State of Comparative Literature

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University of Oklahoma The State of Comparative Literature: Theory and Practice 1994 Author(s): Kathleen L. Komar Source: World Literature Today, Vol. 69, No. 2, Comparative Literature: States of the Art (Spring, 1995), pp. 287-292 Published by: University of Oklahoma Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40151138 Accessed: 23/12/2009 01:36 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=univokla. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. University of Oklahoma is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to World Literature Today. http://www.jstor.org

Transcript of State of Comparative Literature

Page 1: State of Comparative Literature

University of Oklahoma

The State of Comparative Literature: Theory and Practice 1994Author(s): Kathleen L. KomarSource: World Literature Today, Vol. 69, No. 2, Comparative Literature: States of the Art(Spring, 1995), pp. 287-292Published by: University of OklahomaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40151138Accessed: 23/12/2009 01:36

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=univokla.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

University of Oklahoma is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to WorldLiterature Today.

http://www.jstor.org

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The State of Comparative Literature: Theory and Practice 1994

By KATHLEEN L. KOMAR The 1994 Modern Language Associa- tion convention in

San Diego spawned the usual swarm of parodies of the current state of the discipline. What one misses in the popular version of the meeting, however, is the real movement taking place in literary studies and particularly in the discipline of comparative lit- erature. That shift in focus was embodied at this year's conference in what might be described as the face-off between the proponents (now waning in number) of poststructuralist criticism (particularly as exemplified in deconstruction) and the growing numbers of scholars involved in "cultural studies."

A number of sessions at the conference focused on this confrontation. "Deconstruction in the Age of Culture Studies," for example, presented four su- perb papers (by Emily Apter, Vincent Leitch, Jeffrey Nealon, and Stephen Barker) that sought to exam- ine the current state of literary studies. While each scholar on the panel began from a slightly different critical background, each attempted to trace the movement away from deconstruction and toward cultural studies and to evaluate whether the two ap- proaches might have something to contribute to each other. Their interests were shared by so many at the conference that the room (designed to hold about two hundred) overflowed with an audience at least fifty percent beyond its capacity. Although the presenters seemed a bit surprised by this enthusias- tic response (one speaker, for example, brought handouts for the section, anticipating that twenty copies would cover the audience), they had obvious- ly probed a nerve that extended through a large part of the literary-critical body at the moment.

In selecting the topic "Comparing Theories, The- orizing Comparison" for the Division on Compara- tive Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature, Chair Paul Hernadi anticipated and helped elicit within

the discipline of comparative literature a similar confrontation between a now "older" emphasis of deconstruction on deferred and decomposing mean- ings in an often ahistorical context with universaliz- ing tendencies and the newer cultural studies' insis- tence on attempting to understand the immediate world and its specific historical determinants. While the two approaches share a tendency to avoid clo- sure and are both concerned with recognizing the "other," cultural studies is currently dominated by an identity politics that insists on ethnicity or sexual orientation or race or class (or a combination of all these) as crucial components, while poststructural theory undermines the whole idea of identity and of the subject, which it reveals to be only a rhetorical construction. These different underlying orienta- tions create surface frictions that are now evident in the discipline of comparative literature and those who practice it.

Comparative Literature in the Practical World. To move away from the MLA convention itself for a moment in order to provide a practical example of how these tensions play themselves out, let me cite an administrative change of heart over the past few years in many institutions. Several years ago, when I chaired a comparative literature pro- gram, our dean insisted that we become a "theory program" (by which he meant that we should be teaching poststructural theory as our major task and relegating the investigation of primary texts to a dis- tant secondary role). In the past year or so, howev- er, the deaconal nudging (by a new dean) has been rather in the direction of a "cultural studies pro- gram."

It must be noted here that the "cultural studies" umbrella is an appealing one in an atmosphere in which universities are seeking to consolidate smaller departments into larger conglomerates - a practice rampant in the humanities at the moment. Cultural studies can encompass multiple languages and con- cerns with ethnicities as well as a broader range of disciplines that a single language and literature de- partment might not be able to accommodate. Folk- lore or musicology or art history or even sociology might be aggregated into a single administrative en- tity - thus theoretically saving staff salaries and much-needed dollars.

