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THE spaces between departments of English and of other languages and literatures have been growing fertile. The historic joint meeting of the ADE and the ADFL at Summer Seminar West for 2003 put a stamp of recognition on models for working together that are now more readily imaginable than at any time in the past. Ventures across the gap between English and the other languages—or between English and Spanish on the one hand and the other languages on the other—are likely to entail risk, of course. But the intellectual momentum of these fields is emphatically on the side of collaboration, and an institution can position itself for the future by encouraging its departments to develop a program for working together now. Moreover, aside from the more obvious benefits, such a program can provoke the kind of reflection on disciplinary and departmental purposes that often proves hard to begin in isolation.
Why would departments of English and Spanish, or English and foreign languages, interrupt their custom of remoteness from one another and embark on joint ventures, whether events, courses, or hirings? Among many possible answers, one stands out as unimpeachable: the discipline of literary studies is growing more integrated all the time, and to many younger scholars the vivid borders that used to divide one kind of department from another have come to seem merely superstitious. Projects that see themselves as appropriate to the field of English now often include material in other languages (perhaps Spanish, or Cantonese, or Tagalog); Hispanists, in turn, are more attentive to the minority cultures of Spain and Latin America; and many of the scholars who wield influence with a rising generation of graduate students deal openly with other languages in their work. Books such as Kirsten Silva Gruesz’s Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing (2002) and Yunte Huang’s Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature (2002)—the likes of which did not exist twenty years ago—are reshaping their fields. Intellectual self-interest should impel many departments to make themselves into agreeable settings for this kind of work.
At the same time, the field of comparative literature has achieved a dubious victory: its assumptions are now widely adopted, while the field itself is less vital than at any time since World War II. It used to be that comparative literature was the mediating agency for scholarly dialogue between, say, English and French literature. The field was not only an intellectual formation with its own protocols but also a gatekeeper among other fields. Both those functions have become almost meaningless as comparative literature, in spirit if not always in letter, is practiced by people who know little about its institutional origins and historical values. The small scale of institutional comparative literature in the United States, with about fifty serious programs, has meant that the field cannot keep up with the explosion of interest in the multilanguage study of literature. It is hard to imagine how the field can recover from its state of marginality—but that is a topic for another essay (Spivak).
For the first time in memory, then, departments of English and other literatures have something to say to one another without the interference of other institutional ambassadors. No doubt in some places these departments already talk, do business, make plans together. But in most institutions, I believe, English and the other literatures simply have never developed a sense of shared purpose. In my experience, their relations go through a one-way mirror: my friends in departments of French or Spanish can often tell me who does what in the local English department, while many people in English are untroubled by their lack of acquaintance with those other departments. (I have had colleagues in the early modern section of English who have no idea what goes on in the corresponding fields of their own school’s Romance department: whether they might have anything in common with a colleague studying the Golden Age, for instance, or whether they might learn something from another modernist.) This disparity will have to change, for the reason that matters most to English departments: to do otherwise will be to become unfashionable. In measurable ways literary studies in the practice of younger scholars is becoming what it has always been in principle, a single discipline, and the custom of keeping separate will soon become untenable for the best departments. It seems clear to me that the old habits will have to be replaced by collaboration and that the script of such a new order remains to be invented.
There are a handful of ways that departments and their members can demonstrate an openness to these collaborations. The act that entails the most flexible commitment, perhaps, is to encourage the formation of working groups across departmental lines—whether for research, for sponsoring events, or simply for reading. The prospective topics might include anything that the members of the relevant departments want to work up: new approaches to the various periods or to periodization itself, genres, transatlantic or postcolonial studies, and so on. At my institution we have several such groups bringing together the members of our six departments of literature as well as the department of English, organized around topics such as poetry and poetics, visuality, colonialism, and the ends of literary studies. One of our groups has sponsored an exhibition; another, on philosophy and literature, has devised a new undergraduate major that will be represented by a distinct track in each of our existing departments, including English. Whatever the particulars of such working groups, they flourish when they have both a purchase on the current interests of the faculty and an agenda for the future, which might entail events, publications, or curricula. It is not too much to hope that these groups might reconnoiter the emergent fields into which departments will move in the next ten years and might prepare the ground for discussions of priorities.
A further development, always possible with or without such working groups, is a collaborative initiative for hiring faculty members. This way of defining positions looks more appealing in times of scarcity than otherwise, but regardless of the economic climate we will soon see, to a degree that would have been unimaginable until now, faculty appointments across all the formerly uncrossable borders. If, for example, departments of English and Spanish can agree on an appointment in Latino literature, English and French on a Caribbeanist, and French and German on a medievalist, we will have seen a profound shift of attitude. The upshot, I think, will be that comparatists of both official and ad hoc types—those trained under the aegis of institutional comparative literature as well as those who put different languages together in their work under the pressure of an idea—will have fully entered into the traditionally monolingual departments, remaking them as more adaptable institutional formations and preparing the way for still more transformations. This is not to say that these new faculty members will necessarily see themselves as comparatists or feel loyal to comparative literature as an institution; I have written elsewhere how younger comparatists often take on a protective coloration in monolingual departments (Greene). But whatever happens to comparative literature itself, these departments are becoming open to multiple languages, and that condition seems likely to bring still more openness and more languages.
