What ails Comp Lit? Its own cure

Comparative Literature is often described as “in crisis.”  How to define and defend against this threat to the discipline is an open question, a problem whose explanation almost always brings a solution with it.  If you can diagnose what ails comp lit, then you are two steps away from prescribing a cure.

But perhaps Comp Lit is not in crisis, rather it is the university around it that has grown intolerant of interdisciplinarity?  What was once taken to be height of the humanities, a learned ability to move between languages and literatures has of late been misunderstood.

So the worst thing Comp Lit could do is start acting like one of the old-fashioned territorial departments that long ago passed away. The great success of comparative literature in the 1980s—yes, the previous century—has lead to the general acceptance of literature departments to include scholars who work in more than one language, more than one canon.  So now comp lit faces the threat of its own success.  Everyone is doing it, so comp lit departments worry that they need to reinvent themselves.

The worst move would be for comparative literature to start acting territorial, to regulate its graduate students, to force them into a narrowly defined range of courses, to create a curriculum that precludes working with outside departments. 

For if comparative literature departments were to draw borders around itself, it would become the territory of non-territoriality, the discipline of inter-disciplinarity, the dogmatic negation of national identity.  It would set up rules and controls over which scholars and what methods are outside national literary traditions.  This would require, inevitably, that comp lit overstate how narrow, periodical and identity-driven other departments were.  “They are hung up on canons, we are without a canon, that is our canon.”

This kind of dogmatic negativity has been around for ages, longer than Hegel’s dialectic.  In the end it leads to its own internal critique, one which seeks to break out of the rules that proscribe interdisciplinarity in favor of that most dreadful of post-Soviet ghosts, ethnic identity.  The biggest groups usually win in such contests, if not English, for it does have its own department already, then Spanish and Mandarin. Comp Lit would suffer greatly if its literary curriculum were reduced to a question of population sizes--biggest enrollments, largest readerships.

Better to encourage and work with a cosmopolitan model of the university, better to indulge in world literature as a heritage all readers enjoy.  Better not to act as if only one department knew anything about the wonderful interplay of the Liberal Arts.