Table Of ContentComparative Literature in an Age of Globalization
The American Comparative Literature Association
Report on the State of the Discipline, 2004
Comparative Literature in an
Age of Globalization
Edited by
HAUN SAUSSY
The Johns Hopkins University Press
Baltimore
© 2006 The Johns Hopkins University Press
Ali rights reserved. Published 2006
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
4 6 9 7
The Johns Hopkins University Press
2715 North Charles Street
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Library ofCongress Cataloging-in-Publicatiol1 Data
Comparative literature in an age of globalization / edited by Haun Saussy.
p. cm.
"The American Comparative Literature Association Report on the State of the
Discipline, 2004."
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-8018-8379-2 (hardcover: allc paper) ISBN 0-8018-8380-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Literature, Comparative. 2. Literature, Modern-History and criticism.
1. Saussy, Haun, 1960- II. American Comparative Literature Association.
PN863.C585 2006
809-DC22 2005027706
A catalog record for this book is available frorn the British Library.
CONTENTS
Preface vii
PART I THE STATE OF THE DISCIPLINE, 2004
1 Exquisite Cadavers Stitched from Fresh Nightmares: Of Memes, Hives, and
Selfish Genes 3
HAUN SAUSSY
2 World Literature in a Postcanonical, Hypercanonical Age 43
DAVID DAMROSCH
3 "Je ne crois pas beaucoup à la littérature comparée": Universal Poetics and
Postcolonial Comparatism 54
EMILY APTER
4 Looking Back at "Literary Theory" 63
RICHARD RORTY
5 Comparative Literature in an Age of Terrorism 68
DTELAL KADIR
6 Indiscipline 78
DAVID FERRIS
7 Cultivating Mere Gardens? Comparative Francophonies, Postcolonial Studies, and
Transnational Peminisms 100
FRANÇOISE LIONNET
8 What's Happened to Feminism? 114
GAIL FINNEY
9 Writing in Tongues: Thoughts on the Work of Translation 127
STEVEN UNGAR
vi Contents
10 Old Fields, New Corn, and Present Ways ofWriting about the Past 139
CAROLINE D. ECKHARDI
11 Of Monuments and Documents: Comparative Literature and the Visual Arts in
Barly Modern Studies, or The Art of Historical Tact 155
CHRISTOPHER BRAIDER
12 Beyond Comparison Shopping: This 15 Not Your Pather's Camp. Lit. 175
FEDWA MAL1I-DOUGLAS
PART II RESPONSES
13 World Music, World Literature: A Geopolitical View 185
KATIE TRUMPENER
14 Answering for Central and Eastern Europe 203
CARYL EMERSON
15 Not Works but Networks: Colonial Worlds in Comparative Literature 212
ROLAND GREENE
16 Comparative Literature: Congenitally Contrarian 224
LINDA HUTCHEON
17 Penser d'un dehors: Notes on the 2004 ACLA Report 230
ZHANG LONGXI
18 Comparative Literature, at Last 237
JONATHAN CULLER
19 Multum in Parvo; or, Comparison in Lilliput 249
MARSHALL BROWN
Contributors 259
PREFACE
In the spring of 2003, Margaret Higonnet and David Damrosch, president-to-be
and president respectively of the American Comparative Literature Association, in
vited me to form a committee that would draft a report on the state of the discipline,
something the association,s bylaws require to be done once every ten years. My first
thought was that I didn,t want a committee report in the usual style-a consensus
document studded with the magic phrases "We observe;' "We advise;' "We strongly
recommend" and the like, of mysterious provenance and authority. I thought the
need to form a consensus ought not serve as a filter for whatever diagnoses and rec
ommendations might be made. The most provocative and readable parts of the pre
vious ten-year report, Comparative Literature in the Age ofMulticulturalism, had been
the signed essays written in support or defiance of the committee's brief statement. I
had nothing against manifestos, or even anathemas, but I was reluctant to pronounce
them in the name of the Association. I hoped that we would find authors who would
impress, alarm, delight, and stimulate our readership by disagreeing with me and
with each other about the state of the field.
