What Can American Studies and Comparative Literature Learn from Each Other

The fields of comparative literature and American studies long have had a fraught relationship. Although both fields emerged almost contemporaneously in the American academy, flourished during the Cold War era with the support of the National Defense Education Act of 1958, and engaged in a reflexive approach to literary studies that addressed diverse topics from an interdisciplinary perspective, the relationship between these two fields, both pedagogically and intellectually, has been rife with anxiety about professional status and a conspicuous lack of interest in each others' disciplinary approaches. This disciplinary tension is evident, for example, in the 1975 Greene Report on Professional Standards to the American Comparative Literature Association, in which the authors of the report drew attention, with evident concern, to "the growth of interdisciplinary programs" such as American studies (30), considering them a factor in the dangerous trend in the academy where, according to the authors, "[i]n at least some colleges and universities[,] Comparative Literature seems to be purveyed in the style of a smorgasbord at bargain rates" (31). Although both fields have undergone major transformations since the mid-1970s, most importantly the rise of "high theory" and the growing interest in non-European literary traditions in comparative literature and the integration of ethnic literatures and the emergence of an anti-exceptionalist critical attitude in American studies, comparative literature and American studies continue to maintain strict disciplinary boundaries as demonstrated by the marginalization of American literature and culture in the field of comparative literature, and the persistence of a monolingual and exceptionalist approach to literature in the field of American studies.

What are the intellectual and ideological underpinnings of these disciplinary divides? How can the pedagogic and intellectual boundaries between these disciplines be overcome? And what can these fields learn from each other? In what follows, I wish to explain their different disciplinary and intellectual trajectories in sketching some answers to these questions. As a scholar whose work straddles these fields, I am convinced that there is a lot to gain both intellectually and academically from working against disciplinary divides and resisting the conventional compartmentalization.

The various reports on professional standards of the American Comparative Literature Association provide a productive context in which to consider the disciplinary assumptions and transformations of the field of comparative literature, particularly those that have enabled and perpetuated its differential mode of identification with American studies. The 1965 Levin Report historicized the emergence of comparative literature in the US in the context of the National Defense Education Act that provided the material support for foreign language instruction and the systematic introduction of programs and courses in great books to help the younger generation of Americans understand and engage more effectively with the international cross-currents and exchanges of postwar years, as well as with the cultural and the political challenges of the Cold War era. Underscoring the inter-departmental nature of the field, the report took an elitist attitude toward comparative literature as a discipline by suggesting that only universities with strong language departments and large libraries should institute them, as well as by underscoring the importance of solid training in three languages and literatures as the primary requisites for pursuing a degree in the field. As the report bluntly stated, "not very many colleges, indeed not every university, can be fairly expected to measure up" to having a comparative literature program (21). As well, the report posited an understanding of comparative literature as the study of literary phenomena from the perspective of more than one European national literature (primarily English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish) with the aim of mapping fundamental unities. The founding texts in the field, including Erich Auerbach's 1946 Mimesis, Austin Warren and RenÉ Welleck's 1949 Theory of Literature, and Leo Spitzer's work on stylistics, all focus on European literary traditions to posit a universalist, unifying view of literature without any reference to the sociohistorical forces in which it is inscribed. Both founding and early scholars of comparative literature viewed the literary text as self-contained, disregarding any other disciplines for its interpretation or understanding, let...