(© 2905 The Jobns Hopkins Univesity Prose Cea America on acd-frepaper 246897532 flns Hopkins Universe Press eres. san o-Bon8-380-6 (ple ale paper) ature, Modem—Histoey end can Comparative Literature Associaton x86 385 2005, Bog—pear 2005027706, ssi 0 Sox8-379-2 har 2. Litreture, Comy 1. Saussy Haun, 1960- ‘catalog recon for this books avaible from the Bish Library. STEVENSON LIBRARY BARD. Bt conrenrs SS Prefice vit PART I THE STATE OF THE DISCIPLINE, 2004 1 Exquisite Cadavers: ied from Fresh Nightmares: Of Memes, Hives, an Selfish Genes — 3 ina Postcanonical, Hypercanonical Age 43 3 “Jene crois pas beaucoup & la littérature comparée”: Universal Pocties au Postcolonial Comparatism 34 4 Looking Back at“Literary Theory” 63 5 Comperative Literature in an Age of Terrorism 68 6 Indiscipline 78 RaNco1se LiONWET 8 What's Happened to Feminism? 14 gin Tongues: Thoughts on she Work of Translation 127Contents 10 Old Fields, New Corn, and Present Ways of Writing about the Past 139 11 Of Monuments and Documents: Comparative Literature and the Visual Arts in 12 Beyond Comparison Shopping: Thi ther’s Comp. Lit, 195 13 World Music, World Literature: A Geopolitical View 385 14 Answering for Central and Eastern Europe 203, 15 Not Works but Networks: Colonial Worlds in Comparative Literature 232 17 Penser d'un dehors: Notes on the 2004ACLA Report 230 28 Comparative Literature, at Last 237 19 Multum in Parvo: or, Comparison in In the spring of 2003, Margaret Higonnet and David Demrosch, president-to- and president respectively of the American Comparative Literature Association vited me to form a committe that would draft a report on the state of the discpl something the associations bylaws require to be done once every ten years. My i ‘thought was that I didn't want a committee report in the usual style—a consens the magic phrases “We observe.” “We advises" “We strong recommend” and the like, of mysterious provenance and authority. 1 thought need to form a consensus ought not serve asa filter for whatever diagnoses and re ‘ommendations might be made. The most provocative and readable parts ofthe pr vious ten-year report, Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, had be the signed essays written in support or defiance of the committee's b document studded wi ‘of the Association. hoped that we would find authors who wou ht, and stimulate our readership by disagreeing with me ar point of view would read the chapter or two that confirmed their program f the ature of comparative literature and ignore the rest. We needed other authors w ns in the individual statements of Part One, ‘were actually on paper, would exemplify Heracltus’s “One dif the “unity of difference and non-difference” proposed by th ‘would probably provide hints for the development of perpetual-motion and co!Preface Margaret and David were receptive to the idea of a multivocal report, and with, the help of the members of the advisory board of to colleagues who had recently written om issues t ften within a few minutes of the sending of the & scheduled a series of meetings over the coming two years draft report, as they came in, would be discussed: by the contributors themselves; with respondlents (often asa dress rehearsal for the essays in art Tivo); and with enembers of the ACLA and our sister organization the Modern ‘Language Association at the annual meetings of both groups. By now we had begua ik of it asa book, for which a title had to be found, The phrase “in an age of tion” imposed itself, despite some resistance by all of us, a a marker of the an echo of the 1994 report, Comparative Literaturein at which the pieces of the polities of empire, Somebody had to throw out the first ba. In October 2005 I beyan circulating a draft of my essay, an attempted general survey called "Exquisite Corpses from Fresh Nightmares” Partly becaus 5, partly because it gave everyone at least something to disagree ‘essay came, by an unfortunate syneedoche, to be thought of by many as “the 2004 report” Several ofthe essays in what trly is the 2004 report refer to it and define postions in opposition toi, I daim only the virtue ‘of convenience and em deeply flattered by the attention, but I hope the reader will understand that everythinghere, upto and including the responses is the 2004 report intricate, and various that no one perton could ature” has become a different concern since the 1994 report. The cenon of works under consideration, as represented by anthologies and ‘teaching syllabi, has grown; more and more of us are involved in enlarging compara- and the ways of thinking about it have ramified. And yet, as Damnrosch despite its internationalization and by afew major writers. It is possible to imagine someone leaving college “having read Things Fall Apart three t ‘Beloved four times, but never having read Mahfouz or Ghalib” (Shakespea ‘and well, thank you: despite the canard of their having been cast aside in favor of sralism 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 Shakespeare, Joyces, and Tolstoys to introduce new writers and sme quand méme” thet seek te the fatality of translation, above the walls separating linguistic families and literary genres, in spite of the riskiness of the category of the universal. Alin Badiou's attempts to produce a truth-bearing event through the en- counter of disparate butes to certain postcolonial anthors, and the planetarism of Gaya ‘work are for her examples showing what is possible when the model ‘guarantor of community an ‘These models disagree amon of the place of language, of literariness, and the role of interpreters in making con- nections, mth to maturity in the 980s, underwrote most form yin the lan- guage of “theory.” Richard Rorty’s “Looking Back at gently ques- tions the sssumptions of reports on the state of a discipline, praising instead the “mutability and fashion-proneness” that makes the movement of ideas in a Bel Damrosch and Apter assume a form of literacy that, for the get ary theory. For Rotty, it would be an error to see theory as having been the means ing; rather comparative literature, ugh theory expanded canons, of comparative literature’ belated self-understa find themselves in an isolation “beyond dissensi ever” and incorporated willy-nilly into “unive ‘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 10 what is a recognizably American comparative literature; the In this light, the emergence of World jemony rather than hospi Different, and sot parative literature within the contemporary university. Does the “discipline withoutre and the problem sosed “impossibility” oF ‘As Sarah Lawall predicted i ature perspective is not one, but mul ating Mere Gardens?” Prancoise ‘the ways “the global” emerges as a successor to the national in her ary space of “la francophonie,” A“transversal comparative approach” she offers the best chances of overcoming the pressures to assimilation and ghet- ne Serreau’s film Chaos exemplifies for her the multiple unacknow!- 1 francophone culture 1s someone asking between what was already a 2 of course, and the reftam- “What's happened the1¢94 report and the present. What happened i ferninistn: the adoption of interdisciplinarity as a m ing of women’ kin tudes as gender studies, The consequent shift from the analysis end tw pluralities has made feminism nearly unrec- th 1 egy) coexistence of men ‘and sromen within feminism, historical and social work on the body the growth of ‘queer studies, ond even the paradoxical emergence of “postfeminisma” have changed. ‘the context of ferninism. As with comparative literature itself, the success ofa style of, critique of binaries toward at definition of the fel ‘rom many differer red through al jon toa “foreign language”? What if it emerges first as and jont Ungar questions a lingering logocentric bias through considerations of writers who speak of their use of French (a language Ungar cites “in the original”) Preface itself, and insists thatthe “original” is nota sem: confrontation, not transparency: under these condi reading’"—of, not despit an implicitly comparative feld built around éiglossic cultures in Europe and elsewhere, ought to have something to tell us about comparison, and Caroline Eekharde's “Old Fields, New Corn, and Present Ways of Writing about the Past” contrasts the flourishing of medieval studies generally wit its minor presence associations, and conferences. Among the ap= recovery of the internationalism of the Middle Ages, and attention to diverse contexts and functions of reading, Her recommendations seek to undo the temporal provin- cialism, as objectionable as the more often castigated vice of Burocentrism, that too offen concentrates comparative work inthe last two centuri “Of Monuments and Documents: Compa Early Modern Studies, or T Erwin Panoféky’s iconology in a new climate. The Renaissance, he reminds us, pto- posed a lingua frenca of texts and ideas that bound together the vernaculars of Eu- rope even as they diverged from Latin-based culture. Similarly, an “emulative rivalry” sculpture literature, and even historical action together times, the iconology reserve iterary scholars, philosophers, hi theorists, and others make images into an exceptionally serious kind of text, one that ‘ot just permits, but requires, interdisciplinarity, In “Beyond Comparison Shopping: This Is Not Your Father's Comp. Lit,” Fedwa Malti-Douglas casts a backward glance on the changes in the field since her own .as has transformed in orians of science, pel neatly defined realms but spread well beyond them in chains of consequence, Ma Dougie cals on comparatists to take up their scrutiny and concludes with a laudatio of comparative literature asthe realm of intellectual adventure.Preface mpensating for gaps in the ess ising the report was the task originally planned for the “Responses” section. Inevi- tably, the responders were drawn to iginal views on the direction of the offers a geopo anthology 78) as predecessor figure, Reminding 0 generations —the construction and then apse of the Cold War system of nations—she charts the development of our rence of Eastern Europe’ calls on us to acknowledge the contributions and distinctive points cholars from the Slavic and Slavic-influenced worl, the crucial difference, tin the scheme of human values, Roland comparative lit. n-progress presented atthe 2004 Modern and Jonathan Culler exotic places of resi- Finally, Marshall Brown points out that geography is to some degree relative to the fineness of our perceptions: an attentive reader of the most classically European, stand ic account of the bourgeois detect traces of languages and cultures nota by the image of sel-con- tained national cultures that co fen agninst. In response 0 Prefce ‘the sober tone of much of the report, the last word of his esay-—and of the book—is “fun? Sobeit. ‘The present report has been discussed in various fora, posted on the Internet for nanities atthe Johns Hopki I thank Elizabeth Yoder for her careful and sympathetic editing. For its entre existence, comparative literature has benefited from intense self scrutiny and proposals for renewal. The American Comparative Literature Associa tion has helped to promote those meditations, and ts ten-year reports imperfectly re- flect them, Because our field has not yet found, or is disinclined to claim, a definitive among the disciplines, and because its intrinsic restlessness makes it unsuited to adopt all a common agenda, we précitioners need activist pro ‘nal organizations like the ACLA and the Association of Departments and Pro: grams of Comparative Literature to frame the never-ending discussion about what ‘We do and why. This part of our work can happen only “sit ein Gesprich wir sind / ‘und horen knnen voneinender” asthe poet says with sublimity and bathos. If book had a dedi willingness to renew the conditions ofthat conversa ations, in gratitude for their steady gy fangl, shang” MORILOROTAT RICHIE, (Objects and Methods in Comparative Literature, parts). Translated by He Shaobin F104 mg biiao werecue PLASC 563 (2004): 28-30. iedensfiee(Chied untitled dra), in Halder, Werke (Ranke art am Main: Insel, 1983), 239. Rough translation: “since we have been Andare ale to hear from each other”CHAPTER ONE Exquisite Cadavers Stitched from Fresh Nightmares Of Memes, Hives, and Selfish Genes HAUN saussy ‘The ‘Triumph of Comparative Literature Yeti the— alow that’s having other peop-1's fantasies, Suffering what they ought to be themseves- Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’ Rainbow ‘Comparative literature has, in @ sense, won its battles. It has never been better received in the American university The premises and protocols characteristic of our xe now the daily currency of coursework, publishing, hiring, and coffee~ ‘who wrote in “foreign languages” are now taught departments of English! The “transna- humanities programs, collaborative research gro only legitimate: now, as often as not, our is the firs rest ofthe orchestra. Our conclusions have become other people's assumptions.4 Haun Sausy ‘But tis victory brings little in the way of tangible rewards to the discipline. What self-selecting profession has gone out into the world and won over people who have no particular loyalty to institutional bodies of compar both for satisfaction and for a restless kind of disap paratsts now.