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AS WE ivory-tower literati approach the start of another millennium, what should we be doing now to prepare for that not-so-distant future? We must not allow the pressure of grappling with immediate practical concerns to hold us back from dreaming about tomorrow. My specific concern here is our stake in international studies. Surely one of the most significant dimensions in any national view of our profession will be our contribution to the nation's capacity to cope with the complexities and interactions of cultures on our shrunken globe.
We cannot evade the challenge of a more difficult kind of internationalism by the end of our century. Although it is tempting to put off thinking about the need to race the clock to meet that challenge, massive domestic and worldwide forces—many neither congenial nor propitious—are conditioning our institutional patterns, pushing us into a future that I believe it is urgent to modify. This large task requires more than judicious management of the current set of parochialisms within our particular schools. It demands a new kind of academic statesmanship and collaboration that can steer a steady course amid the domestic turbulence that American internationalism itself will necessarily generate.
As an American comparatist pursuing Western European and Western Hemisphere literatures, but supportive of East European, African, Asian, and Pacific studies, I straddle the fence that separates the ADE and the ADFL. And so I claim a certain license to say unpopular things about the enterprises on both sides. I speak also against the backdrop of observations gathered during my two decades as a member, and more recently as an officer, of the International Comparative Literature Association, whose membership is spread over some seventy countries. I shall concentrate on four interlocked problems that leading spirits in our nation's departments of foreign language and literature must attack: (1) the cultural inertia fostered by the rise of English as the world lingua franca; (2) the pressure to include more languages and subject areas in American higher education; (3) the subordination of our fields to the interests of the social sciences; (4) the inroads of “general literature,” as against “comparative literature,” into the place of primary language and literature exposure.
The profound consequences of the global spread of English have not yet been fully absorbed. Having topped French for use in diplomacy and become the standard in air travel by World War II , English has steadily crowded out its rivals as the preferred international idiom for the natural sciences and to some extent for the social sciences, too. Through its latest added prominence in computer software, English is rapidly consolidating its position as the global medium of communication. The Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales, France's leading business school, now offers its graduate business-management course in English as well as French. Even though de jure the sole “official” language of the Association Internationale de Littérature Comparée is French, because its seat is Paris, today English figures as the working language in its deliberations and publications more than fifty percent of the time. De facto, English is more than coequal.
Robert Frost has instructed us that good fences make good neighbors. But what seems in many respects good for our counterpart departments of English across the MLA fence is not necessarily good for departments of foreign language and literature, nor is the hegemony of English unambiguously good for the nation in the longer haul. True, today an amazing variety of countries invite guest professors who lecture in English, a circumstance that benefits me as an American comparatist as much as it does my colleagues in English or American studies. This ease of travel, however, reinforces the lazy thinking about other cultures that grips certain English departments and, given their enormous influence at many institutions, often projects onto academic policy and curricular development. Most of us can recognize the foibles of the foreign language department that isolates itself as a cultural enclave consisting exclusively of migrants from abroad—say, the totally Gallic French department, the Pan-Teutonic German department, or the Latin Americanists, who push out Hispanists not of their ilk. But many a subdepartment or program in American studies is just as tunnel-blind and ordinarily more capable of doing severe damage to the humanities through its collective rhetoric. American-born university officers who are professional administrators or who are recruited from the natural sciences and social sciences are likely to be attuned to the kinds of clichés endemic in English departments. Comparative literature has a primary duty to maintain a constructive dialogue with English, but foreign language and literature departments should also participate in that conversation directly.