In the same way, comparative literature itself is looked to as a possible solution to budget prob- lems.1 The difficulty is that this type of growth for comparative literature sometimes comes at the ex-

Kathleen L. Komar is Professor of German and Comparative Literature and Associate Dean of the Graduate Division at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she received the 1989 Distinguished Teaching Award. She chaired the Program in Comparative Literature from 1986 to 1989. She has published articles on contemporary women writers from several cultures (including among others Christa Wolf, Monique Wittig, Christa Reinig, and Ingeborg Bachmann) as well as on a broad range of modern German and American literature. In addition to Tran- scending Angels: Rainer Maria Rilke's "Duino Elegies" (1987) and Pattern and Chaos: Multilinear Novels by Dos Passos, Faulkner, Doblin and Koeppen (1983), she is currently completing a book to be titled "Re-Visions of the Women of the Trojan War: Contem- porary Women Authors' Rewriting of Helen and Klytemnestra."

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pense of the foreign-language departments, which are often collapsed into comparative literature to save money. This move can cause an irremediable distrust of comparative literature on the part of the foreign languages and thus can undermine the co- operation needed to make comparative literature possible. The mass aggregation also ignores the fact that comparative literature is a discipline with its own theoretical suppositions that differ considerably from those of individual language departments. At the other extreme, comparative literature programs can be swallowed by larger departments (usually English), thereby also losing the disciplinary differ- ence of comparative literature and its insistence on understanding literature in its original language.

Many of us feel that comparative literature should include both poles of the poststructural- theory-versus-cultural-studies debate - but not de- fine itself exclusively as either. Indeed, part of our methodological considerations must be an ongoing comparison and evaluation of the possibilities of dif- fering theoretical and critical stances. It is this activ- ity that allows comparative literature to survive vari- ous waves of theoretical fashion and constantly to change its focus without losing its center of gravity in literary texts. Maintaining the intellectual space to continue the performance of this task in an acad- emy and a culture that is intent on shrinking the hu- manities to a "more efficient and more economic" core will prove an increasingly challenging task.

The Bernheimer Report on the State of the Discipline. Another indication of the shift taking place within comparative literature is the recent vol- ume edited by Charles Bernheimer and entitled Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism.2 This collection of essays responds to a report (in- cluded in the volume) authored by a committee consisting of Bernheimer, Jonathan Arac, Marianne Hirsch, Ann Rosalind Jones, Ronald Judy, Arnold Krupat, Dominick LaCapra, Sylvia Molloy, Steve Nichols, and Sara Suleri for the American Compar- ative Literature Association, which was seeking an updated version of its report on professional stan- dards.3 Two earlier reports (The Levin Report [1965] and The Greene Report [1975]) are also included in the volume.

Bernheimer's report suggests that comparative lit- erature should begin to focus more on contextual is- sues and broader cultural production and should "play an active role in furthering the multicultural recontextualization of Anglo-American and Euro- pean perspectives" (44) as well as in interrogating canon formation. Bernheimer's committee also pro- poses that comparative literature should broaden its horizons to "include comparisons between media from early manuscripts to television, hypertext, and virtual realities" (45).

Even in this simplistically brief summary, one can already see why the report raised hackles on a num- ber of different literary scholarly animals. It engen- dered a lively debate that is reflected partially in the essays included in the collection (and which I will discuss to some extent below), which pivots on the same confrontation between older theoretical posi- tions and a new cultural-studies emphasis. But the report also became ammunition for university ad- ministrators looking for new ways to "downsize" those pesky and expensive humanities departments that are composed mainly of a variety of "literature" ("foreign" and domestic) departments. While I doubt that this last repercussion was anticipated (and certainly not desired) by the authors of the re- port, it provides an interesting example of the kind of immediate political impact a text can have in the "real" world of the academy. A phenomenon that ironically supports the emphasis that the authors of the report lay on a broader attention to cultural, po- litical, and historical context.

In many ways, this report galvanized the debate that we have been examining between a growing trend toward cultural studies and an older, text-ori- ented, intrinsic approach to the literary text of which poststructural criticism has been the domi- nant form in recent years.