—and for good reason—but ot ity with three or more languages that tare programs still require—do nat apply to the application of ideas pioneeted in our de Man, Seid, Derrida, or Spivak. The omnipresence of comparative does not by any means betoken a large and powerful university department in that discipline; infact, it might be used as an argument against the necessity of founding. cone. Compat thinly funded patch- works of committe representation, cro ature programs in most us and teaching have spre spite what our frends in beleaguered language-and- literature departments may say) by an empire, ‘We might be forgiven for wanting to bring home the fruits of our collective in. tellectual influence. One nightmare scenario about genetically modified crops has poverty-stricken farmers obliged to pay heavily every year for spectal seed stock that is patented by the corporations that did the development; another has modified {genes escaping, through pollen, out into nature and altering the makeu and cultivated plants. In our case, itis certainly the second metaphor that applies. The successful propagation of traits from the comparative literature family has not been accompanied by mechanisms of i (of “branding,” to use a term shared by cowboys and: ), We ae universal and anonymous but perilous one in the scramble i we experience every day in the support of deans and budget officers were the measure of success? Have you been a departme sagt A beehive can grow 2 certain size before its numbers begi Exquisite Cadaves Stitched from Fesh Nightmares 5 hives off into other departments and disciplines is proof of its vitality. Or have you -mistaken the unit of enalysis? In attempting to confute the Darwinian theory of natu- ral selection, skeptics collected examples of tusits and behaviors that did not advance the fitness of the individual this then brought forth the clarification thatthe effects tion are seen in the species, not the single snimal. And others have proposed the “invisible hand” behind natural selection is not the interest of the species but reflex, the comparative way of thinking, not the departmental name; those are to be spread atthe cost of identity and institutional reward, so much the worse for identity. it so happens that identity isthe pivot of our triumph—and our wraithlikeness. About Our Selflessness: An Origin-Story ARERR ABER. What others cast off collect; ‘What others see, supply. —he merchant Boi Gui, oconded by Sima Qian comparative spectively as operating at every moment ofthe history of the discipline—a history of counter-, supra, and meta-insttutional act Comparative literature, as we all know, isa product ofthe nineteenth century. But in another sense all literature has always been comparative, watered by many streams. ‘The clay tablets of Mesopotamia yield evidence of rivalries and strategic mergings among the hero-narratives of neighboring culture, as do the books of the Bible." Seeking the true sublime in “examples that please all and always," the rhetor formerly Prolonged engagement caused speakers and wri ‘own very dif Features of the morphology of written Latin that we take for granted—the di ‘ness of individual words marked by white space, for instanoe—were first elabor: bby Celtic-speaking scribes who lacked the rhetorical and literary training of the typi-5 How Sawssy cal Roman patrician and needed the extra help Not justinfluence, ut consciousness of difference and relation, i at work in these collisions. “Languages in contact” spawn [And yet this indeterminably anciea particular origin in the era of nati purposes of manufacturing a mythology, thee figures can be named as by describing those of Germany to her French fellow-citi- zens, she initiated what Michael Palencia-Roth has since denominated “contrastive literature” that i, refletion on national genres, devices, styles, and occasions of imagi ces through the themes, attitudes, 1g" Her book showed Erench culture with all ts unconscious universelism a corresponding image: another world vocal by Heder instantaneous international welcome—and thus the comparativ-iteratureeffective- ns hastened) sd by travel and patterned on inter- mal commerce: "If such a world literature wll soon come into being, a is inevi- the coming of an age of “wor sman interaction, then we may not expect, the name and predicts th So, as an institution, compars e year of Nietasche's Human, Ail Too Human and of Tollope’s Is He Popinjoy?—twelve years atier the conclusion of the American Civil Wer, seven years after Bismarck’s Reich, five years after Middlemarch (with its unfortunate Casaubon and his key to all my- ‘thologies”), three yeats after the International Postal Union. It is six years older than the Brooklyn Bridge and twelve years older than the Eifel Tower. But a name, a birth Bequisite Cadavers Stitched rom Presh Nightmares 7 date and a time line do not yet tell us what ipline was designed to do, "Ver~ _glcichende Literatur” and its equivalents in various languages were the statement of a ‘program, a call inviting a response, What were the terms of the call? Who responded, and how’ Forthe reader of 877, “comparative” was a in a single word. Since 1809, pl enable the reading of texts in Old for their bases in myth and history, and questioned for wh about the origins of the peoples whose cultural “property ‘The Deutsche Grammatil Mythologie (n855) of the Brothers um created Germans ge before itcould be achieved through. cal means." National rivalries, particularly acute along the French/German axis, Sesignted scholer-heroes who fashioned, through text editing and dialectology and in perpetual awareness of the identitarian needs of their state sponsors, versions of ty were at root forms of the same language. And the consequences tive method were the same when applied to the content of utterances: Michel Bréal, for example, in the pivotal year 1877, proposed that “the Révmdyana and the liad may mek contain episodes thet retell, under different names, ¢ when all the selfsame fact” Linguistic or literary chauvinism is beyond the p& roads ead to the shores ofthe Indus, and no local hero is more the from the layers of subsequent accretion, the comparative method tended to dissolve ide any rate their singular expressions, into @ common source. One discipline seized ‘oder to pare them away; the other did so in order to neutralize them, differences in8 How Soussy Meltel de Lomnitz, in his program for comparative literature, announces “the principe of polyglottism” and prescribes ten languages asthe basis for literary study: German, English, French, leslandic, Italian, Dutch, course on cognates or common ancestors, for Hungarian the science will have to suspend its ftom reports of contact or ature questions the the ultimete ancestor snd also the decisive swerve of philological method) toward a the world takes to be By not being a science of origins, comparative literature establishes an indefinite task fr itself Comparative philology could, inthe end, use up its raison d'etre: after a suff covery process, a pa and the regularity of thei ‘mon source. Comparative philology found wh from the foreground of scholarly attention once the floor plan of histor lar fate lay in store for a related fel, comparative anatomy, which 'a term employed to designate the study of the structure of man in contradistinction to human anatomy; ‘The change From the point of view of structure, man is one ofthe animals; anatomical structure must be comparative” By winning its case, compara ‘omy had made itself obs presupposition of general anatomy. terminology is chiefly the res i became sim Exquisite Cadavers Stich from Fesh Nightmares 9 another existing branch of the historical sciences. ‘As of 1877, no branch of learning was more involved with and indebted to na- tional strivings than the study of moder languages and literatures. Chairs in rhet (@ discipline indebted to the ancients and imbued with Renaissance universalism) had been turned over into chairs of philology and linguistics, whose new possessors jan—singly or in histor mance philology). Comparative literature a coneutrent tongues set inst the model of national language and. ature studies In so doing, it certainly made finding a patron more diffi ‘while particular ministries of education could and did always find it reasonable to ap- point professors of the national heritage, a heritage thi once everybody's and nobody's lacked the appeal of Metz! dle Lomanitz, professor of Germanic philology at the Un ‘present-day Romania, published his grandly titled Acta comparationisliteraruns untversarut (Journal for the Comparison of the ‘Totality of Literature) himself, It was in France, a country where culture had long, ly one with national ‘¢ linguistic frontier leaned toward systematic global per- -spectives, yielding common patterns of development. (Thus, for Charles Mills Gayley erature is “the general theory of liter: traditions.” What they have in common is a noncongruence with studies of the an ‘guage and canon of particular nations (what we in the United States. ature department) and, by consequence, a diffi ture could provide a proof « contraro ofthe persis "a relatively recent political 10 define and shape culture. Circa 1777 in ise the disciplines that handled we would today call literary texts were rhetor and thcology-—all of them based on ancient or common property of cultivated people. By 1877, it seemed,10 Fun Ss taner for post-Renaissance literatures was the national language and culture. Comparative literature strove against this. ‘Metta’ comparative literature makes indeed, forthe East. Afar longer temporal series; a single dominant literary idiom shared by multiple dynasties, nations religions, and languages; a common ‘canon, parsed and combated in many ways; the emergence of vernaculars from and against the literary language; exchanges with peoples from éifferent cultural Back: grounds, and the consequent adaptations and reval ‘combine to make East Asia a more “norenal” grown South Asianists, Americanists, and others could 1 of 1851, 1867, 1889, sophers, psychologists, the Red Cross; the Soc the emergence of civil-society organizations for a universal language for female suffrage, for eugenics. (As this brie isting shows, such bodies, even when nization gave quasi-politcal substance to professionally defined ers (and presented opportunities for the politcal manipu: y enter the nevly created internat in the literary domain, express its logic" Many compara ceedings of international congresses are replete with references to the encouragement comparatists of every country de- ogether. as a word with imp ” it suggests that what Religion will take on a new look by being put next to other things of the same kind. (That there ae “other things ofthe same kind” is what some adepts of Philosop the definition istorical pater been, in isolation, simply Philosophy or hed from Fresh Nghomares 11 and the rest) by throwing examples and counterexamples att Founded in the era of national and hist comparative literature ny “selflessness sage with ther reason is our close dependency anguage-and-lerature disci rnparatve literature was created ne. Without taining in specific languages and canons, a comparatst will have nothing to work in administrative terms, a metadiscipline o even 4 counterdisciptne, founded on the traditions of learning in national languages and \iterares, inseparable from them but distinct from them in its purposes. It occupies and has en: the oly way to get theres through a which example, English literature in a transnational mode, so as to preserve the very differences of language and histori cal moment that a wholesale “denstionalization”ofitratures into Literature would erode?" In proposing to consider world iterature 3s "aneliptical refraction of national it- exatues}"“nota set canon of texts but a mode of reading.” David Damresch reminds at there willbe ces as there ae national o local peespoc- tives, that world ‘that committee structure again—fom parts that ty department structure and some out of it, own, in methods rather than in subject matter. Of Objects and Methods ive, tha of view, eems to betray