Cultural Studies or Comparative Literature?

Some years ago I guest-edited a special issue of Modern Fiction Studies on the topic of "postmodernism and the globalization of English." When I mentioned it to friends, colleagues, and associates, sometimes (but not always) in the course of soliciting submissions, they almost uniformly looked at me quizzically and said, "you do mean 'postcolonialism and the globalization of English,' don't you?" No, I replied, the whole point of the issue is to revive and revisit Anthony Appiah's famous question as to whether the post- in postmodernism is the same as the post- in postcolonial, and to see both "posts" as being related in some way to the world in which the sun has long since set on the British Empire but still never sets on the English language. This special issue attempts something similar, or at least similarly strange: bringing together two fields with uncertain boundaries, two fields that might plausibly speak to (or merely about) each other more often than they have in the past twenty years or so.

One of the minor curiosities of recent intellectual history is that major theoretical developments and schools have tended to take their initial shape from the period or the subdiscipline with which they were first associated. This proposition may sound tautological—well, of course they take their "initial shape" from their "first" association—but in fact, there is no necessary or inevitable correspondence between, say, deconstruction and Romanticism, or New Historicism and the English Renaissance/early modern period, or Lacanian psychoanalysis and film theory. There are, surely, good reasons why queer theory has had more to say about Henry James or Oscar Wilde than about William Langland, and it does seem to be the case that literary and cultural texts respond more richly to some kinds of inquiries than others. But there does not seem to be any reason why cultural studies and comparative literature have had so little to do with one another in the United States, apart from the accidents of institutional history thanks to which we associate the comparative literature tradition more with the arrival of phenomenology, structuralism, and deconstruction on American shores, and the cultural studies tradition more with the arrival of British Marxism and post-Marxism. That these accidents of institutional history correspond, in some ways, to different intellectual traditions and trajectories is not, in the end, a sufficient explanation for why they have run in parallel courses for so long. (Even innovative academic departments such as Minnesota's "Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature" look like experiments in juxtaposition: Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies constitute two wholly different programs of study, with Studies in Cinema and Media Culture serving as a third.) Of course, I cannot presume to say whether the six essays presented here establish permanent points of contact between cultural studies and comparative literature; but I can say that both fields have been radically opened and significantly transformed over the past decade and a half, and that the moment is propitious for building a crossroads.

Paul K. Saint-Amour's uncannily timely—or cannily untimely—essay opens with bombardment and fear: not a simple fear of an unprecedented form of war (bombing) or a generalized fear of death, but "a condition of hideously prolonged expectation, a state of emergency that is both perennial, in having been detached from the arrival of violence in a singular event, and horribly deferred—the advance symptom of a disaster still to come." That condition corresponds to 1930s air raids as described by Lewis Mumford and postwar shell shock as delineated by Virginia Woolf, but of course it names the interwar period itself, those two decades of anxiety and dread between November 1918 and September 1939. "The memory and dread of aerial bombing," writes Saint-Amour, "not only figured prominently in interwar public discourse and the concurrent urban imaginary but also constituted the locus classicus for a kind of proleptic mass-traumatization, a pre-traumatic stress syndrome whose symptoms arose in response to an anticipated rather than an already realized catastrophe." Against that backdrop of trauma past, trauma present, and trauma yet to come...