Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism (review)

REVIEWS The real bone of contention in the "culture wars," then, is not so much over what we read as how we read, although perhaps in the future it will also be whether we need to read. I find that Bloom's elegy to aesthetic, personal, and solitary reading has much appeal. For what other reason, except for thejoy ofsuch reading, did most of us get into the literary profession, and who has not at least once suspected that the professionalization ofour reading endangers the joy? Bloom's focus on individuality and originality serves him well in his brilliant essays on Wordsworth, Whitman, and even Dickinson. His reading ofTolstoy's Hadji Murad, "the best story in the world," for its "uncanny and natural" aura and its reworking ofthe archaic epic hero in the Democratic Age is beautifully argued and told. His intertextual exploration of Shakespeare in Beckett's Endgame is something of a tour de force, but he brings it to bear on illuminating that truly strange play without reductiveness. If Bloom could only resist the all-too-frequent jibes, rather than arguments, against the "School of Resentment" he claimed to dismiss in his first chapter, the eloquence ofhis narrative would be more captivating. And yet, it is not only Bloom's resenters who read for reasons other than the aesthetic/individualist ones he so passionately defends. Is it wrong to read Virginia Woolf more for her feminism than for her aestheticism? Bloom praises Pablo Neruda for his creative misreading ofWhitman, but seems to deny that his political commitment could produce anything decent in his poetry. Yet for many readers of much Latin American or African American literature, among others, the political or social perception is inseparable from the literary effect. To deny that we read for reasons that are also ideological is to limit unduly the experience ofthe reader. In the final analysis, Bloom's book is elegiac, as he announces in the conclusion . Posing in a sense as the Last Romantic, he surveys the grim possibility ofa future devoid of literary pleasures while shoring the fragments of his lifetime devotion around him. While there is much to deplore in the often mean-spirited exclusiveness ofthis book, there is much to admire in its scope, its willingness to address fundamental questions, and its passionate intelligence. Mary Ann Frese Witt North Carolina State University CHARLES BERNHEIMER, ed. Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. 232 pp. Every ten years since 1965, the American Comparative Literature Association has commissioned an official Report on Standards to chart the vitality ofthe field. Produced by a panel ofworking comparatists chaired by an eminent scholar, these reports have surveyed the development of Comparative Literature in the United States, defined its intellectual mission, and defended its disciplinary legitimacy. Comparative Literature in the Age ofMulticulturalism (hereafter CLAM) reprints two ofthose reports—Harry Levin's 1965 report and Thomas Greene's from 1975 —but it is anchored by the most recent and most controversial report, prepared by Charles Bernheimer and published alongside numerous concurring and dissenting opinions. The missing document—the 1985 report—was found so unsatisfactory, Vol. 20 (1996): 182 THE COMPAnATIST Bernheimer informs us, that the chair declined to release it. The gap is, ofcourse, revealing: whatevertensions and disagreements may have led to its suppression are, in this volume, vented with a vengeance. While there can be no doubt about the intellectual vigor ofthe individual contributors, the mutation ofthe official Report on Standards into a polemical exchange challenges, for better and worse, the ACLA's model of disciplinarity. If Lionel Gossmann and Mihai L. Spariosu entitled their collection of autobiographical perspectives on comparative literature Building a Profession, Bernheimer's volume might fairly be subtitled Deconstructing a Discipline. By reprinting the Levin and Greene reports, CLAM invites us to compare the language ofthe earlier Reports to the current one, and the comparison is instructive. The Levin "Report on Professional Standards" records the nascent institutionalization ofthe field, beginning forthrightly: "The recent proliferation ofComparative Literature . . . could hardly have materialized without the support ofthe National Defense Education Act (21)." For Levin, "a set ofminimal standards" is necessary "before our subject gets too thinly spread." Standards...