an underlying fa clsra of dramatic incomparsbi12 Haun Sausy some idea of the considerations that set the iit to conceptual contrast Donald Davison, "On the Very den of Conceptual Scheme” ‘To be a linguist these days, you do not have to know a lot of languages, despite the older meaning of the term the lst fifty or sixty years, linguistics has developed a set of autonomous research programs that do not involve engaging with st few decades, it has language at that level of detail. Similar) stature: one could study aesthetic pedagogy—even the history of theories of lterature—as 50 many independent fields. Buta field composed of examples (and of theories of what the examples are examples of) like comparative literature has lite chance of declaring scholarly independence. What would we do 2 This condition of imperfect autonomy keeps us awake at night and makes for ahigh degree of a field of study’; “Teannot mn can be constructed out of comparative literary his- like comparative philology anatomy, the point of reference common to any two phenomena would be their It- Exqwisite Cadavrs Stich rom Fresh Nightmares 13 cst shared ancestor: thus English five and Greek pent, distinct twigs on the tree of, language, lead us back through branchings of sound and sense to an European form, *penk'e, as to a trunk, Compa bs brain of the rat points out shared ancestral features as well as such comparison, asin a metaphor by Aristotle's account, the things. ‘to be compared lead the researcher to “solve for” their common factor, the tetium comparationis oF ground. Where the third term is missing or simply too remote to n of man and story of develop- ment of ea documents and conjecture) To use an older language: the fertium comparationis was expected tobe a fardamenturn in re. Thus the comparative disciplines on the analogy cof which comparative literature was fist proposed thought of the Altaic, ete). Itwould in folklore and mythology. (othe patterns of linguistic diffusion and differentiation.” interest in modern literary traffic across languages and bord sn character [of] production and consumption in every country” that creates the “cos- ‘man experience. corpus of word literat places: an account of hovr the works make their subject matter manifest is the only14 Har Sausy thing that can save a comparison of nat for ex themes can poetry in Wordsworth and Xie Lingyum, sypathesis at best, the uni of selected conclusion. Enumeration isa slender form: and with a horizon of univerelity, one has never finished enumerating. ‘But for literature in translation, where nothing of the work may survive the pro- ‘cess but the subject matter, there is no better place to start, Thematic reading is the constant pedagogi erature may not work f offers a hopeful case: “Kate's haunting ironies play out do not always translate well, yet ‘the Katkaesque’ is fully visible in translation at the levels of the paragraph and the scene’ If s0, good for Kafka, and good for Chekhov and many others; but not every author scales up so convincingly from sentence to interpretation, ature But what works for world vice versa, David Damros se comparative study, paragraph o scene level. ‘To perceive in Dante, Baudelaire, or Sei Shonagon only the Poets, for evident What comes aeross in thematic reading in response to conditions of our encounter with translated litera sarily what is most worth knowing about a work. A method of analysis t content to have been acquired can only with difficulty as if we know how to read, they are also is good for: by patting tr tive language undergo “the tet of foreignness to play. But thie ole requires that lnguage—the language ofthe origina bie understood as having a weight and resistance of for teaching works they do not readin the original, some ness to deal with remot knowledges maintain serving, Comparative pedagogy must find a way to steer between uns and to take collaborative risks, Unless specialist 3 desired standard, such arguments arein danger of ap~ Ifthe specific object of comparative literature is not found in the thematic content ‘of works, perhaps i lies in a dimension of which works and their contents are only symptoms. Can something as impermanent as imagination and tale-telling give rise Bxquisite Cadavers the from Fresh Nightmares 15 to true knowledge, as Socrates might have asked? Or do the fluctuating phenomena boil down in the end to something solid and necessary? Ideas of inescapable evolu- jonary rhythms shaped the comparative work of Alexander Vesclovskij teenth century, and of his twentieth-century successor Viktor ny as a sequence of sta ture to social science must have been a useful vn for compara- tive study was the symbolically titled Growth of Literature by H. Munro Chadwick. and N. Kershaw Chadwick. The authors declared thetr a inciples in regard to the history of tent ofa number of ancient Europea tobe “to formulate some sed on the results of the ological classification, What were the origi ‘genres and topoi obsessed them, and how did they change over time? The goal of rudy as the Chadwicks formulate it precludes giving too much atten- ngs would constitute meddlings with an experiment that should have been [eft to run ts course, The gram devised for comparative literature by van Tieghem, the study of! and imports. That comparative literary research could issue in two so well-stocked yet ly contrary paradigms at the same time shows the capaciousness, or perhaps the ‘enterprise thus appears asthe reversed image of the pro- Another 19308 experimer of the theories of I. A. Richards and C. K. Ogden, founded comparative literature on ‘A national language isan inintely complicated st of estes. By nations manipulate 1s of symbols verse, and a the same time relieve and stimulate emotions. ty of «range of sense fe IF this rough account of meaning is acceptable, the comparison of literatures will ‘become the comparison ofthe several kinds of meaning which the Germans, Feench, English and Americen peoples seck elicit by the use of words”16 Haun Sausy Here an anthropological category—human sign-using capacities —has taken the place of the common ground and serves as a metric for evaluating how far apart the 3 of Europe have grown, or how much similarity remains to them, after hun: ieds of yeas of schooling inthe vernacular languages ofeach. his Theory of Prose The cornmon trunk to which all the ex tense book refer isthe contention that writing is di not subject matter the thesis of “Art as Devic.” Here the intellectual leanings of the and the object-hunger of comps ature are in alignment, or in the fog of Russian modern ruse aterm made famous by ‘would have been had ShKlovsis work not been I and it makes perfect sense for acosmopo! search out and describe it in all its contexts. ‘What Shidovslij did for prose, Roman Jakobson did for poetry, but witha signifi- lifference: where Shklovskij’s arguments could be made on the bass of transla- icumstance,Jakobson found that mnsand not suffer from: devices were strongly co Although a very abst 8 shaped, for example, by the opportunities furnished by differentiation, ‘berwoen labialized and plain consonants (asin Rusien),by classes of tone and rhyme (as in classical Chines of the most adva outside it—for example, Foucauldian shave generated, like linguistics, that seem to pat the obj rary study ata remove erry terms helps ved from the reading of works in Zusi or Gikuy as well as from works {in French or Italian. But nothing should be taken for granted. When the effort is ‘made to integrate contemporary vocabularies withthe traditional lexicon of literary effects used i for example, the forced matches and awkward remainders of Exquisite Cadavers Stitched rom Fresh Nighmares 17 connotation on both sides reveal as much incompatibility as harmony. If proposing. ‘equivalences is one job compari and i needs to run up against these inder that the ni agrees to disregard are not merely arbi ‘The “linguistics of literariness” provides a rich conceptual framework and prom- ‘ses extension to an indefinite number of potential contexts of discovery: no human culture is without verbal art, and there are as many “devices” as there are ways of drawn on & continuous landscape. tuopological dimension of language .,.can be revealed in any verbal event when itis read textually” —even the Socratic dialogues of Archic and Edith Bunker. Formalist ture share a set of charac reading isa great dissolver of canons. fall works of teristics which it tes as diferent, in almost every other respects Shklovasj,Jakobson, and de Man show the power and attractiveness for comparative literature ofa concept ovwever variously it may be put o work. Itisnota concept for which inguistic frontiers or historical epochs matter much, so it promises to wave aside many of the attempt to define a priori what language in the same ways, is its message. The modal character of literariness robust and context-independent, exactly what an expanding research project being property of literature, and it suggest acategory-slippage between a disciplin- ary product and a restricted class of objects, Some paradoxes follow from the elev ng been written—even comparative and international ones—but ‘history of literariness i difficult to imagine, The kind of reading that discovers lit- crariness, the kind of seeing appropriate to nonrepresentational painting, the kind of18 How Saussy listening appro; of the artistic media sic—each announces and confirms the autonomy under consideration. Te just as vehicles forthe conveyance of gene [Even in the period of ture could not quite ingle coherent research program. The centrality must therefore have always been a virtual model, an heteronomous activities might aspire. Oddly, the moment inthe bi ature that saw it dwelling most insistently on the character iongestinterdisciplinary energies. In another paradoxical twist, the summoning of lterariness from attention to transcended the concerns of jonal concerns seem wi le College of Theory (sometimes but not always located in com- ture departments) roamed the floor plans of previously distinct curr me who made or applied Theory became comparatist, if only by defeult because of the undeniably specific and multiple historical origins of the theoretical vocabulary: Some twenty years after the moment of Theory’ for quite unrelated reasons, this neut ‘become an institutional reality. Across the country, programs in languages and ceratures are being eliminated, consolidated into big, diverse departments of forcign languages and literatures, or subcontracted to units outside the humanities (inter- national and overseas programs, for example). The academic environment that gave ne in which the national languages an: test influence, and ature project of nation: in postcolonial national tradition ina larger context. Comparative liter previous part after this redistribution ofthe roles, These separate treatment in a later section ofthis report. ‘The 1993 ACLA report on the st a8 Compara ‘raturein the new millennium” asa feld of fields, dav ties for boundary crossing: toboundariesas opportuni- ‘The space of comparison today inveves comparisons between artistic product ally studied by diferent dlsciplnes; between various cclural construct Exquisite Gadavers Sted rom Fresh Nightmares 19 iscipines; between Western cultral traditions both high and popular, and those of non. Wester cultures Between the pre-and postcontct cultural productions of colo nized peoples between gender constructions defined s feminine and those defined 3s longer adequataly describe our abject of ed” ‘The 1993 committee members were not so much declaring a new direction for note of tendencies already at work. Ifthe standard dem: sgressed by degree programs and books in comparative iterature—language, genre, period—derive from the frameworks of national literary ions suggested here come from media stud isi’ at all “woreying about the historical contingency of this category"is the studies task to which the Bernheimer committee summons us No les than any other statement inthe il the 1993 report expresses a theory of are to beseen ing, and often con. production” (42)."Comparat sof cultural expression, both phenomenal and diseursve their different epistemological economic,and political contexts” (45). The cont ture had replaced the n: change, with ts owa universalism and accounts o terature” without borders that had formed the disciplinary focus of literature in the 19505 and 6os was to be redescribed as20 Hews Sausey gender, sexual preference), historical geography (the West, the non-West; conditions before and after European colonization), the history of technology (forms of com- no preestablished {s couched in terms from outside its p 128 and becoming an area