Moreover, it is time for literature departments of all sorts to take another look at translation, thinking about how to use it strategically. Or, to be more precise, we ought to think again about the relation between an original work and its translation as a variable that can produce different results in different settings. We can no longer afford the general condemnation of translation that held a generation ago—the view that complicity with translation in a department other than English represented a betrayal of that department’s purpose. In fact, this view was more dogma than practice, because many departments, not to mention the particular people in them, already had (and have) a more complex experience of translation. An especially well-subscribed course taught entirely in translation, an unevenness between how a department uses translation for its own purposes and how it expects others to use it, uses of translation in scholarship that in principle one would not accept in teaching: the examples of inconsistency are obvious and many. We are missing a policy for translation that would allow for the strategic use of translation where the end is to establish a respect for, and often a knowledge of, the original. Such a policy would entail less reliance on using published translations in toto and uncritically and more attention to the correspondences between an original and its translation, to how translations are made, and to translation as an element of both the influence and the reception of a work. For instance, while the main text for a course on the Divine Comedy might be Charles Singleton’s translation, a particular passage could be looked at in more detail through the original, John Ciardi’s version, and Robert Durling’s version as well. Or a poem that has figured in a many-languaged continuum might be reinserted into a comparative context for pedagogical purposes; Neruda might be set alongside Whitman and the English-language poets who are influenced by Neruda. We might adapt the conclusions of several recent studies of translation and acknowledge that almost everything we read has a secret history carried on through translation: those translations the author read, those the author enabled or produced, and those of the author’s own work (see, e.g., Copeland; Venuti). Disclosing that history and exposing the assumptions behind it—including what counts as faithfulness between an original and its translation and how translation is complicit with interpretation—can be as responsible to the abstract values of literary study as the closest reading of the original.
There is one more topic on which English and other literature departments have a stake together: world literature. For twenty or thirty years this rubric has been a label without a concept, covering ill-formed and even contradictory notions. Recently, world literature has been taken up again in serious, provocative ways, and the concept seems due for a renovation (Moretti; Damrosch; Jusdanis). Meanwhile, even when most scholars have met the term with uncertainty or indifference, courses on world literature have persisted on many campuses because of the implied value for students. My experience suggests that world literature courses are typically well enrolled, are taught by a professor of English entirely in translation, and include a selection of international readings with strong brand appeal: formative works of Western civilization, established classics, and works by Nobel Prize winners. Sometimes the existence of the course is a source of contention: the competence of the faculty in English to teach such materials may be derided; the course, taught by one department, may be coveted by other departments for the sake of the enrollments. When I was the chair of a comparative literature department, I tried in vain to persuade the chair of English to share the teaching of that department’s world literature course; having been conditioned to see our departments as competitors, she even objected to our developing a course of our own called anything like World Literature. The existing course was a cash cow that could not be shared or even examined. Should we wonder that while the term is ubiquitous and the brand name is healthy, the concept is empty?
This kind of course should become a scene of collaboration between departments of English and the other literatures. I like to imagine a five-year project in many places at once, reinventing such a course to take account of recent thinking about the concept and institutionalizing a way of working together across departments. (The topic is one that could be treated in a group like those I mentioned earlier.) An obvious approach is simply to present such a course in modules that are controlled by members of different departments and assembled by some chief instructor; in many institutions, that arrangement would be a distinct improvement. But it would be much better to reinvent the course through collaboration from the bottom up: addressing what “world” means for such a course; deciding a common vocabulary that can be developed and reinforced from materials in different languages; arriving at a consensus about the role of translation in the course and about how its problems will be foregrounded; and incorporating some literary work that in an institutional sense does not belong to any of the instructors, so that they can participate with the students in fashioning an intelligent response to it.
One of the built-in challenges of the term “world literature” is that it excites expectations it cannot fulfill: the promise of unity and coherence is strong, but the reality of multifariousness and inequality is stronger, so all instances of the concept are bound to be inadequate. Curricular innovations in the matter of world literature, therefore, should be designed both to strike a balance between coherence and multiplicity and to get across the impossibility of establishing such a balance in any permanent way. Coming to life under the attentions of two or more faculty members from departments of English and other literatures, the concept should appear attractive but approximate and provisional; and the course in question should send students into further courses in both kinds of departments with a fresh sense of the common territory between them. It is hard not to imagine that after colleagues of different departments have worked together on such a course, they will have something more substantial in common than mutual ignorance or suspicion and that their departments will have a basis for further collaborative ventures. It is also hard not to suppose that they can obtain more from their institutions through such statements of shared purpose than through unthinking competition or mutual obliviousness.
Copeland, Rita. Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.
Damrosch, David. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003.
Greene, Roland. “The Post-English English.” PMLA 117 (2002): 1243–44.
Gruesz, Kirsten Silva. Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2002.
Huang, Yunte. Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002.
Jusdanis, Gregory. “World Literature: What Is It Good For?” Diaspora, forthcoming.
Moretti, Franco. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Left Review 1 (2000): 54–68.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia UP, 2003.
Venuti, Lawrence. The Scandals of Translation: Toward an Ethics of Difference. London: Routledge, 1998.
© 2004 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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