Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE IN AN AGE OF GLOBALIZATION Utrecht University The bylaws of the American proportional lit Association stipulate the writ-ing ein truth ten years of a fib on the state of the guinea pig. The invest collection comparative breaker point Literature in an Age of Globalization represents the latest in the series and is a follow up to Charles Bernheimers comparative Literature in the Age of Multiethnicalism (1994). The geomorphological similarities in the midst of the two titles, with their repetition of proportional Literature in the date of is striking, and I will corne back toit.The nineteen essays in the collection rent been written by a team of eminent savants and they respond non only to Bernheimers collection and to the general theme of globalization but too to each other. The resuit is an kindle series of kaleidoscopic interventions, around super unmortgaged and pulling lots of punch others little user-friendly and, in attempting to origi nate to the occasion, somewhat convoluted and over-written.Granted the report is a very awkward writing style for which in that location ar no rules and, given this need to improvise, the editer Haun Saussy has made a good job of providing a nuanced and multiperspectival account of the state of the flying field. It would shed enhanced the refer of the present volume, however, had it been at times slight an innermost qualitying colloquy among seniors and more than inviting to the as-yet non initiated graduate student.As it is, it makes very interesting reading for the diehard senior member of staff (and presumably the members of the ACL A) term being less fond to the future scholar or to those functional in other disciplines and interested in finding out what Comparative Literature stands for, where it is going to, and why it might be important. Canadian look backward of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Litterature Comp bee CRCL declination 2008 DECEMBRE RCLC 0319-051708/35. 4/353 Canadian Comparative Literature Association 54/ CRCL DECEMBER 2008 DECEMBRE RCLC ANN RIGNEY COMPARATIVE LITERATURE IN AN AGE OF GLOBALIZATION/ 355 A survey attempting to do thoice to the complexness of an academie theater and what is at issue in it, almost inevitably leaves the subscriber less with a single argument than with a variety of perspectives on a variety of issues (on among other things, the importance of historical approaches, the value of case of graphie novels and other visual forms a recollectiveside texts the nature of comparative literary productions as a metadiscipline or exploratory space).So what is really surprising round this collection, then, is the degree of convergence that it nevertheless manifests. To begin with, the majority of contributors do address some issue indoors the broad frame of globalization taking their eue from the tauting(a) introductory essay by Saussy, himself a specialist in Chinese literary productio ns.Where the 1994 report focused on questions of the boundaries between literature and other ethnical expressions, ten years later the main emphasis here is on themes that argon in many paths more customal within the trilingual field of comparative literature the concept of existence literature or literatures of the area and how best to teach it (David Damrosch and Katie Trumpener go forth interesting solutions) the cultural role of translation and its status as a medium in teaching and look into (Steven Ungar) the nature of comparison itself and the grounds upon which texts or movements from unlike cultural and linguistic traditions, even from different periods, may usefully be compared with each other and if indeed, as Emily Apter argues following Alain Badiou, if grounds for comparison are always needed the future role of (East) European literature and conjecture within the much larger body of world literature flat becoming available (Caryl Emerson). Even Marshall Browns enthusiastic celebration of the neighboring reading of particular texts, using the example of Effi Briest, reflects the concern with globalization the very fabric of Effis provincial life is woven through, as Brown shows, with the partake of more distant and general developments.Such concerns suggest that we are witnessing the return of Comparative Literature to its origins as the inter-cultural and multilingual analyse of literature. As if to con-firm this, the polyglossic Zeitschrift fur Vergleichende Literatur accomplished by Hugo Meltzl de Lomnitz in 1877 is cited on more than one occasion as the foundational text of the discipline (rather than say, the Russian Formalists programme for a general literary science as promoted among others by Rene Wellek). The phrase return to origins might come out at first sight a merely conservative adjourn to older positions, but re-engaging with roads taken earlier in comparatism is non a symptom in this case of burnout.Instead, the pr esent concern with intercultural and interlinguistic comparatism as the basis for the common pursuit of literary studies represents non just a return, but similarly a revitalization a return to a well-established tradition that had been marginalized as long as other theoretical formations, taking a more universalist approach to literary texts, dominated the academie study of literatures, as they did from the 60s on. But it also represents a revitalization and expansion of this tradition at a time when globalized communication networks, intercultural exchanges and human mobility are such prevailing features of our lives, some of the traditional concerns of comparative literature a la Meltzl de Lomnitz and Paul van Tieghem among others have become pertinent in impudent ways and have the possibility of taking central stage in the field of literary studies at large.Ail of this is good rude(a)s for those who sustain to want to disengage the study of literature from the inevitabl e parochialism of the separate language departments and who are committed to the study of literature as a trans-national medium that has long been crossing bordersbefore ever the term globalization was invented twain in the original and in the form of translations. The report thus bespeaks confidence in the Comparatist project and a certain excitement at the sense that literature has become an even richer domain now that we in the West are becoming belatedly aware of the variety of literatures in the world and, thank to work done in the last years to make it more accessible in the form of anthologies, a little better outfit to talk about nonEuropean literatures.As several contributors point out, the success of comparatist concerns in the field of literary studies at large along with the more general word sense of translation as a legitimate medium for teaching, may mean that Departments of Comparative Literature as such may become less distinctive. The even greater risk is also th ere that the inter-linguistic and inter-cultural levels of the Comparatist project may end up being sign upd to the derivative study of literatures of the world through the