Curricular Evidence. The strong flow toward an aggressive awareness of multicultural issues is also evident in curricular changes in both compara- tive literature and in the academy at large. The As- sociation of American Colleges & Universities, for example, recently announced the topic of its annual conference to be "Teaching Cultural Encounters as General Education." The conference topics include "Crosscultural, Multicultural, Intercultural: Models of Curriculum Development," "Race and/or Cul- ture: How Do We Conceptualize Difference," "De- mocracy, Power and Pluralism," "Pedagogy: Diver- sity Issues in the Classroom," "American Pluralism and Global Studies: Theoretical Intersections," "Gender & Culture," and "Poststructuralism and Diversity Politics."

What is immediately evident about this list of is- sues (which would be quite familiar to anyone cur- rently teaching in a large university almost anywhere in the country) is that it is indisputably comparative. Indeed, the comparison of literatures, languages, and cultures has long been precisely what compara- tists produce. The rest of our colleagues (particular- ly those in English departments) have clearly begun to move in our direction.4 The topics of this nation- al conference of very diverse colleges and universi- ties make clear that precisely how we should under- take such comparisons is a vexed issue. And the growing feeling that only a member of a particular group is equipped to teach about that cultural sub-

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set is also problematic. In an age when identity poli- tics and "strategic essentialism" are stressed by scholars of various ethnic groups, comparatists must be very cautious about how they go about looking at two cultures in the context of each other.

Bernheimer takes up this issue in the introduction to his volume. Stressing the growing importance of contextual issues in the study of literature, he antici- pates the very debate that aroused such interest at this year's MLA: namely, the confrontation of older poststructural (but still text-oriented) varieties of theory and newer forms of scholarship that move in the direction of broader cultural considerations. In his introduction Bernheimer wrestles with the diffi- culty of comparing cultures of which the compara- tist herself is not really a part as well as with the anxiety that such attempts to move beyond one's own culture create.5 In the same collection Emily Apter discusses the necessary component of an "ex- ilic consciousness" and the legacy of dislocation that always marks a comparative study. This feeling of being haunted by the other, however, can produce a self-reflexive consciousness that may be as close as we can come to "fairness" in our comparative ef- forts.6

While we may be troubled at how to go about it, the fact that a comparative mode of understanding has made its way into the mainstream of academe in America is, however, incontrovertible. That com- paratists are at the forefront of this new wave of teaching should not, therefore, be surprising. The difficulty arises when those engaging in this new arena of cultural comparison, which may be intrana- tional as well as international, come into conflict with those who hold to an earlier version of compar- ative literature as the study of influence or genre or even relative literary value (as Anna Balakian argued in her MLA presentation, "The Pyramid of Simili- tude and Difference" [see this issue of WLT, pp. 263-67], which sought to investigate various levels of possible comparison and argued for the under- standing of the "true nature of the work of art"). This clash brings into discussion whether compar- isons should be based on "eternal verities" or on historical contingencies - and whether our "eternal verities" (or at least our theoretically consistent es- thetic principles) will not turn out to be historically contingent after all.

Or, at a slightly different level, we see the colli- sion that has been traced throughout this paper but couched in slightly different terms: the collision be- tween those scholars intent on focusing on what they see as issues intrinsic to the literary text (such as esthetics and rhetoric analysis) and those who wish to situate literature in a broader cultural con- text. The regret voiced by scholars such as J. Hillis Miller in recent years7 is echoed in Bernheimer' s volume by critics such as Peter Brooks, Michael Rif-

faterre, and Jonathan Culler.8 These critics fear that comparative literature will lose its disciplinary focus by being drawn away from literature to the study of other aspects of culture.

Their trepidation seems to have found a fairly broad resonance nationally. Scholars from Yale to Southern California are engaged in what might be termed the "back to the text" movement exempli- fied by the new Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, presided over by Dante scholar Ricardo Quinones. The society suggests a return to "broad conceptions" of literature rather than the "narrow, highly politicized ones often encountered today."9 (One assumes that the often highly politically en- gaged efforts of scholars in cultural or ethnic studies or gender studies might be implied.) In an attempt to avoid what it sees as the faddishness of political correctness, multiculturalism, and gender studies, the association is attempting to return emphasis to literary scholarship and to the text itself.

