How American Is World Literature?

Michael Palencia-Roth has worked for many years on the challenge of presenting a truly global view of world literature on an American campus. As a principal founder of the University of Illinois’s pioneering program in world literature in the mid-1980s, Michael confronted this question in practical as well as theoretical terms as he and his colleagues built their program within the constraints of available faculty resources and training. In an recent essay entitled “Pioneering Cross-Cultural Studies and World Literature at Illinois,” he remarks that “one must always begin from where one is standing” before adding an important caveat—“but not do so naively or blindly; that is, one must acknowledge one’s standpoint and perspective—in my case my training as a Europeanist—and account for it in the interpretive process.”

Interestingly, Michael here describes the importance of beginning “from where one is standing” not in geographical but in disciplinary terms: his Auerbachian Ansatzpunkt is his formation as a Europeanist working in a specific institutional locale—“at” rather than in Illinois, as his title puts it. In this essay, I would like to explore the shaping of world literature in a national cultural and institutional environment, in this case that of the United States. Though we have become increasingly attuned to the limitations of the traditional Eurocentrism of Comparative Literature, American-based comparatists have yet to think through the impact of our cultural and institutional location, both as a limiting factor and as an arena of possibility.

The question of our standpoint becomes particularly important as we seek to follow Michael’s lead in developing a global literary vision on American campuses. What national and cultural predispositions define the parameters of world literature as it is construed or constructed on American campuses, at conferences of the American Comparative Literature Association, and in American journals and anthologies? Just how American, in short, is our view of world literature? How American should it be? My argument here will be that shadowing the debates over Eurocentrism is a largely unacknowledged Americentrism, a factor that is at once repressed and pervasive in American comparatism.

The relative invisibility of our American standpoint is itself a characteristically American trait. A peculiar feature of literary study in many American institutions has long been the subordination of American literature. Within most English departments, American literature has been relegated to second-class status, with British literature garnering far more appointments, even though Americanists typically enjoy (or are overwhelmed by) far higher enrollments. The unusualness of this situation regularly strikes visitors from abroad. It would be as though the French universities had no departments of French but only ones for Romance Languages, with the specialists in French substantially outnumbered by those in Italian and Spanish.

Within English departments, Americanists have long lobbied for stronger representation, and over the course of the twentieth century they have gradually developed a second home of sorts in American Studies, often finding more visibility in association with historians and sociologists than with professors of British literature. Yet Comparative Literature departments have rarely been involved in these efforts. Many of our programs took shape in the 1950s at the hands of European émigrés who were pleased and relieved to find themselves at universities that did not give pride of place to a national literature and a jingoistic cultural agenda. In his 1960 essay “The Crisis of Comparative Literature,” for example, René Wellek clearly viewed the United States as a location to look from rather than a culture to look at, a space of separation in which one could rise free of national entanglements elsewhere:

We still can remain good patriots and even nationalists, but the debit and credit system will have ceased to matter. Illusions about cultural expansion may disappear as may also illusions about world reconciliation by literary scholarship. Here, in America, looking from the other shore at Europe as a whole we may easily achieve a certain detachment, though we may have to pay the price of uprootedness and spiritual exile.

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In this essay, apart from a passing reference to Washington Irving as a possible source for a...