One curious result of the global spread of English is the assiduous effort by foreign powers and political factions to use English to intrude directly into the political and cultural affairs of the United States—for example, by being interviewed for free on American television or mounting lobbying campaigns through front organizations to influence our Congress. The training of American-born media people in foreign languages and cultures seems to me woefully inadequate to deal with such phenomena, let alone to investigate, assess, and report on the variety of significant events unfolding around the globe. Journalists' international mobility, based on English, frequently promotes the illusion that they know what is happening when they do not. I am sure many of us have been startled and dismayed by the domestic coverage or noncoverage of significant foreign events about which, just hours earlier, before our flight home, we gained some immediate knowledge on the scene. We are probably more alert, as well, to catching the latest errors, prevarications, and distortions that, whether out of naiveté or ideological passion, faculty members and students put forward regarding cultures and places very familiar to us. Because we are aware of other areas of the world, we are a vital national resource; but because, by its very nature, our disparate expertise has no single focus, it is poorly understood on far too many campuses. I find it difficult to suppose that increasing American competence in foreign languages will worsen the level of misinformation and disinformation with which our world is awash; rather, it should contribute to our ability to interpret what other peoples are saying and doing.
I am already anticipating my third category, and a few preliminary notes must suffice here. On most campuses scholars who are interested in other cultures are not numerous, and whether we are assembled in one omnibus department of foreign languages or divided into smaller blocks or independent units, we are generally a collection of slivers. When it comes to area studies, which certainly should be our business, too, American foreign language departments speak with feeble voices, even while or because we are busily carrying out our primary missions—teaching our languages and literatures and offering at best a sprinkling of general culture courses. We seldom have an effective coterie of spokespersons in the high administration who comprehend our achievement and potential; the fortunate exceptions, such as Princeton, Irvine, Ohio State, and Wayne State, just go to prove the rule. The goal is indeed to forge a collaborative alliance of English and foreign language people, such as the combined department of literature and language established at Northern Kentucky University (see Reichardt). But the omnibus department is not a practical possibility at most institutions, nor does the mere administrative grouping in itself guarantee that the right things will happen.
Separate foreign language departments that lack an effective channel in their institutions should caucus at least annually to formulate and pursue a comprehensive policy on both the humanities at large and area studies in particular. Really caucus, that is—get together in conclave, get together not only under official auspices but also by themselves in camera. The ADFL should vigorously continue its national leadership role in fostering such local caucuses on a steady basis into the 1990s. The ADFL and ADE jointly should examine ways to promote regular local meetings of the chairs of all units teaching language and literature wherever this practice has not yet been established.
Here I arrive at point two. Of the important evolutionary changes in the offing, the biggest to me is the unavoidable alteration in the mix and balance of languages that need to be taught. The rising enrollments in Chinese, Japanese, and Russian reported in the MLA's “PhD Survey” are heartening, but they are also harbingers of new demands, opportunities, and pressures. We who represent the current departments of foreign language and literature must formulate an effective stance, lest these otherwise very welcome spurts of growth destabilize and overwhelm our equally valuable existing programs. If we do not participate in promoting and guiding a sensible expansion of our sector, I predict that there will be no genuine growth in the final analysis. Rather, according to the outmoded political economy by which the intramural pie gets sliced, many administrations may freeze the level of efforts in the whole foreign language field and, in pursuit of that favorable publicity word innovation , wipe out decades of progress. Innovation has become a hallowed buzzword of latter-day Know-Nothingism itching to decree that studying the original expression nurtured in the cradles of Western civilization is no longer a priority and to advocate all manner of false lumping together, which inhibits real synergy.
And now let me say something very unpopular. We must insist on our identity and mission and resist all de facto subtractions of strength from our internationally oriented foreign language sector. Unless the faculty gets its back up, the foreign language area will be misused to accommodate programs that are reflexes of American political life and constitute subcompartments of American studies and domestic social science—worthy endeavors in their own right, but not international studies. Such difficulties are likely to increase. The United States is the only developed nation that has no policy to cope with the enormous implosion into its territory of people from developing nations. The challenge of integrating the newcomers will further confuse the picture as we approach the year 2000. Some administrators, wanting to be benevolent or at least to appear so, will try to use the humanities as a buffer to absorb the demands of these interest groups. The teaching of American black English is certainly relevant in any American studies program or in a black studies program or in an English department that teaches Scottish, Brooklynese, and other dialects. But the cause of American internationalism requires that the introduction of a course in black English not be accepted as an excuse for blocking a serious program in sub-Saharan African languages. Similarly, Chicano studies must not block a serious effort in Luso-Brazilian; and so forth. The Trojan horse will arrive under many pious guises, such as the spurious imperative to correct “Eurocentrism” (the both tired and wearisome slogan recently tried out by the dean of undergraduate studies at Stanford 1 ), but I urge you not to let it inside the gates.
