The ICLA and Disciplinary Renewal

Narcissism is certainly not regarded as an attractive or desirable personal trait, and in its most extreme clinical form has serious pathological consequences. From its inception and certainly from its establishment in North America as a wide-spread academic discipline, Comparative Literature has occasionally manifested certain narcissistic characteristics or at least a marked tendency to reflect back on itself and its methods of literary research. Although other academic disciplines have certainly taken the opportunity for self-reflection, the tendency in the Comparative Literature community has been, perhaps, more pronounced since it emerged as an acknowledged discipline far more recently than its close academic relatives and has had to fight for intellectual and institutional legitimacy with a notable degree of fervor and energy. Manifestations of this self-reflexivity extend from the legendary debates that pitted what was known as the French model against the American to the now periodic and institutionalized reports on the nature of the discipline.

Although all comparatists from sometime early in their career on have had to contend with the awkwardness of their discipline’s name and with the adjectival inflection of literature that has long been recognized as not adequately describing either the nature or the distinguishing features of the discipline, the name has persisted. In spite of its inadequacies, the term comparative adduces a method that is by no means unique to the discipline and yet is one that designates a procedure that is particularly important to it and emphasizes one of the important roles that juxtaposition of various models, concepts, and practices typically plays.

Since its founding in the early 1950s and its first congress in Venice in 1955, the diversity that the International Comparative Literature Association embodies has been far more characteristic of the essence of Comparative Literature than any imagined yet superficial unitary system that some observers have supposed that it managed to impose. Having been brought to life by a European contingent of scholars who typically had broader linguistic competence than most of their North American counterparts and a cadre of North Americans consisting auspiciously of native-born scholars as well as a significant proportion of richly polylingual and multicultural east European, war-time émigrés, the icla was in an excellent position to begin the very modest comparative contextualization of literary works. As has often been observed, this new endeavor at contextualization involved instances of the methodological debate that was being pursued in other quarters involving on the one hand the examination of literary works with works from related discursive systems (e.g. music, the visual arts, anthropology, sociology, etc.) and on the other the comparison of works from different linguistic traditions that would have, due to the contrasting languages, escaped the whole-hearted examination of colleagues from national traditions.

Even though a few voices were raised in protest that the comparisons were not very far-reaching or as revealing as the methodology would theoretically allow because those items being brought forward for comparison were not very different to begin with: both typically descended from the traditions of Aristotlean poetics and European Latinity, had places of origin that were only separated by a few hundred miles and highly porous borders, and were manifestations of the same literary-critical discursive practices. To compare what was from a very broadly international perspective only minimally different did not as many would understandably anticipate yield particularly arresting insights. This eurocentrism of the efforts of the early comparatists has often been noted and in some cases lamented, and it is clear that these narrow perspectives were institutionalalized in national and regional associations as well as in the organization and the programs of the icla .

Although the icla called itself international, it merited that designation during the early years of its life to only a limited extent. In more recent years, however, it has made a concerted effort to assist with the organization of national and regional associations in parts of the world where they heretofore have been unknown and has then drawn them into the organizational structure and full activity of the Association. Among the earliest and most successful efforts along these lines were...