The Deliverance or Domestication of Others: Memos from Comparative Literature Classes in Appalachia

In his work The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age, David Palumbo-Liu examines the relevance of World Literature as a delivery system. According to Palumbo-Liu, works of literature bring the lives of others to us. As a system of delivery, literature, therefore, exposes us to alternative cultural worlds that transcend the borders of our own lived realities. However, it is not just others and their worlds that are exposed to us; the “rational” foundations we employ to make sense of our world also become exposed, destabilized and scrutinized in the process. The deliverance of difference is therefore not always a painless process. As a professor of World Literature teaching at an open enrollment university in rural Appalachia, where many students have limited exposure to people and traditions outside their immediate environment, I find that Palumbo-Liu’s analysis effectively captures the pedagogic imperatives and dilemmas that I navigate in my classes. From a pedagogic perspective, Palumbo-Liu’s work offers a useful way of framing and understanding students’ resistance to particular types of texts and reading experiences. It is by envisioning comparative and World Literature classes as delivery systems that this article will frame pedagogic issues as indispensable theoretical platforms on which comparatists can articulate the exigency of the discipline. Such an approach can encapsulate an engagement with some of the following questions: How do we determine, organize and politicize the corpus of what is delivered? How much difference is enough? What delivery methods should we employ? Is translation an effective delivery method? How do literary worlds travel through these delivery systems and how do we make sense of these processes of circulation? These questions do not just summarize debates in the discipline but they also directly epitomize anxieties about the way comparative and World Literature classes should be taught.

Ethical quandaries regarding strategies for delivering, engaging, positioning and incorporating texts that emerge from different national and cultural contexts have historically engendered a tradition of crisis, permeated by epistemological ruptures, through which the discipline of comparative literature has defined its deontological priorities and imperatives. Between 1959 and 1966, both René Etiemble and René Wellek, figureheads from the French and US-American schools of comparative literature respectively, vociferously declared that there was a crisis in the discipline. While Etiemble bemoaned what he termed a conflation between general and comparative literature in the United States, Wellek criticized the positivist focus on influences that partially defined the French school (37–39; 163). Comparatists have also struggled to unshackle themselves from the Eurocentric epistemologies that have permeated the discipline. As Weisinger and Joyeaux contend in their explication of Etiemble’s polemical work entitled Comparaison n’est pas raison: La crise de la littérature comparée, “many comparatists, having managed to emancipate themselves from the thrall of nationalism, promptly enslave themselves in the larger, but still confining, concept of the primacy of Western literary tradition” (xiii). Indeed, the Green Report, published in 1975, stipulated that “the growth of interest in the non-European literatures is another development we can welcome, while cautiously searching for ways to accommodate this interest in our own traditions […] we still need the virtues of precision and integrity our inherited culture has taught us. It goes without saying that we cannot begin to absorb the wealth of exotic [my emphasis] literatures before firmly possessing our own” (36).

Of course, by the time the Bernheimer Report emerged in 1993, the impetus and symbiotic entrenchment of postcolonial and postmodern literary theory had created a discursive atmosphere that attempted to dislodge the Eurocentric proclivity of the discipline. The Derridean mantra “il n’y a pas de hors-texte,” coupled with the growing influence of cultural studies, had also led the contributors of the Bernheimer Report to question whether literary phenomena “should be the exclusive focus of our discipline” (42). Nonetheless, the tradition of crisis and rupture embedded in the discipline, with its penchant for analytical autopsies, has engendered works such as Gayatri Spivak’s Death of a Discipline (2003) and Emily Apter’s Against World Literature: On the Politics...