In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • English
  • Jonathan Goldberg

I am not much interested in what the West Indian writer has brought to the English language; for English is no longer the exclusive language of the men who live in England. That stopped a long time ago; and it is today, among other things, a West Indian language.

—George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile (1960)

Although Rey Chow's "The Old/New Question of Comparison in Literary Studies: A Post-European Perspective" aims at practitioners that call themselves comparatists and demands a widening of the parameters of inclusion, its salience for those whose disciplinary practice is monolingual is everywhere and quite variously in question. The most stark example for those who profess English is perhaps to be found in Chow's observation that "it is simply inconceivable for students of, say, modern Japanese, Chinese, Cuban, or Algerian fiction to call their novels the novel, while their counterparts in English departments continue to be able to get away with talking about the novel as such." If one implication of this statement is that the English department—and the knowledge represented by that discipline—inevitably is colonialist, it also suggests that a wide variety of other national literary practices, especially in formerly colonized areas or in those bound to the West in forms of neocolonial domination, are tied to what English departments get away with, a mode of cultural production which pretends to be a neutral standard; at the same time, these practitioners have been articulating, for quite a while now, the desire to repudiate such a benchmark for comparison. Nationality, it follows, cannot be regarded as a self-evident or self-identical category, just as "Europe and Its Others" and "Post-European Culture and the West" can hardly be viewed, despite appearances, as symmetrical or mirroring formulations. Chow's essay, at the very least, suggests how colonialism haunts cultural production. But it also implies further divisions and connections, not least those that might make the phrase that lies behind the initials of this journal ("English literary history") an almost unintelligible formulation [End Page 329] that would require a suspension of the suppositions that make the terms follow seamlessly, ruptures of the kind performed by Chow, for instance, when her own "ands" bring together and displace two "ands" whose meanings drive apart: "The schism between this involuntary, neurotic and and the complacent and of 'Europe and Its Others' constitutes the extent of the rupturing—and deterritorialization—of comparative literature as a field and a practice at the present time" (my emphasis).

For if, as Chow claims, literariness as a universalizing concept is a product of European comparative work, English as a modifier of "literary" must mark a particularity that belies the pretense of universality or that masks colonization as the transcendence of particularity. Which is not to say that "English" could be restored to provincial status without a great deal of further work being done to recognize how the very term "English" has the force to vaporize a host of differences of geographic situation or linguistic practice.

I was reminded of this dilemma forcefully this past fall when I undertook to teach an undergraduate survey course of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature from the most recent edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature. The opening paragraph of the preface is enough to stop you in your tracks: "The outpouring of English literature overflows all boundaries, including the capacious boundaries of The Norton Anthology of English Literature," it begins, crediting the multiple genres of the canon to "centuries of restless creative effort . . . radical contingency, sudden change, and startling innovation."1 Is this an expression of nationalist sentiment? Nationalist genius? Are these anodyne (and yet overpowering) claims impossible to make about other national cultures? Or does English alone overflow? "Rule Brittania! Brittania, rule the waves: / Britons never never never will be slaves."2

"One of the joys of literature in English is its spectacular abundance," the next paragraph opens, and the slight rephrasing ("English literature" at the opening of the first paragraph, "literature in English" at the second) exposes a problem quickly glossed over in a discussion of the ways the anthology adjudicates what it will include...

pdf

Share