America must and will look more intently beyond its southern and western frontiers. As an officer of the International Comparative Literature Association, I am actively encouraging this expansion of horizons. By the same token, it would be a false and futile sacrifice toward this end—indeed, plain folly—to damage our ability to work intensively with the closely related cultures of Europe. It behooves the ADFL membership to state emphatically to our local, state, and national authorities that substitution of one language for another does not meet the challenge of participation in the new global order. The future requires that we add significant work in Asian, Pacific, Near Eastern, and African languages, but while expanding, not diminishing, our European repertory. Judged by national need in the new international framework of 2000, the “same” aggregate commitment to foreign languages will effectively mean “less.”
The issue of our frequent subordination to the social sciences has recently been raised within the American Comparative Literature Association. An ACLA committee, led by Elizabeth Trahan of the Monterey Institute of International Studies, has just begun studying the question, but the signs indicate that the matter deserves study by the whole MLA. 2
Today I can bring only an impressionistic medley of phenomena to your attention. The chair for French at an eminent West Coast university recently complained to me that during the same academic term six courses outside his department included readings from Rousseau. Further investigation showed that many courses given by the history department consisted entirely of readings in literary works of some European or national cultural period, replicating the syllabi of various foreign language departments as well as of comparative literature programs. The co-optation of imaginative literature, treated in translation as social documents, was also widespread in the sociology department and elsewhere in the social sciences. I for one would have cheered this practice as cross-fertilization had I not also discovered that those departments tended to presume their own full interpretative adequacy and to restrict foreign language departments to a low-level service role, failing to recognize that foreign language departments promote in-depth study of culture. Since history, sociology, and political science together dominated the programs in international studies at this great center, I was not surprised—though I was unhappy—to find that foreign language departments were in fact excluded. Some social scientists commented that it had never even occurred to them to include foreign language departments. A prominent social scientist—himself a member of the President's Commission on Foreign Language and International Studies—expressed the opinion that across the nation the social sciences and humanities were not yet collaborating in any practical, meaningful way in international studies.
The lesson to be drawn is obvious: our foreign language leadership must pursue an aggressive campaign both to educate the American university community about our contribution to cultural and social studies and to achieve genuine participation and real partnership in international studies. While there is much to commend in Humphrey Tonkin's as yet unrealizable ideal of teaching the social sciences across the board through the medium of foreign languages rather than English, let me as a former undergraduate comajor in history and literature reverse his recommendation that “[f]ailing a separate track for the social sciences, some attention to the social sciences should be required of all language students” (7). I would settle for far less and ask merely that all social science students in America—not just our anthropologists—learn a foreign language and read or listen to significant works in that language.
The issue of general as against comparative literature carries us full circle back to the problem of cultural inertia. Ideally, comparative literature aspires to deal with all kinds of literary art from all historical periods and cultures, to understand literary phenomena both synchronically and diachronically in contexts larger than the tradition of one language or nation, and to investigate universal traits in the creation of literature, actual instances of cultural transmission across linguistic boundaries, the relations among the various arts and literature, and the place of literature in any general theory of human behavior or social processes. In the pursuit of comparative literature we have one of the most complex, highly integrated investigations of intracultural and intercultural life.
Comparative literature cannot flourish in the absence of, nor can it replace, strong national literature departments. Comparative literature clearly benefits from interaction with such allied departments as drama, art, linguistics, and history. But the corollary is that the co-optation of comparative literature by national literature departments, whether a single department or a combination, is a pretty sure recipe for stifling comparative literature. The reverse is also true: an imperialist comparative literature will suffocate foreign language and literature programs. With some notable exceptions, attempts to establish huge university departments of literature according to some abstract notion of “function” have failed; they break down because vital sectors are neglected and too much energy is dissipated in subdepartmental rivalries. In North America as in Europe, it usually works out better to have smaller productive departments of quality with clear missions and identities than an amorphous jumble. A separate department or program of comparative literature then ideally acts as a natural clearinghouse and integrative counterforce.