of appl plines in this scenario are the rola anthropological groundwork in-house. (The impression thatthe 1993 ‘eport hands down conclusions arr value judgments offered as obiter dicta need for comparat translations, exp c ines, and theoretical soph sry anonby propos- Comparative literature seems tapped the in-between, a ple commitments. “History, cul- ion, gender, sexual orientation, class, race—a reading in the new ‘mode [of 1995] has to try to take as many of these factors as poss big money isin eeifying, a ace literature” attract attention because of special kind of Japanese, Greek, Exquisite Cadavers Stitched rom Fresh Nightmares 21 and Norse to deny that there is any such thing s “poetic rhythm” independent of the comparative context. Nevertheless, it is possible that the referent of compatison is ‘ot some common substrate ofthe things being compared, but the act of comparing, for a weak hypothesis about the iden y to describers tmeats, for example—came into existence because of a claim that does not come nate itself once more an adverb among ea a ofthe 1993 report as evidenced in the response from a diverse and energetic group of scholars, provides a set of mental maps of the ich else, The downgrading of the status of one mode of c all asa gesture directed against both the high: and the legacy of “grand theory’ whether the respondent thinks this downgrading is a good thing or a bad one. The adoption of categories from social ceived 2s a sacrifice of disciplinary autonomy, whether “border 1 recognition that “in fect, there is no central activity ofthe fie and sometimes by express argument, respondents indicate toward ther elective objects. Tell me what your objects are,and. “porosity” of disciplines re ry genses are easily assimilated to biography and history and which, moreover, lend themselves to translation and thematic readings and a neglect of poetry, which is tightly bound see the future of, discourse among ural canon of European literatures ‘to Tanguage and has affinities with philosophy and logic22 Haun Sausy rouble taking place. Once we get into the details, the big pie- ne dissolves, and the opposing forces melt into one another, al languages—is treated as expendable by the authors of the report ina gesture that announces openness but might be read as suggesting that not all languages and “which the majority of the works were read printing of exotic names in several essays— Rey Chow observes thatthe integration of non-Western texts into the comparative literature canon may just mean confronting a new class of “Eurocentric” specialists the question of what kinds of expertise will be considered valuable in the new eom- ‘parative literature: will departments of world cultural studies have to cultivate their ‘uninfected by the Eurocentric virust On all sides, the question is not ature and admit new traditions and canons, but hows ads us away from the delusional questions of i and toward the pragmatic ones, away from statements such as “The proper object of ” and toward ones such as “What we do in comparative literature is... For to frame the cont cence in the obj between “litersture” and “cultural studies” as a differ- of study would make sense only if comparat hat abruptly changed its focu soon undergo an identity criss far profounder than would an eco- nomics department that stopped studying Russia and turned its attention to Latin ‘America, The historical pattern of comparative literature's declared objects of study (always migrating always retreating) gives no reason to think thatthe typical objects boxes but can be subjected to the kinds of analysis, critique, and contextualization that the discipline has taught comparatists to perform. Such reanalysis is what hap- pened, for example, with the theory of speech acts, an immigrant from the realms of law and ordinary-language philosophy: the idea was permanently modified by its ‘There is no necessary co speaking from the literary side, here isan antinomy between two propert object we know as “literatu ‘would probably be formulated as that between structure and agency.) To quote once more from an alleged arch-Formalist, “The (The corresponding antinomy in ing fact 1 occurrence” Putting aside the conn ‘Man's favorite term would mean erring away from what precise this formulation gives plenty of work to both cultural and historical studies (as the analysis of what“oceuss" in and through the power of sign systems) and litera defiance, and metathcoretical awareness) whatever there may be to read. Contextual- ization is always a legitimate epistemological move, but let us not grant any context the final authority of the real. That would be to make comparative literature a portal id best can provide, rature, of comparative literary history, or of interdisciplinarity. What is needed isa term similar to “bterariness” but for other, more meaningful, more conclusive dis whether in the modes that will not suggest an exclusive focus on written texts, on imaginative “literature” stake when we debate whether comparative literature wed to vanish, its work on earth accomplished, is ity: not because it sounds prestigious or guarantees our uniqueness, of our openness to new objects and forms of inquiry. 's seatch for its appropriate ference of the discipline isthe point of encounter of its various Ja may have litle else in common. It needs, s its manual of procedure, sry (a philosophy or an ideology} but a poetics (an elucidation of the art24 Hun Susy ive body of settled law, do not prove for ‘comers the"“comparabilt sm X and item Y, and thus, by some ace constitute a discipline, Comparative literature is engaged with specificity and rela tion: the specificity of the object whereby it exceeds established models of discourse, 8 objects. Every comparative ive onesbestanswer is encounter? What can you show us that we could not have leaned for ourselves by taking each objectin the ‘traditional perspective of i inc? These are in fact the questions asked of the discipline asa whole, and on them hinge its independence within institutions, The Age of What? f comparative literature as a ideas come down, then, to the same things its lack of permanent defining object, a position between and (methodologically speaking) above disciplines with deter nate fields and canons, and an openness to lateral linkages end nomothetic general- izations. di ch for changes in its environ boundary of the task of a periodic “report on the state of ion and its success asa se conceived 1 discipline” like this ome. What we face, as much as who we are or what we do, marks out the paths that our ‘may follow in the coming years, Predictions are always unreliable, but recent muta: sions in the political and institutional structures within which we practice leave litle wed. Some that might uni An Age of Unipolarity Ever since the world ended and ight. Mose Allison, “Ever Since the World Bred” Bouse Cadavers Stitched rom Fresh Nightmares 25 ‘Asa product of the nineteenth-century European nation system, comparative lit- divergent character ions whose form it echoes, ugh of course ature have been very much identi the fact that this international space, is admitted as2 fied with the projects of this or that state or regi: critique gives one hope). World literature t00 exists anthologies and syllabi always open to chllen Tanguage, oF originally North American in a heterogeneous state, creates a solution to the probl imilar set of opportuni of overlapping ide for groups to sue for recognition. Indeed, since much of jm plays out as a domestic version of international tative in ke id al decisions on a world sca by the perceived. shington consensus” about the shape of market nce needs of the United. reforms required before countries can obtain International Monetary Fund ass purposes, privilege it does not extend to other nations, 2001) to block the emergence of regional or global rivals. At this end of ¢ centu “irrelevant” is the long are ofthe rise and decline of supra-governmental organi25 Heun Sausy ms Favored terms to deseribe the United Nations, whenever the teralism seems even to have conquered the domain rerchange between fact and verification, as if repeating a claim often enough sufficed to make it true. Merely to imagine the end of American dominance pro- vvokes outery.® to clamor against y. In 1947 (the year of the founding of ‘the compar ture department at Yale, with Welle it first chair), Americans lxew that they would have to engage with the rest of the world in mixed tones of threat and persu ing to be an adequate plan for ion grows. The their desires were not attacks of September 2001 have nat ye up international studies of language, & near-doubling of enrollments in Arabic) for the guidance and funding of language and azea studies since 2001 has been bighly instrumental in nature (teain- ing personnel who can read al nce intercepts, rather than formi Foreign language and literature teaching in general have much to lose: we may find ourselves one day teaching liteature-in-translation and cultural studies because the infrastructure for our traditional concerns hes collapsed. Com should take the side of foreign-language progrems in the in ces, However hard cl ical Chinese or Arabic may be, however and complex the traditions of annotation and inte slations of Laozi or the Quran is those works in the original. Books from far away or long ago are precisely the works that more people in the North American mainstream need to know intimately. A twansation always brings across most successfully the aspects of a 3 Which its sudience is already prepared; but ost worth knowing may be what requires 10s strenuous and imaginative adaptation from its readers, As members of na- mal language departments (which most of us are, atleast part ofthe time), weneed to develop those readers; and as comparatsts, we need to link readers and reading strategies together to fashion ever wider and deeper collaborations of reading, STEVENSON LIBRARY BARI COLLEGE Exquisite Cadavers Stitched from Presh Nightmares 27 Unipolarty forces us to co from yet anot standpoint: not ‘multiple ways of coming to and through those po dent who chooses to reawaken a (possibly suppressed) “home language” cee, and advance it to literary competency isin a different situation from his or her grandparents, who might have left Chinese behind as they received an English ‘ences have points in common, ‘works, great authors; the ease or difficulty of greater or lesser der the reeders end to adhere to rece experience of reading, Immigrants and colonized people (who night be said to have been immigrated upon) are already comparatists in much of their daily behavios, since their words and actions exist under two idioms, two scales of value, two legitimating vocabularies. The “double consciousness” articulated by \W.E.B, DuBois admits of many variations, Thus, the meaning of comparati erature changes asthe frame of reference shifls; although people share a disci sespace is organized differently for each, We are fortunate to inhabit a mul- ‘ipolar profession; the nes make ita contrarian model. An Age of Inequality fall the seas were one ea ‘What great sea that would be er Goose Claude Lévi-Strauss was haunted by the idea thatthe real name of his dis. \was not anthropology but “entropology”: “Every verbal exchange, e establishes communication between people, thus creatingan evenness gap and consequently a greater degre ‘works in the same way as power transmi before there was an informat tion?” C the charge on all points of its system, secking a point of rest. ( Lévi-Strauss’s journey to the Amazonian hinterlands followed the ph line, a material connection, though often broken, between capital and outposts.) The ethnographer brings back information from remote peo- the brush fora tele28 HownSousy that separate them from others by translation as much as by overcoming the herdships and dangers of travel, and alo leaves something himself with the people investigated. In the long run, comrmunication must reign nopposed and differences be reconciled in a universal “disintegration,” the end of the world for ethnographic purposes. Lévi-Strauss could have saved himself the worry. The (always unevenly disteib- uted) realm of globalized interchange maintains difference as an essential part of its uuniversalizing program. L& del was too simple: it failed to take into account the asymmetry and nontranspazeney of markets. restricting trade among countries) between individuals who benefit from externa s—which once could have been imagined as nearly sown borders, language, main products, laws, cus- economy; but the single mong states and between the rich and poor srehas always thought about difference, bt inequality remains ular, transverse 