Edelstein, Dan. "Gerrymandering the Canon." INSIDE HIGHER ED February 16, 2010.

In a recent New York Review article on Byron, Harold Bloom makes the following passing remark: “In the two centuries since Byron died in Greece [...] only Shakespeare has been translated and read more, first on the Continent and then worldwide.” Bloom does not cite any statistics, and one cannot help but wonder: Really? More than Homer and Dante, or, among the moderns, more than Sartre and Thomas Mann? Of course, what Bloom really means is that Byron was translated and read more than any other English writer, and he may well be correct on that count.

Yet this omission is telling, as it highlights an unfortunate tendency (recently diagnosed by David Damrosch) among certain English professors to equate literature in general with literature written in English. This disciplinary bias, less prejudice than habit, can distort their scholarship – the authors that they admire tend to be far more catholic in their reading. But this pattern also raises a larger academic question: Why do we still partition the literary canon according to nationalist traditions? Is this really the most intellectually satisfying and authentic approach to literary studies? . . . Bloom is certainly no provincial, and his own, published version of The Western Canon includes German, Spanish, French, and Italian works – although this canon, too, is heavily tilted toward English authors. But can this be avoided? No doubt French scholars would produce a version of the canon equally tilted toward the French, just as scholars from other nations would privilege their own authors. To an extent, this literary patriotism is normal and understandable: every culture values its heritage, and will expend more energy and resources promoting it. From the viewpoint of literary history, however, such patriotism is also intellectually wrongheaded. To be sure, writers are often marked most strongly by their compatriots: one must read Dante to understand Boccacio, Corneille to understand Racine, or, as Bloom would have us believe, Whitman to understand T. S. Eliot. But such a vertical reading of literature (which Bloom himself mapped out in The Anxiety of Influence) overlooks the equally – sometimes far more – important horizontal ties that connect authors across national borders. T. S. Eliot may have been “hopelessly evasive about Whitman while endlessly revising him in [his] own major poems,” yet by Eliot’s own admission, the French school of symbolist poetry had a far greater impact on his work. Some of Eliot’s first published poems, in fact, were written in French. Conversely, the French novelist Claude Simon may have endlessly revised Proust, but his own major novels – such as La Route des Flandres and L’Herbe – owe far more to William Faulkner. Such examples could be multiplied ad infinitum: they are, in fact, the stuff that literary history is made of. . . .

Students wishing to study English Romanticism ought to have more than Wikipedia-level knowledge about German Idealist philosophy and Romantic poetry; students interested in the 18th-century English novel should be familiar with the Spanish picaresque tradition; and so on and so forth. Comp lit alone cannot break down the walls of literary protectionism. The fact that we even have comp lit departments reveals our ingrained belief that “comparing” literary works or traditions is merely optional. Despite Bloom’s own defense of a “Western canon,” such a thing no longer exists for most academics. This is not because the feminists, post-colonialists, or post-modernists managed to deconstruct it, but rather because our institutions for literary studies have gerrymandered the canon, department by department. Is it not shocking that students can major in English at many colleges without ever having read a single book written in a foreign language? Even in translation? (Consider, by contrast, that history majors, even those desirous to only study the American Revolution, are routinely required to take courses on Asian, African, and/or European history, in many different time periods, to boot.) Given that English is the natural home for literary-minded students who are not proficient in another language, it is depressing that they can graduate from college with the implicit assumption that literature is the prerogative of the English-speaking peoples, an habeas corpus of the arts.

But wait a minute: how dare I criticize English curriculums for not including foreign works, when the major granted by my own department, French, is not exactly brimming with German, Russian, or Arabic texts, either? To the extent that French (or any other foreign language) is a literature major, this point is well taken. But there are differences, too. First, it is far more likely that our students will have read and studied English literature at some point in high school and college. They will thus already have had some exposure, at least, to another national canon. Second, and more importantly, a French, Spanish, or Chinese major is more than a literature major: it is to no small degree a foreign language major, meaning that the students must master an entire other set of linguistic skills. Finally, language departments are increasingly headed toward area studies. German departments routinely offer classes on Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, none of whom are technically literary authors. Foreign language departments are sometimes the only places in a university where once-important scholarly traditions can still be studied: Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes tropiques probably features on reading exam lists more often in French than in anthropology departments. A model for such an interdisciplinary department already exists in Classics. . . .

