscipUnary, sense of the concept. Because—so I thought—A the time should ever come (God forbid!) when our embattled area of inquiry should become defined, should lose the vigor of its embryonic inquisitiveness, or should be pushed into a position of having to expUcate itself, that would be the end, the noose that chokes, the stillborn birth. The center that held all together for me was LITERATURE (apparently an imprecise concept today, questioned by people Uke Jonathan CuUer, but quite specific then). I chose the discipUne because I loved Art, and, whüe appreciating fully the values of those beguUed by the noble rigors ofscientific methodology, I argued spontaneously against excessive and exclusive, myopic, scholarly rigidities and promoted a more Ubertarian approach based on freer conceptual and aesthetic associations. I found self-justification in countering so many misguided (to my way of thinking ) speciaUsts with the argument that since when we study music we do not study only German music, and since when we study art we do not study only ItaUan art, why on earth when we study Uterature are we to study only EngUsh or Spanish or Russian or Chinese, or, for that matter, the Greek and Roman classics my mother taught me as a chAd? Goodness , the answer is simple, I was reminded; music and painting enjoy universal languages, whereas Uterary study draws you into the Tower of Babel, where you have got to locate your own tribe. I am speaking here in the first person, but there were a number of other crusaders attempting to scale the embattlements of nationaUyerected Uteratures, each viewing its own castle as a Camelot. We of the second generation stood outnumbered, but wUly-niUy the battle had been Vol. 20 (1996): 6 THE COMPAKATIST joined, and our commitment, like that of Shakespeare's Henry V, was tenacious because we were convinced of its irreduceability. The irony was that none of us preached the demise of the national Uteratures even as these miUtated against Comparative Literature. The related irony was that we saw our interests as boosting the national Uteratures. The difficulty came with the language barrier. But like my coUeagues of that second American generation, I was never impressed by the argument of Unguistic separatism, promoted by people who usually knew but one language foreign to their own (if that), and who specialized in, say, English Uterature of the Jacobean age—period, or in French Uterature from 1348 to 1497—period. These felt that their Camelot was under siege. Those of us who spread our wings beyond our specialization were labeled inteUectual dAettantes, or, as Socrates labeled himself in Plato's Apology, gadflies—with impertinent pretentions. Not surprising. It did not matter that, to mantle one's self with the generous cloak of true comparatism, one had to be a genuine speciaUst in something. Of course not! This would have undermined the detractors' exclusivist claims. For those chAdren of the positivistic age of mainstream science who sought hard, in a world...

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