10 of diferences. les that we cannot inclusiveness, The ‘more cosmopolitan our reach, the more evident the problem. Knowledge obtained across steep gradients of inequality istunretiable—one of the many arguments against ‘ea8 an intelligence-pathering tool. Much postcolonial scholarship (erroneously tegorized as mere special pleading) has attempted to think about this condition. bulwark or a nontransparent market in certain cultural goods. Multiculturalism is often an ettempt to establish e footing of equality among positions otherwise sharply _up- or downhill from each other: The lore of "hybridity" too, teaches that “there's no Boise Cadaver Stiched from Fresh Nighomares 29 1 thousand forms of Cinderella). But hybridity as such often (imagist chinois translator always pectarbs the settled economy of two linguistic systems; operations among languages and cultures are not carried out by Maxwell's energy-conserving Demon. A task for comparative literature (and, all the more, for world litera ects 3° should we expect one ison in which local agendas reconcile point about the multi ‘world literature” perspectives again), An example is the history of the Chinese disciplinary field bifiao wemxue HERI (which trans- lates as “comparative literature”), nonexistent before 1917 and created i need to define what is properly, uniquely Chinese, through contrast with the “others” its disturbance effets in modern Chinese culture have not been small:* An Age of Institutional Transformatic omy have con sequences closer to home, The original purpose of founding a nation was, alter all, protectionist: people needed walls and moats to “promote the general welfare” As ‘multilateral teade agreements bind countries to remove their import-substitution ning the mos eflicient industry possible, they can absorb their costs by raising prices. An ébenist can find enough commissions in Manhattan or Beverly Hills, whilst furniture workers in North Carolina have lost their jobs to lower-priced labor abroad. The highly skilled, proposing objects of rarity30 Haw Sausy ‘to a small public of patrons, prosper, but the market offers consumers lower down the same space with @ competitor that wins economies of scale, and is necessarily always seeking to expand marketshare, watch out. ‘mand thet research pay for itself deepen the differences between elite institutions and those with a more pragmatically defined service mission. The efforts of Allan Bloom, Sanmuel Huntington, and Sayyid Qutb to the contrary hardly anyone believes and those that have to buy from sweatshops; the middle zone of craft disappears ur reaction i typically o tr to proteet what we can from the ruthlessnes of he ‘market: to stand up for Medieval Russian or the Sigo de Oro. But such efforts may only delay or displace sacrifices. Long accustomed to thinking of fils in terms of “coverage” we have had to learn how the cultural market operates and how its ratio- rnality conceals (a5 do all markets) considerable irrationaity—bubbles and shelters round which we can strategize. sive its main significance. ‘than one job) in national literatures? Is the teaching oriented toward electives, degree Fequirements, or courses (or majors? What are the opportunities for research? The «continued existence of comparative literature in hard times is reason for celebration, Jboona tenure line? Does it replace a job (or more Exquisite Cadavers Stitch ror Fresh Nighomares 31 lebeation iit tums out that we are gaining 2 the expense make our metadiscipline possible. ‘but ever more mode of the sister diseiplin An Age of Information human beings always put technology, nd the even stranger thoughts they bred out of those uses; about the way the word is always changing... about the way polit technology and economies and jforration low and that clement ‘of expresive styl in ones approach to them... are insepatable tangles rather than mummerable disrete sues whose interfaces and iterations and implications an be analytiealy identified and he people who can wal with a through a howling muy node Teresa Nilsen Hayden, Making Bonk ‘We live in an era of plentiful iaformation, information so readily available as to be lmost worthless, Wiceess data appliances can serve esa metaphor forthe condition: Awareness would need to be assuaged by ever more profound connections among, ‘ever larger groups of data. This is contextual interpretation with a vengeance. The ‘question of what a person might mean to do becomes saturated with determinants [Neurobiology cluters the folk concepts of intention, blame, and feeling with its au- tonomous accounts of chemical and electrical transmission. Soon Radio Frequency32 Hawn Seusy cach tag broadcasting its one of 18 thousand In such a perspective, most ofl low-bandwidth era of communications. The reader of ature is a paleontologist, scraping and fitting together a few poor bones to imagine a ten-story beast. A plain- text version of War and Pence, downloadable gratis, thanks to the Gutenberg Project contains only data in Z1P format.* What carries an ordinary reader tough weeks es nonreaders by its bulk om the library shelf takes up the same amount of al space as ~a freeware program that organizes your résumé, — any of 9 songs in MP3 format posted by Eric and the Thin Line, inute sample from “The Sounds of Moo: The Young Polish Real Elec- tronic Music?” —2 PDF catalogue of bathroom window shades, —oralmost any one of the vacation pictures on my hard drive. ‘The close readings and paradoxes of tradit rary criticism must have been symptoms ofthe information-poor communications networks of the past, when de- is mattered, It mattered when the 1631 reprinting of the Authorized Version of the al sive array of data points pixels without anyone’ contemporary literature isa journey into a different epistemological world (ur students, when asked to do research, go to Google and conduct word scans: “pierre natasha psychology love” suadl them to goto the ‘would anyone do he all the time, now that whole libraries ate being scenmed into stantly searchable all the way to its farthest recesses, But the according to Google is vast er proximity to other keywords, more or less highly ranked in a rep algo= rithm that depends om following the behavior of other users of Google. Advert ‘may shufile the results. Fora reader whose experience of literature has been & matter of following arguments and assessing which statements are subordinated to which Buguisite Cadavers Stitched rom Fresh Nightmares 33 is apt to have a Cut the more vividly) 1 generation used to having Google for its ‘may not see any Cubism thereat all Google levels the world line encyclopedist and lexicographer a degree cultural studies might envy: for once,n0 ‘takes for granted that text and context are co-present, “really” in some precritical fashion, a move that allows for a positivstic style of reading. But can one ask the right ques endless quantitative corre sin such apositivstc setting? Is one condemned to wander a Google of jons or a Yehoo! of preestablished categories narrowing ble over every word, literature frustrates the cconomy of information in which more ata and faster aces in alvays beter. A socilogia study that hasan thee times greater than the next study wall be more relia ther layer of obstacles to the translation of text into dats. The job of comparat ists willbe, increasingly, to show why this is worth the trouble: ‘Someone once said—and was roundly derided for saying—that hhors-texte:" The translation into English as “There isnot stone I can tll you to ki tify to the textual condition, @ claim as modest as the 1." A generation's pedagogy went to learning what “text” ‘was, Likewise, there is no point to trying to escape the world of information—there is no outside toi, unless you want to depart from biology and physics as well ture is a kind of resistance to information's charm. An internal resistanct Informational orders are made, not natural (as if thet case ‘Yet we may find ourselves more and more acting as archaeol ration order of print, the people who remember the tact knowledge that neces precedes any reading.84 Haun Sausy Envoi: The Age of Comparative Literature? “Tan never tance of dleeves, the huombmail or the great issues that may hang fom a Sir Arthur Conan Dale, A Case of Identity” we should toate the iments, nd soon.” fe rejected—housing Continental philosophers or Marxist political mn somte campuses, on others providing a place for noncanonical languages to be taught, and now and then giving a second chance to graduate inal advisors thought they “lacked focus” We sometimes have a hard time explaining ourseives in other than negative terms (we've not the English department, not the French department, not philosophy 1 +++ Jyand we may be viewed by deans asa sideshow—or as a Punch-and-Judy show: 1 comparative literature department without confrontations isa collection of inert ye miscellaneous, disfa- versand virwosi of the better-organized disciplines; ‘our forming a smooth corporate i ‘margins and angles and all comers, may impede tity, but it gives us the opportunity to present ‘ourselves asthe test bed for reconceiving the ordering of knowledge both inside and outside the humanities. Why not graft Egypt phenomenology onto neurobio something. philology onto Japanese poetry, or layer vireual reality games tell us before? As every- the old justifications forthe existence of disciplines, or for keeping them come more and more into question for intellectual as well as budgetary rea sons, and comparative literature can move into the gaps betveen disciplines without ‘Bequisite Cadavere Stitched fom Fresh Nightmares 35, (for once) a sense of sacrifice. The history of “theory! (not to say the banality of infinite repetition th 8 precedent. Mark Granovetter reported that people secure importan sxample, get jobs—more often through chance acquain ids than through members of their established social net already know one another and possess the same “social capital,” so if is to come into a person's world, its likely to be through a less predictable avenue ‘The logic of "weak ties” could be a description of interdsciplinarity or indeed o tre. It is how we earn: not so much through coverage as throug! sgrnapse, to mumble Greek). Most of the innovations in the sixy-yea history of our profession in this country can be s {among disciplines, among methods, among canons ind thus ose their power to bring in new intellectual o that eventually becom ‘Many departments have instituted interdisciplinarity by seting up, ‘traditional three-literatures standard for degree programs, the option of pr literatures in two languages plus a “field” —usually in practice, a related hums ties discipline such as history, film studies, philosophy, or art history, but occasion ally something further off the beat: architecture, economics, law, computer science should be encouraged. The “two languages and afield” option is by no means a relax ing of requirements for worthwhile interdisciplinary work to happen, the researche must try to become a plausible “native speaker” of the idiom ofa field, acquiting legacy of results and controversy, and doing what others in the field do (runni programming code, taking surveys, titrating blood samples). And, t terests of comparative literature, the researcher must bring sticulate conceptual and effective connections among the field involved, ‘What adventurous students do shows us what th Always under threat of being clasified asthe rubric: tive literature departments should attempt an explanation of what their internal conve iscipline can and should do icking which, they may not de36 Haun Seusy serve to be maintained) is abor this most successful and most phant knocking on doors and announced ‘our patterns of thinking. Ours too. 2. David Damroseh, What ls World Literature? (Prineston, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003),39-77. 2 ecudo-Longins, On the Subtme ard furnal of Asia Studies 4. Boul Soenger, “Silent Re 9. Goethe saw De Allemagne as having broken prejudice that separated us fom France’; ced hy Horst Nitschack, "Die Rezepton Madame de tals in Spanien und Hispenoamerit"in Madame de Stall und die International der ew roplsen Romanti . Udo Schoning nd Frank Seemana (Gtingen: Waste, 2003), 39. 