Elitism or Eclecticism?: Some Thoughts About the Future of Comparative Literature

Before considering the direction which the next generation of comparatists is likely to take, it will be helpful to contextualize those thoughts by briefly retracing several key moments in the history of the (graduate) discipline of comparative literature since the Second World War. This brief survey will highlight the following influences on comparative literature, which were subsequently assimilated to varying degrees by the discipline: 1) canonical literary history, 2) literary theory, 3) multiculturalism, 4) cultural studies. This overview makes no claim to exhaustiveness. Chronologically, the movement from literary history to cultural studies is steadily in the direction of increasing disciplinary eclecticism.

The more distant origins of comparative literature lie in the early nineteenth century, in Goethe’s concept of Weltliteratur (world literature) and in European philology. John Pizer’s characterization of the Goethean paradigm of Weltliteratur as “grounded in the dialectical relationship between cultural unity and multiplicity, universality and particularity” is illuminating for the humanistic coloration of comparative literature in its early, post-World War II phase (2006, 114). Although comparative literature was studied in this country in the 1920s, the postwar incarnation of comparative literature as an American academic discipline is heavily indebted to European, predominantly German Jewish, exiles fleeing totalitarianism and repulsed by nationalism, as has often been elaborated. Among competing traditions which came together in Istanbul and other exilic centers, the model that prevailed and was imported to the American academy by refugees like Erich Auerbach was the humanistic curriculum, comprised of modern and classical European languages and literatures. In writing about the “invention” of comparative literature by Leo Spitzer in 1930s Istanbul, Emily Apter shows that the exile culture in Istanbul was considerably more cosmopolitan and multilingual than Auerbach portrayed it to be. Concomitantly, as she also notes, Auerbach largely blocked the transmission of non-Western traditions to the U.S.

The humanistic curriculum, embraced by American scholars who were frequently of German/German Jewish descent themselves and whose cultural formation was therefore receptive to such a model (Harry Levin is a notable example), became the foundation of a Eurocentric comparative literature based in literary history and the comparative study of canonical literary texts in their original languages. Hence in this early stage, the discipline is elite, both by virtue of its “high” subject matter and in the sense used by Gerald Gillespie in writing of the “elitist metanarrative” of comparative literary history, where “elite” points to the intense degree of specialization of each practitioner.

It is impossible to overestimate the impact of theory—which at first usually meant philosophy—on comparative literature. This development can be regarded, in simplified terms and at least during the 1970s, as an intellectual version of the Harvard-Yale game: the work of Derrida burst onto the scene at Yale, while Harvard’s Department of Comparative Literature remained for the most part devoted to the study of literary texts and literary history. In this counterpoint schema, the Department of Comparative Literature at Yale—teaching literary theory, especially deconstruction—stands as representative of programs at Hopkins, UC Irvine, and Cornell, to mention a few, just as Harvard’s department—stressing literary history—was at the time typical of comparative literature programs at UC Berkeley, Indiana, and Stanford.

In his essay in Haun Saussy’s collection Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization about the influence of philosophy on literary theory, the philosopher Richard Rorty emphasizes in particular the impact of Derrida and Foucault, as well as that of Nietzsche and Heidegger. Rorty—who was himself carried by the theory wave from one institution to another—speculates that the time for theory was simply right in the early 1970s: people were bored with New Criticism and Freudian thought, he writes, and the work of Derrida was exciting and energizing for the study of literature (2006, 64). But now, Rorty claims, this “subdiscipline” has had its day: “People in literature departments are beginning to suspect that all the juice has been milked out of the Nietzsche-Heidegger-Derrida intellectual tradition” (63). Whether this is widely true or not, I think most would agree that the engagement...