It is not sufficient, however, for comparative literature and foreign literature groups to eschew unfriendly designs on each other's missions. Together they face today a danger of academic dilution that is all the greater because it operates under a disguise. It appeals to the quite natural desire for an approach that bypasses the tedious acquisition of specific knowledge and supposedly allows the mastery of any mere facts, including the specificities of the intractable plethora of cultures. You may wonder whether I am referring to the rock-ribbed doctrine so widespread in American primary and secondary education that anyone properly trained in “method” can teach any “subject area.” No, I am thinking of the same fallacy on the university level, draped in sophistical rhetoric, in the specific case of general literature.
The practice of general literature—that is, the study of all native and foreign literature and literary theory, assimilated into and taught within the framework of one's own culture—is legitimate in its own right, in any nation, and praiseworthy. But when general literature turns into an intramural aggressor, the problem for everyone else doing in-depth work in the specificity of other cultures is that the siren cry of ecumenical imperialism sounds as American as apple pie. In many places across contemporary America, comparative literature is being smothered by academics who want to obliterate the distinction between comparative and general literature. Undeniably, the label comparative literature has been co-opted extensively to cover the inflated pretensions of general literature. It is considered bad taste to speculate out loud about whether this urge receives reinforcement from the deep-seated doubt that many have about their own competency as comparatists, or whether it is a reflex of the decline in standards of training over a whole generation—a decline, we hope, that is now halted. In any case, be it with cultural innocence, reactive resentment, or downright opportunism, many colleagues now proudly look with jaundiced eye at literary history, criticism, and interpretation and profess the supremacy of “Theory.” Henry Remak has recently published one of the bluntest views of the intellectually vitiating effects on comparative literature observable in both America and Europe. And Norman Cantor has more broadly characterized the trend in American universities as a blend of antinomian reductionism and epigonal rejection of liberal humanism.
In the name of almighty Theory and led by hundreds of grand viziers, thousands of janissaries today enlarge the new imperium. We see them race up and down the aisles to load up an ever-shifting supermarket basket of theories (writ small). Those of quaint foreign origin they purvey mostly secondhand in translation. Since praxis takes a backseat to theoria for so many academics, a large number of our colleagues are less eager to apply theories to actual literary texts, texts they often cannot read in the original, or to actual cultures. What complicates the situation is that this kind of shallow generalist is indeed being encouraged by a handful of comparatists with authentic credentials, some of whom—as we know from their pronouncements—favor a revolutionary restructedituring of the academy and society that will be accelerated, some prophesy, by the dismantling of traditional foreign language departments. A considerable contingent of today's faculty were suckled on the antinomian pessimism that boiled up in the MLA at the time that Louis Kampf, then its president, wrote his provocative article “Toward the Dissolution of Graduate Programs in Language and Literature.” Many have since switched to the new taste formula of Theory (writ large) in lieu of more drastic weaning.
Here are some sample eructations from the horse's mouth. Some of our colleagues make the astonishing claim that, through theory, they are now at last able to teach students how to think, rather than, as in the bad old days, just dump on them a repertory of knowledge. (Indeed happy news for the academy.) Moreover, one branch of theory is eager to reveal that literary canons and systems of discourse are shaped by social forces. (This will come as a shock to Madison Avenue, once the secret reaches beyond our ivy halls.) Another species of theoretician will generously inform you whenever you practice an unfashionable approach abandoned by the latest wave of PhD candidates, and if the pundit invites you to try out an approach you happily jettisoned years ago, the reason is that whatever the pundit recommends is “new” by definition. In striking illustration of this principle, a whole cohort of theorists have been marching since the start of the 1970s under the unfading banner of “new literary history”; this suspension of time empowers us to berate all that is “unnew” (a license I hope is transferable to future generations).