1, Cited and translated in Hendrik Biru,“The Goethean Concept of Comparative Litera- yoo-afirasooshtml. The pastge 142.25 PP 502-3. ‘i. Hugo Mettal de Lomnit,"The Preset Tasks of Comparative Literature Comparative “The Early Years ed Fists-Joachim Schulz end Philip H. Rhein (Chapel Hil: Univer- CCatolina Press, 973), 6-62. Orginal “Vorltufige Aufgaben der vergleichenden Leitch fr verglechende Lierat (1877): 79-82. ‘On ths period, ee R, H, Robin, A Short History of Lingisics (Bloomington: India ‘University Pres, 1967) 69-8 Hansar, 002); B, Howat Bloch, * ‘A New History of reve Literatur, ed. Denis Holi (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univesity Exquisite Cadaver: Stitched fom Fash Nightmares 37 On Indo-Butopean “nationalism,” see Haun Saussy, “Always Multiple Transla- Chinese Language Lost its Grammar 107-29 in Tokens of Exchange ed. Lyin N.C Dake University Press, 199 of Comparative Literature strikes the pure note: dis infact, born no longer to the freedom of ‘or brighter dream of all reat force, but where reason is supreme. Paradigms in World Literature” What ls World Literature? 28, Se also Franco More, "Conjectures re” New Left Review (2000): 54-68. 26, On telack “home” as biographical and disciplinary fot, see Hil Apter, "Glob Tant- {ato he Invention’ of Comparative Literature, Istanbul 535" Chita Inquiry 29 (2003) 359-8.38 Haun Sausey cssman and Sparioss, Building a Profession, contains remarkably in response to adm acting the carers of tive deci Ulich Weise, “Asesing the Assessors: An Anatomy of Coropartive Litera- Communs: Contemporary Tiends in Comparative Literature, Fest lance Ret, Peter Boerner and Bernhard Scholz (Tubingen: Gunter Literature atthe Crossroads: Diagnosis, Therapy, ‘and General Literature 9 (1960): 3. The observation A: se René Wellek, “The Crisis of Comparative Titera- nen G- Nichols (New Haven Yale gm (Bakimore: Johns Hopkins University ‘On precisely this pattern, Est Rober Curtis's Europenr Literanureand the Latin Mile ash (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Pres, 48) reconstructs the before the emergence of the verneulas. Fora methodological con- vttbachs Mines The Representation of Reality in Europe Literatur, (Dathars, N.C: Duke Universit Pres, 1994). 1¢ Communist arty” Selected Works in jon of erature asthe province of “un (The Hague: Mouto SH Munro Chadwick and. Kes Bxguste Cadavere Stitched rom Fresh Ni 49, Viktor Shlovsky, Theory of Prove, trans, Benjamin Sher ‘We Like as opposed to Nationalism We Dist 8 Imwood Pa UL: Dalle40 Howe Sausy ‘Charles Beemmes’ 4 See Werner Sal racial Literature (Now York: Oxford Ur Literature (Stanford, Calif: Stanford Uni 55. Haun Savsy “Compr 58 Peter Brooks,"Must We Apologize?” in Compa Literature inthe Age of Mi souction” Comparative Literatur in the Age of Mico 8. lack nor White Yer Boek: Thematic Explorations of ntr~ tre in Comparative Literature the 1 44 Literaare an, heory of Literary Discourse (Bloomington: eseandale du cons parkant: Don Juan ave Comparative Hieraare i he Age of 6, Rey Chow;"in the Name of Comps (2, See Mary Louise Prat, Toward a Speech Ae (or Seduction in To Languages (Ithaca, NY: Bulle, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of enti (Neve York: Routledge, 1990) “Fragment pe uur of Literary Studies/ (New York: Norton, 2003) sation and its Dison (0558); 19.996 (002). Compare the B. Wels, “Foreign-Languoge Enroll a ADAL Ballin 3 (2008): 7-26. 1 "Building a New Public ‘Exquisite Cadavers Stitched fom Fresh Nightmares 41 ‘ea About Language,” Profession (2003): 110-9. ft this writing, the Senate was considering an Intemational Studies in Higher Education Act that would empower the Director of Homeland Security to name the members of a review committe charged with examining the “pe concept of cultural diference, aa bone of contention in human ri perception of effects of inequality (319-46), re, Comparer incomparable Place: A Memoir (New York: Kaeo 77. See, eg Homi Bhabha’ remarks on the 1992 Los Angeles uprisings in Anoa Deavere ‘Smith, Bilght: s Anges 1992 (New York: Anchor, 1994) 282-34 78. See Chen Song StH, ed, Wu si gianhou dongsé wenkua wentilashan srensuan EIFWTWESCHCIAREIABLSEIN (The controversy around the problem of Chinese and West om I owe these thoughts about the rican Academic rofesion” Liberal ensue and “comparative ei, "The Moxphing of scom.com/2o10-1089-98ox25htnl).On the dificult an information explosion, se Alexander Stl, The Future of the Past (Neve Yor {& Giroux, 2002) On the shift fom scarcity to abundance of information, se Fey Schnapp, 'No Future in The Fut of Literary Siu, ed. Gumbrecht and Moser, 90-96 8. See wnwiiblioorpiguenbergy {2 On'flaness” vee Fredric jameson, Postmodern orth Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, (Durham, N.C. Deke University Pres, 991), 6,26. Te ttl ofthe present essay was concocted to Jrustrate keyword searches a possibly Blameworthy poe of informational dendyism. ples for “stant reading” “reading st second band” in “Con- One of Decide'sobjects age of "2 iustrations 85, The misunderstanding owes s much to reception and tion if « (WS. public had not been ready and willing to see42 Haun Saussy 186, See Geotfiey Nunberg, "The Places of Books inthe Age of Electronic Reproduction’ Representations 24 (3993): 3-37; Lawrence Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (New York Basic Books, 2000) 7. Richard P Feyoman, _acrer (New York: Bantam, 88, Mark Granove 1360-80. 48, See N. Katherine Hayes, How We Became Post erature Informatics (Chicago: Univesity of Chicago Writing the Body into the Posthuman Technoscape!” Confgurt owe Joking, Mr. Feynman! Adventures of Curious Char- engi of Weak Ties American Journal of Sociology 78 (973): CHAPTER TWO World Literature in a Postcanonical, Hypercanonical Age DAVID DAMROSCH has exploded in scope during the past decade. No dy has been greater than the accelerating attention beyond masterworks by the great men of the European great powers The tellingly was content in its ist edition of 95510 survey the world through a total of only seventy-three authors, not one of whom was ‘womans, and all of whom were wiritorsin“the Western Tradition” stretching from ancient Athens and Jerusalem to modern Europe end North Americe. The muambers of included authors gradually expanded, third edition of 1976, the editors finally found room fortwo pages of writing by a woman, Sappho. Bu the European d, 1e Bernheimer report, ly concerned at the time thatthe early efforts to broaden the spectrum of word literature weren't so much dismantling the gret-power canon as, ‘extending its sway by admitting afew nev great powers into the alliance. As she sei in her response to the Bernheiener report: ‘The problem docs not go away if we simply substitute India, China, and Japan for Eng- land, France, and Germany....In such instances, the concept of literature istry sub- ordinate44 David Damrosch cure has “To a very teal extent, the expansion of our understanding of wor improved this situation during the past dozen years, The major anthologies (such as as five hundred authors in their pages, often with dozens of countries included. It is the old Burocentric canon has fallen away altogether. AS in this collection, contempor the inherited i the traditional center of hi ithas been achieved in postcolonial theory. We do live in aposteanonical age, but our age is postcanoni that it is postindustral. The rising stars of the postindustial economy, afterall, often turn out to look a good deal like the older industries: Amazon needs warehouses of bricks and mortar; Compaq huge assembly-line factories, com- jc chemicalsand pol lems, as they crank out an ever-growing jn much the same way is compounded by a second factor: many of the established to do quite well in our supposedly postindustrial age, Consider the auton and mainstay of the ol economy: far from going the way of the stage coach in the age of the Information Highway, the automobile is more ubiquitous than ever. Not only that: there are more luxury automobiles on the road then ever. ‘The Lexus the Mercedes, and their high-end friends have profited precisely by adding, ‘value in the form of dozens of microprocessors that do everything from improving y to remembering their driver prefered seating positions. ig. IF weno longer focus largely on a common rmasterworls that we can require our stu by acommon fund of knowledge of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Proust, and Joyce. But have these old-economy authors really dropped by the wayside? Quite the ry: they are more discussed than ever, and they continue to be more strongly sesented in survey anthologies than all uta very few ofthe new discoveries of re- cent decades Like the Lexus, the high-end author consolidates his (much more rarely World Literature ina Postenonical, ypercanonical Age 45 ‘het) market share by adding vaiue from the postcanonical trends: the James Joyce s today are giving mote and more: cern, or marginal perspectives” as the Bernheimer committee red we would, yet these perspectives are applied as readily to the major works of the “old” canon as to emergent works of the postcanon, How can this be? Something surely has to give. The number of hours in the day and the number of weeks in the semester haven't expanded along with the canon of world lit something: hence the frequent assumption, especially by the attackers of the recent ‘expansion, that we're abandoning Shakespeare for Toni Morrison. By Instead, just as in the postindust Ihave gotten richer, wh fortunes. ts too simple to say that his is not so. ‘economy, what has happened is that the rich ist scrape by oF see outrighs erly, worl Even terature could be divided into “major authors” and “minor authors” the heyday ofthe “masterpiece" approach, a range of minor Western authors ye found accompanying the major authors in anthologies, on syllabi, and in scholarly discussion: Apul 1956 Norton Anthologyincluded. Aleksandr Blok along with its far more extensive scletions from Tolstoy and Dos- toevsky. In place of this older, two-tiered model, our new system has three levels: ay ‘ountercanon, and a shadow canon. The bypercenon is populated by the coexist quite com- th these new arrivals to the neighborhood, very few of whom have yet ac- ied anything like their fund of cultural capital, Far from being threatened by As we sustain the system today it isthe old“minor” authors who fade i into the background, becoming a sort of shadow canon that the older scholarly gen46 David Domrosch ration still knows (or, increesingly, remembers fondly from long-ago process can be seen even within the national literatures, where range are much less pronounced than in the lager scale of world ing anywhere, and have actually added onto their mansions, but Hazlitt and Gal lethreadbare on the rare occasions when they're een out and about. It may not be long until their cultural capital runs out and their ined cottages are bought fora teat-down "The shape of the new canon can be illustrated in various ways, both within na- sional literatures and across them. A concise example isthe situation of the “Big Six” British Romantic poets as illustrated by the numberof articles and booksabout them listed in the MLA Bibliography. Obviously, this san imprecise measure, yet overtime trends can be seen, particularly if we look at ten-year totals fo smooth out the varia~ tions that can be caused by a centenary ora chance bunching of essay cl special issues of journals. The figures for these major authors can be further contextu- alized by comperison with the numbers of entries ‘poets like Southey and Landor and for newly prom smans and Anna Letitia Berbauld. The “Big Six” ae particularly interesting ‘older New Criticism and then ninor” Romantic ‘nonical figures like ism, It would be reasonable to expect that the Big Six would have suffered a decline during the past decade or two. Yet a survey ofthe MEA Bibliography reveals 2 1 cttial attention given to al of the Big Six. Even going back footy years, there has them asa group relative tothe field asa wh ith upwards of 400 books and daring those ten years, whereas fewer than 100 entries forthe -movernent within the group. Byron began at the bottom ofthe hypercanonicl group and reins there still Shelley and Coleridge have each moved up a notch or two, and Blake and Keats have declined a notch or two, but no more. Blake did have a brief boom during the second of these four decades, but he then settled bac “Wordsworth began at the top and remains there stil, the pack in the hypercanon: as in today’s economy, the richest of the rich get richer sill. is prior level of attention. ly increasing his lead over Worl Literature ina Postanoniea, Hypercanonical Age $7 400 800 Figure 1. MLA Bibliography Entries or Sdected British Romantic, 964-2003 ‘The formerly minor figures on this chart xemain about where they were: John ‘Clare went from 40 entries to 56; Wiliam Haczlit has slipped from 88 to 78: Robert Southey has gone up and down, from 46 atthe start to 62, then down to 44, and now ‘upto 51,buthe has never come close to breaking the 100 mark, Walter Savage Landor, onthe other hand, has dropped sharply 1 sharply, from 42 atthe start