The fact that this new association has garnered members from across the country and from many of the most reputable institutions in the nation is in- dicative of a growing feeling among many scholars that both poststructural theory and cultural studies have taken literary scholars too far afield and caused them to lose sight of the initial object of inquiry in the effort to be either theoretically clever or politi- cally effective. While I am not sure that political im- pact is necessarily mutually exclusive with a close appreciation of individual literary texts as works of literature, I can appreciate the fear that literature will either be swamped by theory or simply appro- priated as a weapon in a political campaign. Indeed, at the level of university administrations, both possi- bilities have become a danger in recent years. The demand that (particularly foreign) literature depart- ments demonstrate their social usefulness in order to justify their continued existence is familiar to many - as was the pressure a few years ago to con- vert our literature programs into "theory programs" in order to give them the necessary intellectual sta- tus to survive beside the sciences.

The question remains, I believe, as to whether any act of critical interpretation can escape theoreti- cal presuppositions on the one hand or possible po- litical implications on the other. This new associa- tion itself is beginning to exert a certain political pressure on scholars in the discipline to return to the literary text and its specific realm, and it is run- ning head-on into the countervailing pressures being exerted by proponents of cultural studies. It adds another interesting dimension to the several pres- sures being brought to bear on comparative litera- ture in the academy today.

I would agree with Bernheimer, however, that it is very difficult nowadays to conceive of studying lit- erature without a strong sense of contextualization.

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The specific form of that contextualization will vary given the specific circumstances of both the critic and the text, but that seems all the more reason to be self-conscious as to how we go about examining literature and its contexts. I do not believe that cul- tural studies will replace literary studies, but it will pressure scholars to consider new issues and prob- lems - just as feminism and Foucault and postcolo- nialism have done in the past few years.

In an era when so many peoples have been colo- nized or culturally subjugated (both within our own country and in the world at large) we are faced with the question of whether it is possible to compare lit- erary and cultural phenomena without creating hier- archy or privileging one side of the comparison. And in a broad global context, we must consider the now familiar theoretical problem of whether some liter- ary and cultural phenomena so completely differ from the Eurocentric underpinnings of so much of our curriculum that any comparison at all becomes distortion. How can we create a comparative prac- tice that escapes the binary in order to be truly mul- tidimensional and "multicultural?"

Again, Bernheimer's volume offers some opti- mistic considerations. Francoise Lionnet, for exam- ple, suggests that we can face the difficulties of working in a truly global context and that we can deal with the "contamination that might result from the democratization of the idea of literature as an intersubjective practice."10 This will require our fac- ing the necessarily subjective dimensions of some of our activities as well as accepting the "productive discomfort" of participating in multiple cultural contexts (as Lionnet herself does on the biographi- cal level by virtue of being raised in Mauritius). Mary Louise Pratt sounds another note of optimism in her discussion of "Comparative Literature and Global Citizenship."11 Like Lionnet, Pratt believes that globalization, democratization, and decoloniza- tion hold the key to the future of comparative litera- ture. In fact, she seeks to go farther than Bern- heimer's original report to the ACLA and to argue that comparative literature should be "an especially hospitable space for the cultivation of multilingual- ism, polyglossia, the arts of cultural mediation, deep intercultural understanding, and genuinely global consciousness" (62).

The MLA Papers. Many of the issues we have discussed find a new embodiment in the several pa- pers presented at the Modern Language Association convention under the rubric "Comparing Theories, Theorizing Comparison" - an activity that lies at the heart of comparative literature. At stake for the dis- cussants at the MLA is the very dilemma of how we can go about rethinking our comparative activities in an age of shifting theoretical foundations. How can we fulfill some of the promise of comparative

literature as envisioned by Lionnet or Pratt? How can we avoid the pitfall of throwing out the very heart of the discipline, literature itself, while still finding new means of contextualizing literature, of bringing it into larger fields of values, both political and ethical? Can we find a dynamic definition of comparison and even of literature12 that will allow us to maintain a disciplinary identity while constantly accommodating new theoretical positions?

Many of the MLA presenters explore the possible profit to be gained from thinking from a method- ological perspective different from poststructural lit- erary theory. Gabriele Schwab, for example, investi- gates linkages between literature and anthropology, while Ellen Berry explores "transculturology" as a postcommunist Russian counterpart to cultural studies in this country. Schwab's considerations give us a look from another disciplinary point of view, while Berry introduces a nationally, culturally, and linguistically different perspective. Francesco Lorig- gio (see this issue of WLT> pp. 256-62) probes the results of selecting diverse genres as our dominant metaphor for theoretical investigation. Recent theo- reticians have stressed narrative, which has resulted in an emphasis on ethnography and psychology; Loriggio suggests that drama as a theoretical metaphor might lead us more in the direction of the roles and role-playing stressed in the social sciences. Ken Reinhard pursues the possibilities for rethink- ing how we go about comparison by enlisting Lacan and Levinas as well as Sade for new perspectives that draw on the ethics of sexuality and how we treat the other.

