Comparative Literature: Where We Started and What We Have Become

I would first like to thank the conference organizers and Kathy Komar for allowing me and my icla colleagues to address you today. Many of you may be unaware that it was the acla that contributed to the establishment of the icla some fifty years ago. We in the International Association owe much to our American colleagues. It was, therefore, a great honor to convene this forum at your annual meeting. I would like to preface this discussion with some anecdotal background thoughts on the state of the discipline of Comparative Literature before I turn the podium over to my colleagues who have come to discuss with you the state of Comparative Literature in their respective countries.

I came to the study of Comparative Literature very late in my student career, after considerable graduate work in theology and classical religions. I was able to segue into a new discipline because I had good linguistic training as an historian of religions. These were the days when one studied languages by studying literature (there was no Rassias method, there was no brutal immersion process). As soon as the rudiments of a language were learned, one began to read the literature. More advanced language courses often consisted of survey literature classes. So, in the process of training to read classical languages and secondary European scholarship in the history of religions, I simultaneously received rudimentary training in ancient and modern literatures. I could, therefore, easily make the transition from the study of comparative religions to Comparative Literature. Most importantly, however, my training in the history of religions acquainted me with the philosophical, psychological, and anthropological source material necessary for understanding the background of much of structuralist and poststructuralist literary theory. This point is crucial, because my broad background equipped me precisely with the tools that would be necessary for me to understand much of what was happening in literary theory.

Early in my teaching career, some time in the late ’80s, I realized how my own scholarly formation differed from that of my students who were merely a few years behind me in their studies. I was then teaching in a Comparative Literature program at a large metropolitan state research institution in the northeast. I remember talking with a senior colleague who succinctly explained to me what I then perceived as the topsy-turvy system operative in certain Comparative Literature programs. Students did not come to graduate work in Comparative Literature with a broad background in three literatures as a point of departure and apply to them one critical method or another. Nor did we find any longer in Comparative Literature departments students such as myself who saw in the discipline an avenue for interdisciplinary work (the old model of Comparative Literature as the place where one could study “literature and . . .” as in the model of Indiana’s “literature and music” emphasis or, in my case, “literature and religion”). Entities such as humanities institutes had taken over the function of interdisciplinary studies on many campuses, often without requiring their students to develop the linguistic, theoretical, or historical skills necessary to engage in truly interdisciplinary studies.

From the late ’80s onward, this trend has continued. Students read the theory of the moment. They then read the literature cited in the theory. In the era of deconstruction, this method led to a discrete and limited canon. I still have memories of the virtual cottage industry that then existed in deconstructive readings of Lao Tzu, Mallarmé, and Rilke. The result was that the students would be fully versed in “their” theory (often without any understanding of its precursors—Derrida without Husserl or Heidegger) and know only the literature that lent itself to the theoretical method they had adopted. In the case of postcolonial theory, the handful of seminal theoretical articles became the literature itself. In many graduate programs in the US today, we have not advanced much beyond this theory-centered model of literary studies. The result is that many advanced students of literature do not actually know much literature at all. They are quite familiar with various critical trends and...