to25, then down to-4an ‘now to 5. The countercanonical poets I loo ne Barbauld, have risen from next to nowhere ‘went from no entries at all to 70; Barbauld from 4 entries to 59, The emergence of the countercanon does mark a significant shift in the field, and48 David Damrosch if weextended the chart to include prose, we'd see the rise of Mary Wollstonecraftand Mary Shelley into the hypercanonical ranks as well as jane Austen's ascent from alow “major” rank of 3: to a place high up in the empyream (with 94a entries in the past decade, second only to Wordsworth), The neighborh looking different today than it did thirty and forty yeas ago—y he larger structure of the field doesn’t look as diferent as one might have expected. A few new occupants ost hover far below them, and there are few if any writ- range between 100 and 4oo entries per decade. is pronounced even within a ‘country, However, the disparities of attention are more dra piven the severe pressures of ti rue, asin some literary be represented by a single authy home of ancient and ongoing ealtur of Pramoedya Ananta Toet. Jorge Luis 1 Universe competition, an entre nation may Indonesia, che world’s fifth-largest country and sions even among the select group of non-Western authors who have become wel known in North America, Figure 2 may suggest the differences that can emerge even betwen authors of major standing in critical esteem, has shown rapid growth during the past twenty is growth has affected authors in very uneven ways, seems quite disproportionate to any differences of artistic quality or nfiuence. A few favorite writers have emerged into a new, postcolonial hyper- cott (309 entries in 1984-20 ty small overall si .ypercanon Nadine Gordimer and anyone with a hundred or more entries during, the past decede. Yet I haver't found many newly prominent postcolonial writers with that level of attention. Instead, aftr few mid-List figures like Naguib Mahfouz, we ‘quickly reach a very modest level of around two or three entries per year, the rate for “Amos Tutuol, for example, or for Lu Xun. These highly respected yet rarely discussed writers could be called the Harlits of postcolonial studies—an odd way to think of the field of postcolonial studies, we might include in World Literature ina Posteanonica, Hypercunonical Age 9 500 400 300 200 400 ° wi - 1964-1973 | 1974-1963 | 1984-1993 | 1994-2009 —-— Rushdie 2 6 259 394 === Gordimer 8 68 176 304 -—-—manrouz 8 7 7 87 Lu Xun 3 2 49 2 ‘Figure 2. MLA Bibliography Articles on Rushdie, Gordimer, Mahfour, and La Xun them, surely, given their excellence as writers ans ‘eminence in their home coun- ature they have the secondary status ‘once accorded to “minor” Romantic poets and essayists. Additionally, in postcolonial studies s in British Romanticism, there i a shadow ‘anon of figures everyone “knows” (most often just through one or two brief an- thology pieces) but who are rarely discussed in print: Fadwa Tagan and Premctiond hhave each been the subject of only a small handfil of articles in the past twenty. tries, but the numbers suggest mer, R, K, Narayan is upstaged by Salman Rushdie, The great ghazal poet ‘was regularly about todey, perhaps nv of the general shift toward the twentieth century that Chri (chapter 11). Allin all, even without the inherited underpinnings of author-specific journals and special interest groups (The Wordsworth Circle the Shakespeare Studies Asso50 David Demos heimer volume may have been averted atthe level of the nation only to return atthe thor. ts respond to this situation during the years ahead? As vantage. We now have the 1 ‘umes to read more widely ourselves and to present a wid ‘Wordsworth, isa wonderful figure fo discuss for 1eback to the same ‘emerge from college hoving read Things Fall Apart and Beloved four times, but never having read Mahfouz or Ghalib ‘We should resist the hegemony ofthe hypercanon, yet as long as i's fact ‘we should also turn ito our advantage, Students may not enroll in course on we do want to broaden their horizons, it can be useful ypercanonical figures to catch their attention—not least because wehypercanon only when they rally are exciting to read a wide variety of contexts, Yet our offerings don't have to become the time ary more than they need to be all Shakespeare all th hhypercanonical and countercanonical works toget Both in teaching and in scholarship there cently when the graduate students in my department made a special request Joyce course” to be offered this year As they recognized, Joyce's stat jing for students interested in modernise, is such that a and in the history of the novel. I rea agreed to offer this course, but sd to expand the fel surrounded Joyce's works with readings in precursors, contemporaries, and succes- sors, Some ofthese readings show direct line of influence (rom Ibsen to Joyee Joyce to Lispector)s others, such as Simann’s Way, are intended to suggest someth a comparatst I wa know at all Rabindranath Tagore and Higuchi Ichiyo. ‘Such conjunctions enable us to avoid an either/or choice between well-grounded World Literature ina Posteanonienh Hyperanonical Age 51 icted influence study and an ungrounded, universalizing juxtaposition of unconnected works in the mode advocated by Alain Badi ‘Shade of Spring Leaves, we were also able to make comparisons in terms of intertextu- ality: whereas Joyce draws on Irish songs, Swift, and Dante, Ichiyo deaws on Jepanese ‘a true poet." Like Joye Zole’s work, and Id ‘This conjunction not only worked wel of research opportuni study of “wave patterns” ofthe spread of genres like the short sto advocated by Franco Moretti? Such comparisons are almost unknown once we move beyond a single national tradition or the trade routes of a colonial empire, and they can do much to conjunctions can also ease the problems of audience faced by anyone who wants ‘on cither sort of euthor. If most nonspecialist readers have never heard of » much less read her, how are we to interest them in looking at her work, es tration of some European ith no fewer than 7,651 books and articles who is going to want to read num- lad has already been tracked down, every chapter—almost f Ulysses lovingly dissected, debated, re-interpreted: what can possibly be left o say? In this circumstance, cross- tural comparisons prove to be marvelously illuminating and refreshing. Making them, moreover, can help lessen the radical imbalance seen in figure 3. ‘As might be expected, comparisons have regulatly been made within the hyper-52 Dovid Demos Rena errge] — 12 Figure 3 Books and Artces on Joyce et al, 1964-2003 ‘canonical ranks: $5 of the above entries are on Joyce and Proust. Yet what of Joyce ters of the second half of th century, a person who titled her first novel with a phrase from Joyce's tof the Artist and whose collection of linked short stories Lagos de familia, (Family Ties) is widely recognized as one of Dubliners’ most creative successors. She hhas a substantial total number of entries in the MLA Bibliography, yet only three of, these 355 items compare her and Joyce, parison, And what of Joyce's contemporary, Tagore? He is a major short-story writer ‘who shares Joyce's deep concerns with colonial impact of modernity on resistant traditional societies, yet there‘s only asingle article ‘on Tagore and Joyce. Less surprisingly, given the small numberof articles, but no less regrettably, there isnt a single article on Premchand and Joyce, nor is there one on Ichiyo and Joyee. "ve came a fair distance in the decade since the Bernheimer report was pub- we have succumbed too readily to the pressures of time and the attrac cal celebrity bot festern literature and beyond. Pethaps advice of Joyce's elusive character Sylvia Silence, "the terlinguistic tensions, and the as dense asa decade” she warns: World Literature ina Psteanonica,Hypercanonical Age 53 ‘of cultures, and new lines of comparison across the persisting divisions between the bbypercanon and the countercanon of world literature. 1 Rey Chowy"In the Name of Comparative Literature in Comparative Literature i he Ageof American scholaely audience supgerting. asundertood by North American com 5, See Franco Moretti "Conjectures on World Literature” New Left Review (2000)55-#7CHAPTER THREE ‘Je ne crois pas beaucoup a la littérature comparée” Universal Poetics and Postcolonial Comparatism EMILY APTER Ina chapter of Petit Manuel d'inesthrique, his book of essays devoted to 2 com- parison between the poets Labld ben Rebi’a and Mallarmé, the ‘mined failure of translations to transmit the genius of asource text. In Badiou’s view, {is tantamount to a writing of disester; and yet, for all the obstacles, quarantine language groups communities “of their own kind” (as in “Romance” or “East Asian" languages) o enforce ¢ condition in which monolingualisms coexist without relation. iterary universalism, argues for the ability of art ity of an Event by making manifest Truth—« aesthetic” philosophical expressionism. A comparison between two wildly divergent authors—one a nomad writing in classical Arabic in the pre- from arts most Islamic period, the other « bourgeois salonnier of Second Pmpire France—has just as ‘much credence for Badiou as a comparison between authors hailing from a shared, “ene cros pas beaucoup la iasature compare” 55 tradition. Indeed, it would seem that the greater the arc of radical dissimilitude and incomparability, the truer the proof of poctic univers Badiou’s astuce, which implies that eomparativity with the least relation guar~ antees the maximum of postic universalism, challenges shibboleths of translation theory and comparative literature alike. Translation and “Comp Lit” have tr ally supported each other in arguing for enhanced conduits of linguistic and e adequatio, based on values of equivalence, co sional triage of favored among language groups with a shared pi in carrying over the imperial carve-up of linguistic fields, So, for the case ofthe Caribbean: Haiti, Martinique, and Guadeloupe ae placed. 1e rubric of Francopl in Amevican studies; and Jamaica remains sequestered in Anglophone fields, ‘While there are obvious historical and pedagogical reasons for maintaining geopdlit- cal relations between dominants and theie former colonies, protectorates and client (one wouldn't want, for exam) ‘over the world in which French, or some kind of Frend play ‘The idea of a postcolonial comperatism that doubles as a new form of global anticipated by Charles Forsdick and David Murphy in theie forward- m,n discussing the rationale for the 1 of many languages ‘to understand better the complexity and diversity—linguitc,eltural, politisl—of the world in which we lve. As the rhetoric of empire seems increasingly to occupy a56 Emly Apter prominent plae in public discourse, the urgency of sucha project becomes ever more appatenc? studies, particularly to the way in w that Amitav Ghosh associated wit reproduced. In es dies” Forsdick and Marphy nudge postcolonialism closer to and Austra ry domain called “Franco- phone Postcoloni the Pacific Rim, Archipelagien discourses, the literary Chunnel—or by North-South ‘patterns of global hegemony. Bringing postcolonial comparatism int 1 recognition of the revolutionary potential available wi 1s emerges as a paysage of regional and language groups set inside a wider linguistic world that includes but also traverses Europe. An essay such as Bernard Cerquiglin’s report on “The Languages ‘of France” (1999), which in the past might not have been co postcolonial acquires new heuristic relevance within resectoting global language politics? So too, though in a very different vein, does 197) which introduces the idea language politics implies coral and literary ex pressionism. A count larger project of perimentalism of Rabelais, Dante, Joyce, Faullner, Mallarmé, Céline, Frankétienne, and Glissant, Postcolonial comparstism within these expanded parameters accords greater attention to the linguistic predicaments of minorities and micro-minor to what Lawrence Venuti has referred to as “the ethics of he eloquence ofthe vulgar” oF ‘of defining the threshold ofa diserete language when ang, and accent shear off from standard language These concerns especial significance in places with a history of colonial or neocolot which standard languages have been imposed and native tongues are over-managed, banned, oF reduced to the status of endangered species. Alain Badiou’s comparatism could not be further from this location-conscious “Jone cois pas beaucoup dl trate comperés” $7 “translational transnationalism have used frequently in my own ongoing ‘work on the politics of translation If there isa global dimension in his reading prac- wroduced collaterally, thats to say san unintended sie effect of track- 1g