My second thought, which followed closely on the first, was that a book that con
sisted wholly of divergences from a set theme and expected the reader to synthesize
the conclusions would do just as litde to honor the ideal of dialogue as a book that
corralled all divergences into a single poliey statement. Readers already won to a par
ticular point of view would read the chapter or two that confirmed their program for
the future of comparative literature and ignore the rest. We needed other authors who
would discover the shared patterns in the individual statements of Part One, sift their
daims, and confront their disharmonies. The book, as I dreamt it before any words
were actually on paper, would exemplify Heraclitus's "One differlng in itself" and
the "unity of difference and non -difference" proposed by the German Idealists, and
would probably provide hints for the development of perpetuaI-motion and cold
fusion machines as weIl.
viii Preface
Margaret and David were receptive to the ide a of a multivocal report, and with
the help of the members of the advisory board of the ACLA, we sent out invitations
to colleagues who had recently written on issues that seemed to us to loom large in
the history and future of the discipline. 1 was happy to see that almost every person
invited to contribute said yes, often within a few minutes of the sending of the e
mailed invitation. We then scheduled a series of meetings over the coming two years
at which the pieces of the draft report, as they came in, would be discussed: by the
contributors themselves; with respondents (often as a dress rehearsal for the essays in
Part Two); and with members of the ACLA and our sister organization the Modern
Language Association at the annual meetings of both groups. By now we had begun
to think of it as a book, for which a title had to be found. The phrase "in an age of
globalization" imposed itself, despite sorne resistance by aH of us, as a marker of the
times we endure and imagine, as an echo of the 1994 report, Comparative Literature in
the Age of Multiculturalism, and as a reference to two of the models for the discipline
currently prominent in comparatists' teaching and research, "world literature" and
the politics of empire.
Somebody had to throw out the first baIl. ln October 2003 1 began circulating a
draft of my essay, an attempted general survey called "Exquisite Corpses from Fresh
Nightmares." Partly because it appeared earliest, partly because it gave everyone at
least something to disagree with, this essay came, by an unfortunate synecdoche, to
be thought of by many as "the 2004 report." Several of the essays in what truly is the
2004 report refer to it and define positions in opposition to it. 1 daim only the virtue
of convenience and am deeply flattered by the attention, but 1 hope the reader will
understand that everything here, up to and including the responses, is the 2004 report
on a field that we know to be so large, intricate, and various that no one person could
reasonably be expected to report on it as a whole.
The variety emerges first in the kinds of texts we talk about. In "World Litera
ture in a Postcanonical, Hypercanonical Age," David Damrosch elucidates the sev
eral senses in which "world literature" has become a different concern since the 1994
report. The canon of works under consideration, as represented by anthologies and
teaching syllabi, has grown; more and more of us are involved in enlarging compara
tive literature; and the ways of thinking about it have ramified. And yet, as Damrosch
notes, the field as encountered by students is, despite its internationalization and
multiculturation, ever more strongly dominated by a few major writers. It is possible
to imagine someone leaving college "having read Things FaIl Apart three times and
Beloved four times, but never having read Mahfouz or Ghalib." (Shakespeare is alive
and well, thank you: despite the canard of their having been cast aside in favor of
multiculturalism and small traditions, the new system has even increased the power
Preface IX
of the Major Authors.) Damrosch suggests ways of resisting the star system while
using the bankable Shakespeares, Joyces, and Toistoys to introduce new writers and
modes.
Emily Apter evokes several versions of a "comparatisme quand même" that seek
to make connections despite the fatality of translation, above the walls separating
linguistic families and literary genres, in spite of the riskiness of the category of the
univers al. Alain Badiou's attempts to produce a truth-bearing event through the en
counter of disparate texts, the achievement of singularity that Peter Hallward attri
butes to certain postcolonial authors, and the planetarism of Gayatri Spivak's recent
work are for her examples showing what is possible when the model of language as
guarantor of corn munity and identity disappears even as a thesis to be combated.
These models disagree amongst themselves significantly: each offers its own account
of the place of language, of literariness, and the role of interpreters in making con
nections.