From another direction, and in line with the con- cerns of Francoise Lionnet and Mary Louise Pratt, both Natalie Melas (see this issue of WLT, pp. 275- 80) and Jerome Frisk probe the limits of legitimate comparative practice by challenging the idea of a (Eurocentric) type to which things can be com- pared. Melas interrogates whether Eurocentric theo- ry is really still imperialism in disguise, while Frisk (citing the reservations of critics such as Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cornel West) questions whether deconstructive Eurocentric criticism can be applied at all to the constructive emphasis of African Ameri- can literature and criticism or to other marginalized discourses for which the identity of the subject is crucial. Jonathan Culler (see this issue of WLT> pp. 268-70) interrogates the peculiar concept of "excellence" and the effect it causes in comparative practice. Culler's paper is an interesting addition to the debate that was generated between Melas's and Frisk's position as to the limits of comparison be- cause of absolute differences that could not be me- diated and Anna Balakian's assertion that we can still find universal linkages in texts which allow us to understand the true nature of a work of art.

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Taken as a body, these papers make us rethink issues of binarism and hierarchy in comparative practice. They use cultural specificity to question generalization. They suggest new methodological perspectives from which to attempt to practice com- parison with greater awareness of cultural and eth- nic presuppositions and biases. It is precisely this kind of critical interrogation of our methodological assumptions and our critical praxis that keeps com- parative literature alive - and honest. By constantly challenging the latest icons of theory and by com- paring them to other possible strategies, compara- tive literature as a discipline is constantly forced to renew itself.

The kinds of debate aroused by the various posi- tions in these papers (like that generated by Bern- heimer's report to the ACLA) also engender what Bernheimer refers to as the anxiogenic quality of comparative literature - the anxiety that arises when the very definition of one's activities and the object of study as well as one's preparation or even right to carry out that activity are constantly under revision. Indeed, Wlad Godzich sees this constant battle over what constitutes its "identity" as the very determin- ing factor of comparative literature.13 Or, in Bern- heimer's words, the identity of comparative litera- ture is "perpetually precarious" and the field is "constantly in crisis" (2). But as terrifying as this might sound to those who seek stability, it may be quite beneficial for the long-term survival of the dis- cipline. As Darwin determined long ago, a species must be able to adapt and evolve or it will become extinct; I believe the same can be said of academic disciplines.

Comparative Literature as an Ongoing Process of Intellectual Adjustment. In the final analysis, it seems to me that comparative litera- ture can encompass all the intellectual positions we have discussed so far - poststructural theory, cultur- al studies, a renewed emphasis on the text as litera- ture - and a good many more, including gender studies, new historical and context studies, linguistic approaches, and adaptations of film theory, to name but a few. The "comparative" aspect of the disci- pline allows for (in fact demands) a multiplicity of possible approaches to literary texts and to cultural phenomena. It is in the act of comparing and evalu- ating and interrogating various positions that we make intellectual and historical progress. In appro- priating techniques of analysis for new esthetic or political purposes, we can build upon older theoreti- cal positions that might run counter to our own agenda. (The broad adaptation of some techniques of deconstruction - reading a text against its own grain, examining aporiae and chiasmi in the text, ex- amining how meaning is deferred or distorted - by

those interested in gender as well as cultural studies is a prime example of this profitable appropriation.)

Comparative analysis allows for understanding and adaptation without necessitating elimination of opposing views or the absolute privileging of one theoretical position. That may be precisely the chal- lenge for the coming generations of comparatists who are dealing with a much larger geographic, in- tellectual, and cultural world than the Euro-Ameri- can founding fathers of the discipline could have an- ticipated. Our students will have to extend their comparative talents to a vastly broader arena than we did. Most of us envy them the challenge.