What, then, is to be done? . . . Get the answer here: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/02/16/edelstein.

Cfp: "Explosive Past, Radiant Future," Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto, March 19-20, 2010.

21st Annual International Colloquium. Keynote Lectures:

• Svetlana Boym (Harvard University, USA)
• Thomas Moylan (University of Limerick, Ireland)

The lingering spectre of the past and the beckoning formlessness of the future are the two highly charged images that act as the starting points of the 21st annual international colloquium at the Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto. Negotiating the troubled terrain between them has been the work of cultural texts and an ongoing problem for cultural and literary criticism. The struggle to establish a meaningful present, which incorporates the triumphs and horrors of historical memory and enables comprehensible directions toward the future, is a shared task of art, philosophy, religion and political though, among other activities. We suggest that narration – in its various poetic modes – is nothing more than this struggle for meaning, occurring over a multiplicity of social and cultural spaces. Likewise, we suggest that art, philosophy, political thought and religion, to the extent that they are concerned with the problems of meaning and temporality, may also be understood as essentially narrative endeavours. We seek papers from diverse disciplines that bring the problems of narration, thus defined, to the fore and offer innovative solutions to them. The arts have offered us rich and enduring images embodying the complex antinomies of this struggle, from the time bomb ticking in a sardine can in Petersburg to the ghost of Sethe’s murdered baby in Beloved to Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus, so eloquently described by Walter Benjamin as having its face turned to the past, wishing “to piece together what has been smashed,” but blown by a wind from Paradise “irresistible into the future.” We take seriously Benjamin’s subsequent suggestion that the dialectical object – the historical ruin, the aesthetic text, the political moment – contains the latent potential to “explode the continuum of history.” We seek papers that interrogate the status of such objects and their relations to the problems of temporality in general, to current cultural and political situations, and to the ways we understand cultural and political situations of the past. We also invite papers that consider the phenomenological and/or existential nature of time, its relation to the experiences of consciousness and the limitations (or impossibilities) of translating it into public language. Such papers may follow Heidegger in the contention that the subjective experience of time – “the horizon of being” – shapes the contours of social and cultural “historical” realities; or they may follow Freud in the counter-contention that the temporal imperatives of organized domination are introverted against the living memory of primordial, liberated time (situated in the unconscious). It was perhaps Augustine who most clearly illuminated the phenomenological problem: “What is time? If no one asks me, I know. If I want to explain it to someone who asks, I do not know.” We seek re-evaluations of the relationship of subjectivity to culture, mediated by the experience of time. Suggested topics include (but are not limited to):

• science fictions, possible worlds, and literary utopias/dystopias; utopian planning in art and politics; utopian philosophy; lived utopias/dystopias;
• the status and temporality of memory, trauma and nostalgia, rooted in the present and directed toward both past and future;
• the study of texts from various historical periods; the political and intellectual goals of revisiting older texts; the selection of historical texts and critical modes of approaching them from the present;
• canonization/re-canonization/de-canonization and their relationship to temporality in general and their own historical moment (the problem of cultural history);
• the emergence of “historical thought” within history itself, and related artistic, political and philosophical movements (i.e. “the rise of the novel”; “enlightenment” thought; new teleologies; the explosion of imperialism); alternative modes of temporality and historical thought within modernity;
• revisionist approaches to history and historical thought based on subjective experience (i.e. women’s history, queer history, indigenous people’s history); the political projects and philosophical stakes of such revisions, and new directions for revisionism (i.e. moving beyond ‘herstory’; moving beyond the ‘outing’ of history; moving beyond the postcolonial and ‘new’ historicism);
• the role of capitalism and its social/cultural logic in the narration of history and the possibilities of the present; the limits within capitalism of imagining alternative futures, and literary, philosophical, or political challenges to those limits;
• the challenges of globalization and the crossing of political, social, cultural, and philosophical boundaries; the clashes and hybrids of opposing temporalities;
• the role of technology and science in articulations of modernity, and the relationship of these spheres to literary forms, political agendas, and philosophical discourses.