As the goliardic poet said, “Gaudeamus omnes!” ‘Let's all have fun!’ There is scant time to share my notes on these messianic directions, but in your own minds you have surely gathered plenty of your own. I can think of few intellectual pleasures more rewarding than a deconstructive analysis of the utterances of the forever aging and ageless Young Turks. But lest you fear I may spoof my way into trivializing the fundamental issues that creative theoreticians legitimately raise, I pause to acknowledge my own indebtedness to theory and to confess that I occasionally comment in print on aspects of the contemporary debate. I am making the different point that my special interests as a generalist give me no right to play Tamburlaine and lay waste language training, philology, literary history, criticism, and interpretation in foreign language departments. Machiavelli would have smiled wryly at the pretext, often voiced in the American academy since the 1960s, that the scholars on campus whom we might think most aware of other cultures really are not. The most frequently cited evidence that they unaccountably do not know the structural rules, the operative “codes,” is their failure to kowtow regularly before the throne of theory. Equally suspect of heretical adherence to an old faith are scholars who, alleging that they already encompass important theoreticians inside their foreign language department curriculum, eschew salvation by general literature. I believe we must confront the task of setting the cultural picture straight on a broad front by choosing schism, by insisting on the distinction between comparative and general literature.
It is my modest proposal that foreign language departments constantly remind administrators that comparatists practicing in America should be checked for all these qualifications, regardless of whether their primary effort is in literature or theory: (1) decent knowledge of American history and literature, (2) broad-gauged familiarity with older and contemporary literary theorizing, and (3) in-depth command of several literatures in the original languages relevant to their field(s) of specialization. At the same time, if there are any foreign language departments still reluctant to do so, I urge them to emulate the pioneers who have developed excellent offerings in translation as bridging and feeding courses and have expanded their repertories to embrace film, painting, opera, or whatever medium might have a special cultural profile relevant to their work. That is, foreign language groups should exploit the human common denominators with which they otherwise will be hammered if they allow a monoglottal general literature monopoly in said common denominators. We need all these activities and levels as points of reference for a healthy foreign language enterprise, and we need a vigorous foreign language enterprise if there is to be a healthy American internationalism in the year 2000.
The author is Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. This article is based on the keynote speech presented at the ADFL Seminar West, 26–29 June 1986, in Monterey, California.
1 The dean, Carolyn C. Lougee, noted that the Western Culture Program—reintroduced by the faculty in 1980 in a spirit of strengthening undergraduate education—recently had “been subject to a powerful critique” of its “‘Euro-centric’ perspective” by “minority students.” She questioned whether its model, Western civilization courses, was “adequate to the new political exigencies, the new social realities, and new scholarly understandings” (7).
2 Papers given in the section on Comparative Literature and International Studies at the 1985 MLA convention have been published in Council on National Literatures Quarterly World Report Jan.-Apr. 1986.
Cantor, Norman. “The Real Crisis in the Humanities Today.” New Criterion June 1985: 28–38.
Kampf, Louis. “Toward the Dissolution of Graduate Programs in Language and Literature.” Graduate Journal 7 (1971): 439–42.
Lougee, Carolyn C. “Stanford Education for the Second Century.” Stanford Campus Report 18 June 1986: 6–7.
“PhD Survey.” MLA Newsletter 18.2 (1986): 14–15.
Reichardt, Paul F. “Apples and Pommes : The Combined English and Foreign Language Department.” Profession 85 . New York: MLA, 1985. 41–44.
Remak, Henry H. H. “The Situation of Comparative Literature in the Universities.” Helveticum 1 (1985): 7–15.
Tonkin, Humphrey. “Foreign Language and the Humanities.” ADFL Bulletin 17.1 (1985): 5–8. [Show Article]
Trahan, Elizabeth Welt. “The International Dimension of Comparative Literature.” Ninth Triennial Meeting of ACLA. Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 21 Mar. 1986.
© 1987 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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