To provide one final practical example of the broad range of possible activities engaged in by comparatists, let me describe a doctoral examina- tion in comparative literature in which the student was investigating subcultures within broader gay culture. The student planned to analyze a series of gay subcultural phenomena ranging from "fan- zines"14 to gay film, literature, and visual art, and fi- nally to narratives of gay serial murderers. The stu- dent presented a strong theoretical underpinning derived from several national traditions and present- ed in the original languages with positions ranging from Lacan to film theory to gender theory. A col- league from a national-literature department was surprised that we would allow such a presentation at all and vigorously questioned whether this prospec- tus had anything to do with comparative literature. Those of us from comparative literature itself felt equally strongly that this is indeed one possible em- bodiment of comparative literature; it is studying cultural and literary phenomena (in their original languages) among differing cultures and subcultures and bringing to bear in that study theoretical frame- works derived from a variety of perspectives. What we "allow" tomorrow as "comparative literature" may look considerably different and may question the theories we employ today. That is precisely the strength and vitality of the discipline. It can con- stantly question its own suppositions and engage in an ongoing process of intellectual adjustment. In- deed, it is forced to do so as new cultural experi- ences are introduced into what began as a very Eu- rocentric activity.

As this example demonstrates, theory (including poststructuralism, deconstruction, Lacanian psycho- analysis, and many others) and cultural studies need not be at odds. They can and do inform and inter- rogate each other. Comparative literature is the ideal intellectual space for that meeting of attitudes to take place. Perhaps my opening metaphor of the face-off should be replaced by that of a chemistry flask in which various components intermingle to produce new substances - sometimes explosive, ad- mittedly, but often the means to see new possibili- ties in a constantly changing intellectual world.

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Comparative literature at its best provides just such an experimental space.

UCLA

1 See Mary Russo's "Telling Tales Out of School: Compara- tive Literature and Disciplinary Recession," in Comparative Liter- ature in the Age of Multiculturalism (see note 2), pp. 187-94, par- ticularly 193-94.

2 Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, ed. Charles Bernheimer, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Subsequently cited as Bernheimer.

3 "The Bernheimer Report, 1993," in Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, pp. 39-48.

4 Too often, however, studies are produced that do not take differing languages into account but rather rely on translations, as though language itself were not a part of the culture and of identity politics. The insistence on understanding the "other" in his or her own language is one characteristic that marks compara- tive literature as different from some of the curricula currently being mounted.

5 Bernheimer, p. 9. 6 Emily Apter, "Comparative Exile: Competing Margins in the

History of Comparative Literature," in Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, pp. 86-96.

7 See, for example, J. Hillis Miller, "The Function of Literary Theory at the Present Time," in The Future of Literary Theory, ed. Ralph Cohen, New York, Routledge, 1989.

8 The three following essays all appear in Comparative Litera- ture in the Age of Multiculturalism: Peter Brooks, "Must We Apol- ogize?" pp. 97-106; Michael Riffaterre, "On the Complementari- ty of Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies," pp. 66-73;

Tonathan Culler, "Comparative Literature, at Last!" pp. 117-21. 9 Quoted from an interview with Ricardo Quinones in the Los

Angeles Times, 27 December 1994, p. Al. 10 Francoise Lionnet, "Spaces of Comparison," in Comparative

Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, pp. 165-74. This quota- tion is on page 173.

11 Mary Louise Pratt, "Comparative Literature and Global Cit- izenship," in Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, pp. 58-65.

12 Rey Chow, in "In the Name of Comparative Literature" (in Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, pp. 107-16), argues that we should rethink the very concept of "literature" and the privileged and elitist aura it has taken on and return "the word 'literature' to an openness that was there before it became disciplined into the particular 'body' that it has had in the past few hundred years in the West - to an alternative space and time when 'literature' simply referred to materials relying on the medi- um of the printed word" (115). Such a rethinking would have obvious and profound implications for the idea of the "canon" and what should or should not be taught in our university litera- ture courses.

13 Wlad Godzich, "Emergent Literature and the Field of Com- parative Literature," in The Comparative Perspective on Literature: Approaches to Theory and Practice, eds. Clayton Koelb and Susan Noakes, Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 1988, pp. 18-36.

14 1 must admit my ignorance when first confronted with this term. These are apparently spontaneous, self-published maga- zines frequently dealing with gay topics and with "outing." They can be ordered through the mail - or, as I recently discovered while surfing the Internet, accessed through electronic media.