CHRISTOPHER
BUSH and ERIC HAYOT
RESPONDING TO DEATH OF A DISCIPLINE: AN
ACLA FORUM
IN
2001 BOTH THE PMLA and Comparative
Literature (with a globe on its redesigned cover) presented special issues
on globalization. Norton, Bedford, and Longman released or announced
multi-volume World Literature anthologies. As the new century began, it seemed
that the dream of a World Literature was increasingly becoming, if not quite a
reality, then something with increasingly real effects.
Two years later, Gayatri Spivak’s Death
of a Discipline (Columbia University Press, 2003; based on her 2000 Wellek
lectures) denounced “the arrogance of the cartographic reading of world lit.
in translation as the task of Comparative Literature,” counter-offering the
figure of a “planetary” conception of Comparative Literature that would
conserve “the irreducible hybridity of all languages.”
If you want to teach Gilgamesh, Spivak’s book seemed to say,
you’d better learn Sumerian. More pressing, perhaps: if you want to teach
Mahfouz, you’d better learn Arabic. Not to mention Igbo, Khmer, Uzbek. . . .
For those who might have complained that all this was too much work, Spivak
offered the following bracing response: “There are a few hegemonic European
languages and innumerable Southern Hemisphere languages. The only principled
answer to that is ‘Too bad.’”
It isn’t every day that comparatists find enough common ground to have a
disagreement. The problem of World Literature and the ways in which it is or
isn’t Comparative Literature present us with an occasion for institutional,
pedagogical, and ethical self-evaluation. The products of that occasion are
perhaps most visible in the essays that make up the Saussy Report on the state
of the discipline, a number of which respond specifically to the historical
conjuncture of the various anthologies and Spivak’s critique, but also in
institutional discussions about curricula and the value of Comparative
Literature in relation to the other disciplines it most closely resembles.
The essays that follow, each of which responds specifically to Spivak’s book,
approach from an oblique angle the current “moment” in this institutional
debate. This has to do to some extent with their doubled origin: three years ago
a group of us decided that one of the most interesting possible uses of the
ACLA’s three-day seminar format would be to ask everyone to engage in a
reading of a single book. Around the same time, Death of a Discipline was
published. The astral conjunction was too good to ignore, and the resulting
seminar, which took place at the 2004 ACLA convention at the
The papers as presented here are therefore not so much direct answers to Death
of a Discipline as they are, in Spivak’s words, “preparation for a
patient and provisional and forever deferred arrival into the performative of
the other, in order not to transcode but to draw a response.”
In the interview that follows the essays in this issue, Spivak says that
they revealed to her the “slightness” of her own attempt to theorize a
non-racist Comparative Literature. This is, to be sure, one model of response:
disappointment that, once again, one has failed to make oneself perfectly
understood, a failure that produces the need for a response to the response, and
so on. Call it a conversation.
Insofar as these responses respond, they do so in relation to both a series of
arguments and a particular act of writing, one that may not coincide with the
book Spivak would come to wish she had written. To say this is but to remark,
not for the first time, that the act of critique and interpretation will always,
in its responsiveness, deviate from the original that it translates into its own
needs. Some of that translation depends on the format of ACLA seminars, but much
of it reflects the degree to which the respondents, in the essays that follow,
respond from a position that is very much their own: Haun Saussy begins with the
de Manian figure of chiasmus, Jane Gallop close reads with extra attention to
footnotes, Steve Yao takes up theories of translation, and so on. These
responses take Death of a Discipline as an opening through which to read Spivak,
but also to read beyond Spivak and into the contingent arrangement of individual
interests, each of these motivated by the weft of that “incessant shuttle that
is a ‘life,’” as Spivak puts it.
Engagement with primary texts both benefits from and is threatened by
translation, a double movement Comparative Literature must continue to negotiate
to avoid the Scylla of provincialism and the Charybdis of dilettantism. So too
scholarly activity both demands and must also resist the ways in which critical
discourses facilitate exchanges across scholarly fields. Brief, recent,
provocative, drawing on a lifetime of critical and practical experience, and
speaking, it seemed, to critics of widely divergent concerns, Spivak’s text
served as the point of departure for this series of readings. Whatever
Comparative Literature is, and however it negotiates the difficulties of world
literature, Area Studies, and institutional budget crises that seem to threaten
it at this historical moment, it is also, no matter where it is done, a set of
critical practices, a crossroads at which people who have learned to speak
different languages—in all the senses of that last word—can think about what
such a learning means, what such a speaking does, in an idiom that with
practice—but only with practice, and never finally—becomes common to them
all. We hope you will find these essays disappointing enough, or compelling
enough, to respond to in kind.