Damrosch and Apter assume a form of literacy that, for the generation that came
to maturity in the 1980s, underwrote most forms of comparison: literacy in the lan
guage of "theory." Richard Rorty's "Looking Back at 'Literary Theory'" gently ques
tions the assumptions of reports on the state of a discipline, praising instead the
"mutability and fashion-proneness" that makes the movement of ideas in a field un
predictable-as unpredictable as was, according to him, the sudden vogue of liter
ary theOl'y, For Rorty, it would be an error to see theory as having been the me ans
of comparative literature's belated self-understanding; rather comparative literature,
like any academic field, lacks a self to discover, be it through theory, expanded canons,
or any other momentary conversation-·starter.
For Djelal Kadir, practitioners of comparative literature in the United States now
find themselves in an isolation "beyond dissensus," crystallized in the motto "What
ever," and incorporated willy-nilly into "universal global positioning systems" de
signed for the delivery ofbombs, not the rescue of strayed mountaineers. Kadir notes
the reversaI of Marshall Plan America into its suspicious, hypersensitive Homeland
Security avatar. The division of the world into those who are "with us" and those who
are "against us" mirrors the unequal reception of works and scholars from different
tiers of "abroad" into what is a recognizably American comparative literature; the
more we talk, the less we know how to listen. In this light, the emergence of World
Literature as a leading question suggests hegemony rather than hospitality, a "master
construct" designed to produce the Same from the Different, and so the obsolescence
of comparative literature.
"Indiscipline" names the question David Ferris asks about the survival of com
parative literature within the contemporary university. Does the "discipline without
x Preface
a discipline" occupy a position of strategie flexibility (permitting it to develop free of
the humanistic: and national investments of other disciplines), or one of sheer nullity?
The antinomy of "standards" and "comparison without bounds" serves as a reminder
of the (in)ability of comparative literature to form itself as a discipline and indicates
the Romantic themes of its intellectual origins: the nation as a project, the poetics of
the fragment, the totalizing resistance to totality. World literature and the problem
of "literature" both respond to the self-thematizing, self-diagnosed "impossibility" of
the discipline.
As Sarah Lawall predicted in an essay cited by several contributors, the world-liter
ature perspective is not one, but multiple. In "Cultivating Mere Gardens?" Françoise
Lionnet narrates the ways "the global" emerges as a successor to the national in her
own field of Francophone studies. Just as French feminism entered the United States
on the wings of literary theory, so postcolonial theories exist in the French-speaking
world lar'gely as a subsection of Anglo-American studies, whereas writers from the
former French and Belgian colonies are generally assimilated into the shared and
single literary space of "la francophonie." A "transversal comparative approach," she
argues, offers the best chances of overcoming the pressures to assimilation and ghet
toization. Coline Serreau's film Chaos exemplifies for her the multiple unacknowl
edged points of contact between feminism and postcolonial francophone culture.
"What's happened to feminism?" Gail Finney imagines someone asking between
the 1994 report and the present. What happened is, first, what was already at work in
feminism: the adoption of interdisciplinarity as a matter of course, and the refram
ing of women's studies as gender studies. The consequent shift hom the analysis and
critique of binaries toward attention to pluralities has made feminism nearly uruec
ognizable, at least for those equipped only with a classic definition of the field. Judith
Butler's work on performances of gender, the (at times edgy) coexistence of men
and women within feminism, historical and social work on the body, the growth of
queer studies, and even the paradoxical emergence of "postfeminism" have changed
the context of feminism. As with comparative literature itself, the success of a style of
thought leads both to its ubiquity and to its fading from view as a definite object.
"Writing in Tongues: Thoughts on the Work of Translation" is Steven Ungar's
defense of a practice often grudgingly endorsed by comparatists, who after aH dis
tinguish themselves from colleagues in other disciplines by their reading of works
from many different traditions "in the original," as we say. But what if the "original" is
constituted through a relation to a "foreign language"? What if it emerges first as and
in translation? Ungar questions a lingering logocentric bias through considerations
of writers who speak of their use of French (a language Ungar cites "in the original")