monolingual filter of a globalizing English. For globalization, of ply, is always double-edged mend providing a greater awareness of cultural diversity it also tends to reduce that diversity by the very fact that it makes cultures more widely accessible in an homogenizing lingua franca.Given this downside of globalization, the distinctive aims of Comparative Literature as the multilingual study of literature have become ail the more urgent. As the present collection demonstrates, however, the traditional demand that students of Comparative Literature be at home in three (European) languages is no longer luxuriant for the task at hand. More language skills are needed. But since there are presumably also limits to the number of languages any individual scholar can master, there is new need for different forms of collaboration between specialists in various fields-a point implied by a number of contributors, though non extensively thema-tized in the present collection.Indeed, given this need for cooperative projects, the core of Comparative Literature may no longer be in a particular disciplinarity (i. e. that it is carried out by individuals who are clever in various languages, though hopefully these people will continue to exist) but in its function as a platform for research and teaching the fact that it brings together scholars who are committed to exploring in a collaborative way the cross-currents and exchanges between literatures written in different languages crossways the world at different periods. This report on the state of the discipline thus gives not only food for thought but also reasons for confidence.Nevertheless, it also leaves me with some niggling doubts about the very way in which we as literary scholars think about our work. My concern centres on the generic wi ne title Comparative Literature in the age of The occupation lies not so much in the epochal tone, suggesting as it does that in the course of 10 years we have moved from the age of multiculturalism to that of globalization (as if mul- 356/ CRCL DECEMBER 2008 DECEMBRE RCLC ANN RIGNEY COMPARATIVE LITERATURE IN AN AGE OF GLOBALIZATION/ 357 ticulturalism were somehow no longer relevant or globalization a new thing). The problem is more with the implicit assumption that one should find out the state of the discipline by looking at ils coitus to the age around it as if it should be its mirror.Behind this conceptualization lies, of course, the legacy of Matthew Arnold and the belief that criticisms main task is to provide association, not so much of literature as such, as of the world itself as this is represented or reflected through literature. Comparative Literature in the age of bespeaks this grand commitment to be the conscience of the world and to discover the best that has b een thought in it. This continues to be a self-evident aim within literary studies. Hence the ongoing selfsearching about what is the proper disapprove of study fuelled by the belief that the choice of object (world literature, literatures of the world, popular fictionalisation or highly regarded works of literature) involves an ethical decision about what is relevant at the present time or in the present world.With our present global perspective and our awareness that there is more to literature than the code of European classics, that worldly task has become an even heavier one and the way to its realization more fraught by the need to select carefully. farther be it from me to trivialize the importance of cultural criticism or a commitment to seeking out interesting literary phenomena to study preceding(prenominal) more banal ones. Nevertheless, there is something paradoxically ostrich-like about the ways in which Comparative Literature defines itself in coition to the worl d around it and in relation to the age as a whole. The very moral pledge accorded to literature is also a throw-back to a time when literature (vide Arnold) was the dominant cultural form.But for ail its ostensible worldliness, the present collection arguably puts its drumhead in the sand when it cornes to the changing status of literature in the highly mediated world in which we live and where globalization has been effectuated more plainly through the medium of television, film, popular music and internet than it has through literature. In paying so much attention to world literature and how it should be defined and taught (in itself a really positive development) the collection nevertheless succeeds in ignoring the fact that literatures relation to the world, and its place in the world, has fundamentally changed. More precisely, it ignores the porthole between literature and other media, and between literature and other forms of knowledge at the present time. In raising this point, I do not mean to uggest that we should ail drop the study of literature in party favour of looking at other media (a pos-sibility raised briefly by Malti-Douglas), for that would be to perpetuate the belief that literary studies is somehow a super-discipline that provides the conscience for the liberal arts and has a responsibility for ail of culture. Rather it is an argument in upgrade of reconsidering the changing relations between literature and other cultural media, and the impact both in the past and in the present of new technologies and changing literacies on the very possibilities we have for expression and interpretation. It is also an argument for considering new forms of collaboration with specialists in other fields of culture. In other words, the side by side(p) challenge is to conceive of literary studies itself from a comparative perspective, that is, in relation to other forms of knowledge about culture and media.In the last decades, certainly in Europe, me dia studies have been institutionalized and have been providing increasing competition for literary studies both when it comes to attracting students and to attracting research funding. The question which needs to be addressed, sooner rather than 10 years down the line, is how to reposition comparative literary studies in relation to these adjacent fields. In the first place, this will mean becoming more modest accepting the fact that writing and reading are just one form of culture among other, albeit the one with the longest history and about which there is the greatest body of knowledge (here we should be much less modest).It will also involve becoming more pro-active as we define more clearly, and become once again surprised by the fantasy of language in its various manifestations, what literature can and can not achieve (Jonathan Cullers intervention hints in this direction). Instead perhaps of soul-searching endlessly about the identity of Comparative Literature in relation to the imbed of objects (world literature, counter-canons, etc) and in relation to the age as a whole, we need to look outside the discipline and accept that there is an outside. Hopefully the next report will focus less on the state of the discipline as seen from within and be more specific about what we have to put up the world of learning at large.