AT THE START OF Death of a Discipline (2003), Gayatri Spivak states that Comparative Literature in the United States underwent a sea change in the two years after she gave the lectures on which the book is based, such that her text should be read as the discipline’s “last gasp.” These remarks prompted an acid response from a French reviewer, Didier Coste, on the literary theory website Fabula. Coste noted that, according to Spivak, “Things change at great speed in Comparative Literature in the USA—as they did, for example, between 2000 and 2002 (the cause of the disruption, it goes without saying, being the 11th of September).” And he went on: “From a less short-sighted, less ahistorical point of view, it would be just as striking that almost nothing has changed in the discipline in France for decades.” I am not convinced that things are as static in France as Coste claims, but Spivak’s way of engaging with the U.S. academic landscape she inhabits may well appear characteristic of that landscape, not least because of her acute sense of disciplinary development and direction (albeit, in this instance, towards death). Only in that context, I suspect, with or without the spectre of a fetishized “9/11,” could such a gulf of retrospection open up within two years.

The reports on the state of the discipline that are required by the American Comparative Literature Association, of which the book under review here is the latest, could be seen as an institutionalized version of this particular academic reflex. The title this time was chosen, in the words of the editor, Haun Saussy, not only “as a marker of times we endure and imagine” (i.e. “the age of globalization”), and as an echo of the title of the previous report, Charles Bernheimer’s Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, but also to evoke two concerns that currently have a certain academic prominence, “world literature”—which will be one of my themes in this review essay—and “the politics of empire.” As these reports come only every ten years, the retrospection they offer is a little less vertiginous than Spivak’s. Roland Greene deems the Bernheimer report, along with the earlier reports, a “period piece,” but he also suggests that frenzied attention to a given moment’s Big Ideas could be seen as “a refusal to see what endures about the discipline in spite of all the changes of emphasis and fashion,” and that “comparative literature is not much different now from what it was ten, twenty or thirty years ago.” Trends as such, of course, and the urge to spot them, are another constant, as is a certain attention to ways in which the discipline may be reshaped by current affairs.

The description on the back of Saussy’s volume begins “In the first decade of the twenty-first century, globalization has emerged as a defining paradigm in nearly every area of human activity” and ends “Responding to the frequent attacks against contemporary literary studies, Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization establishes the continuing vitality of the discipline and its rigorous engagement with the issues facing today’s global society.” The phrase “continuing vitality” may serve as a rebuff to Spivak, but the sentence begins by suggesting (as did she) that Comparative Literature is in crisis and at threat; and many of the essays stress its precariousness and marginality. From the perspective of somebody based in a British university, however, Saussy’s collection—not least in terms of the eminence of the contributors and their institutions—may make comparative literature, and indeed world literature, appear enviably well-established in the U.S. Things may be changing in the U.K., for reasons I will discuss briefly below, but I am tempted to say that whereas, for a long time, you have had an impressive range of professorships, programs, and publications, we have had George Steiner. And whereas from a U.S. perspective, and with a certain intellectual history in mind, comparative literature looks distinctly European (Fedwa Malti-Douglas talks of “our viewing ourselves [members of the U.S. intelligentsia] as a cultural offshoot of Mother Britain and her cousins across the channel,” viewed from where I am standing and through the lens of this collection, it looks distinctly American.

To say this is not to make a criticism of any contributor or indeed of the collection as a whole, which is, after all, the report of the American Comparative Literature Association. But at moments the collection is uncomfortably affected, inevitably, by the ambivalences and sensitivities that run through discussions of globalization and empire, especially discussions taking place in the U.S. Katie Trumpener points out in her essay—and the list of contributors bears her out—that the American academy is “an unusually international intellectual meeting ground, far more cosmopolitan than its host society, yet as such embodying an important American self-perception as a nation of immigrants.” The simplified logic of the remainder of that sentence—“and therefore able to draw on the cultural diversity, intellectual energies, and talent pool of the world” (my italics)—may be a little jarring for an outsider, but this is a small turn of phrase and Trumpener goes on to make the point that “the internationalism of our academic life is a direct consequence of our economic, cultural, and political hegemony, our position at the center of a de facto empire.” The U.S. has the richest universities in the world (by a growing margin, I believe), and the country’s geopolitical clout is one of the reasons that American academia seems to have a wide influence on a global intellectual agenda, real or imagined (even in the humanities, where you don’t need lots of expensive kit to do research)—and one of the reasons that I and lots of other people outside the U.S. will read the report of the American Comparative Literature Association. In fact, another example of American-tinged globalization has been the recent growth within U.K. universities of comparative literature programs whose intellectual agenda, though on one level internationalist, postcolonial, and anti-hegemonic, is on another level deeply shaped by the sheer economic-gravitational pull of North American academic models, not least as channelled via managers of U.K. universities eager to pull in some high-fee-paying students from the States and the “Far East.”

I begin with these remarks for various reasons. First, I am wary of the way in which legitimate and admirable academic self-scrutiny, theoretical and historical, can slide into trend-spotting, sometimes self-serving and never as well-informed as it must pretend to be about what is going on in the many corners of the academic world. That risk arises with a collection like this, but most contributors prove alert to it. Secondly, given the title and provenance of the collection under review, it seems appropriate to register at the start both that the U.S. academy leads the academic world in many respects, and that in this case as in others the processes of “globalization” associated with that sort of position are asymmetrical and incomplete. Thirdly, I am not sure that intellectually the discipline is as closely connected to, and as quickly and radically reshaped by, geopolitical trends such as globalization (itself a notoriously slippery concept) as some contributors believe, or fear, or hope. Finally, the volume repeatedly raises questions, sometimes explicitly, about the homologies, connections, and splits between the institutional and the intellectual, the conceptual and the practical, and research and teaching. I will return to those questions throughout this article.