metropolitan vehicular tongues ( slog into Ogoni, ‘and Mallarmé promotes a comparat way from parallels between languages of great discrepancy. Though he himselfis not, interested per sein making an argument ab his provocative opening salvo "Je ne crois hitched to a tempering brace linguistic function, while soldiering on. ‘There was also theoretical significance specific comparison between the Arabic ode (the mu/aliaga) of Labi Mallarmé’s symboist master llaga” (p. 85). The choice to compare these p: Arabic and French texts is gradually revealed as arbitrary. Questions of democracy and subjectva 7 re of mastery, the seduction of sa- ‘red language, the influence of clans (th for collective destiny and vita is the soc technology, the spiritual “desert” or empty set of subjectivity, docampment, exile, and the defect and Mallat a universalist ps place—these ideas of paramount mutual concern to Labid ben Rabia sean Event in Badiou’s sense ofthat term, even as they announce is that allows for linguistic relations of radical disses58 Bry Aper Badiow’s argument, that “we remain between Mallarmé and the miallaga,” pointed me to a muallaga by the contemporary Palestinian writer Mahmoud Dar- lagat)”’ published in 1995, Darwish allows us to triangulate Badiou’s anomalous pairing of Labid ben Rabia and Mallarmé sre. am what have spoken tothe words: may become my words! Darwish chisels a subjective space from the desert sand, itself en expanse defined by temporal portage and forced emigration: "They emigrated /They cartied the place thaconcluding say:a lower”) or the categorical infinitive “Berire—” of “Quant aa Livre” In the face of disaster—defined by Mallarmé as the crisis brought on by Victor Hugo's overdetermination of modern verse—these simple declarative utter ances induce a revolution in poetic language, licensing prose to become a purveyor of the universal poetic idea ("la notion pure"). The last line of Darwish’s mu/allaga: a divine prose forthe Prophet to triumph,” also parallels Mallarme's cul-de-lampeinvisibles”” Both poets accord the Leantatory sway. ly postcolonial” Mallarmé, of a propelled into colloquy with the moderns, or of a Mallarméan Darwish diseurbs conventional paradigms of literary comparatism, postcolonial or the aesthetic. “The realm of the aesthetic” according iit the exercise of a thought-ful reedom."* To my Writing betwoon the Singular and ired postcolonial compara- tism, In recentering the aesthetic within postcolonial theory (displacing the field's pre- ‘occupation with what he castigates asa “deadened nativism”), Hallward harks back to an earlier era—the 1980s and early 19908—before theory fatigue set in and before cul- ‘tural critics stigmatized colonial ontology as an ei “Tene croispas beaucoup ala litérare comparte” — 59 In practicing theory without apology, Hallward revisits the time when Anglophone ‘and Francophone critics alike—among them Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spi- vvak, Homi Bhabhe, Ngugiwa'Thiong’o, Pas phone side; and Frantz Fanon, Albert Memi ‘Abdelwahab Meddeb, Achille Mbemnbe, Francoise Vergés, and Réda Bensmata on the Francophone side—availed themselves unabashedly of Continental theory, develop- ing critical paradigms that engaged deeply with the work of Freud, Adorno, Lacen, Bakhtin, Benjamin, Althusser, Foucault, Derrida, Levinas, Deleuze, Irigaray, Ci ton ofthe politics of difference, and its naive celebration of “the lo- ‘creates the medium ofits own substantial existence or expression,” drafted from Deleuze’s pronouncement thet “the One ies, these writers, considered together, offer a model postcolonial comparatism, But rather than focus on grounds of comparison common to all, iallward explores how each write, in a feesta the philosophical dea of the “univoc- ity of being” Absolutely Postcolonial, despite its vaguely comical echo of the TV-show title Abso- ia of global transatio and humanist fduation ia which the transcendence and solitude. To write” Hall. isto undergo a radical detachment, to become absolutly alone, impersonal, isolated thin an immediate temporality "thetime ofthe absence of ime”). Like the Delewze Blanchot tends to absorb all“atual writers sso many echoes of singular ‘The “essential then s not that of an anguished isolation ‘mong others, bat ofa submersion within the sspeifc or indifferent pure and simple, «space generally rendered in Blanchot ction as vod, desert ight orsea-spaces scovered, as we shall se, by the ater novels of Mohammed Dib, Weitingbegins when forges the“ power to say the6 Enslly Apter Halhward’s idea of postcolonial worldliness is truly other-worldly, suturing itself to God) and Shadadak ("the assertion that untranslatable alte lore is readily 3c ity against the need to ceded place without ever traveling anywhere. Gayatri Spivak places like In proposing “the planet to over alterity of humans, cast as computer in which nobody actually lives ‘write the globe, Spivak embraces a hur temporary occupants of& planet on loan ‘Spivak remains firmly on the ground, so to speak, in her commitment toa radical defined by the polities of translation. By contrast, Hallward, like Badiow, cats trary theory as cosmology, jumping paral sddhist path” in Sarduy, Hallward evokes sa- res, quoting Daisetz Teitar6 Suzuka Esays in Zen Buddhism “the Zen version of enlightenment... kind she” This mental eatestrophe f the Hiroshima bombings, "5 consciousness at the time of Suzuki's e559, is suddenly emerging before usin the form of @ addressed to Ernest Jtinger, published as" point” asthe world-historical moment of the ‘Walter Benjamin's observations on “The ‘warrant mention as signal text of planetary comparatism. Detivered as a 1932 radio prescient“shorthistory"ofteclnology leads us from the baseline of small nd-point of mass dest tary completion of ni “Tene cris pas beaucoup ala inérasure comparée” 61 ‘Teday we know what tech y is. a new sieplane, a space rel recvive the attention ofthe whole world. Ta the pest the most nt doubca catastrophe forthe two hundred ind for many others. Nevertheless, T wish ro mote than a minor episode ina great struggle fom which hhaman beings have emerged victorious and shall remain victorious unles they them- selves destroy the work of ‘own hands once more. focus as part ofan expanded worldliness, hardly share Badiow’s poetic unilateralism and nondialectical notion of Truth, they too seem to be, s0 to speak communists of the Idea, follosving “Le grand écart” of cultural comparison in the name of militant principles of woeldly dialectics and the transformative power of cognition in the hist Nores Further referencesto this lick and David Murphy, eds, Francophone ‘tution (London: Amolé, 003 6, Mahmoud Darwish,“A Rhyme for Seleced Poems, tras. Moni Akash and Catal Forehé (Berkaley: Unversity f California Pets, 2003), 90-3Bri Apter 7. Stephane Mallar, Bxsres comptes ed, Hensi Mondor (Paris: ibliothtque dela iade,2545) 387 1, Peter Hallvarc Absolutely Postcolonial Writing Between she Singular and the Speci (atanchester: Manchester University Pres, 2001). 12. Walter Benjamin, "The Railway Disaster at the Fieth of Tay in Wile Benjamin: Selected Laie 3947-194, Michao W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University CHAPTER FOUR Looking Back at “Literary Theory” RICHARD RoRTY In the 1970s, teachers in Ameri lt. A new subdiscipline departments began reading Derzida partments for people who hed been trained in philosophy rather than in literature, {100k advantage of this development to move from being Profesor of Philosophy at Princeton to being University Professor of Humanities at the University of Vire sinia Later I went to Stanford as Professor of Comparative Literature, These changes of tile and of colleagues did not alter the content of my offerings, which were jast straight philosophy courses—sometimes on analytic philosophers like Wittgenstein and Davidson an sometimes on non analytic philosophers like Heidegger and Der- the one philosopher about whom every student of literature has to know something. “Cultural studies” has shoved “literary theory” aside, This means that there is less use Philosophy teachers in literature departments; although you cannot understand rvida very well without knowing quite alot about Plato, Kant, Nietzsche, and Hei- you can understand Foucault without much philosophical background. ‘Lam glad that I was abe to take advantage ofthe fact thet philosophy was briefly in fashion in American literature departments, but it was never more than a fashion, ‘There is no compelling reason why students of literature should read philosophy64 Richard Rorty ‘to be sure, a good thing for students of literature to know something {s also good for them to know abot But they cannot do everything, Lots of firs ten by people who are monolingual, or who read l ho have no of the books you have read off the rest of the books ber of books you have read, and the more various they are, the likelier criticism you is theze any set of methodological precepts that should guide your decisions about low your nose. There is nothing special about philosophy books, or any other sort of book, such that eading them isikely to make you a better literary critic Twas nota dislectical necessity but rather ahistorical acident that post-Nietzxchean European philosophy entered the universities ofthe English-speaking world through sments rather than philosophy departments. The main reason those xd Foucault was that dents who read Frederick Crews’s te anything remotely reminiscent of criticism, and with Fre ‘The Pook Perplex were ‘the books that Crews had parodied, New gurus were desperately needed ‘De la Grammatologie and Let Mots et les Choses were translated into English at actly mae, They hit the spot. Derrida and Foucault were not only bril- Jeers, but they came out of an intellectual world that nobody in iglophone literature departments (except for European émigrés like Paul de Man ‘and George Steiner) knew much about, Reading their books gave people a sense that new horizons were opening, Graduate stadent of literature who had, as undergrad- ates, been bored or baffled by courses in analytic philosophy suddenly discovered thet ‘there was an intellectual wor their philosophy professors had never told them about. Exploring that world was great fun, ‘Theexcitement generated in literature departments by Derrida and Foucault (and by Nietzsche and Heidegger, who were discovered more or less simultaneously) was not dite to these books having offered a new theory about the nature of Titerature. ary theory” deceived some hapless graduate students into Looking Back at “Literary Theory” 65 ‘thinking that they could write a worthwhile article or book just by “applying theory” to a text. This belief generated a great mass of barely reada articles and books. Fortunately, deconstructing texts is now as he beginning ofthe end ofthis epoch, just as The Pooh Perplex (1965) did of an earlier one. Derrida and Foucault are brilliantly original thinkers who can easily survive mis- use, just as Marand Freud have, Their books will become part of the philosophical canon. In coming decades, students of literature witha taste for philosophy will still be reading them. But the unfortunate idea that you could learn how to write about a literary text by mastering a “theory” will gradually die out. Literary theory. will be seen to be as optional forthe practice of literary criticism as legal theory is for the practice of lew, Consider an analogy: A certain branch of mathematics is typically taught, under the sobriquet of “symbolic logic” in philosophy departments rather than mathe is departments This too is an accident of history, having alot 0 do and various other dreary controversies. Syrn- bolic logic, Russell and Carnap announced, was going to make philosophy lively and interesting again. So it did, for a while. But they had to takea theory course, just as many philosophy students now get the required course in symbolic logic. The rest will da their best to clamber over one ‘more inexplicable curricular hurdle—a hurdle that was erected ata certain poi the twentieth century and may be dismantled at certain point in the twenty- 4s 1 see it, both comparative literature and philosophy departments should be places in which students receive plenty of suggestions about what sorts of books they ‘might lke to read, end are then left free to follow their noses. Members ofthese de- partments should not worry about the nature oftheir discipline or about what makes it distinctive, They should not fret about whether proving a theorem in set theory, or adjudicating the disagreements between Heidegger and Levinas, counts as “really doing philosophy.” Nor should they speculate about whether to be a “true compera-