University of Oklahoma

American Comparative Literature: Reticence and Articulation

Author(s): Roland Greene
Source: World Literature Today, Vol. 69, No. 2, Comparative Literature: States of the Art
(Spring, 1995), pp. 293-298
Published by: University of Oklahoma
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40151139
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American ComparativeLiterature:Reticence and Articulation
By ROLAND GREENE Comparative literature
as an institution
emerged in its World
WarII-era identity- the one that for betteror worse
still determinesthe practicesof the field today- as
an Americanphenomenon,closely responsiveto the
initiatives of a founding set of scholars, depart-
ments, and journalsbased at Harvard,Yale, Johns
Hopkins, and Oregon, among other places. Of
coursethere are many institutionalforms of the dis-
cipline outside the United States, and some have
been quite successful;but even then the power and
appealof comparativeliteratureseem to depend on
an outlook toward literature,society, and scholar-
ship that is quintessentiallymid- to late-twentieth-
century American,like the MarshallPlan and the
FulbrightScholarships:pluralist,idealist, positivist,
and attractedto a manageableversionof the foreign
as well as the prospectof communicationacrosscul-
tures.
Can the discipline as thus conceived and char-
tered maintainits vitality today? Someone looking
for an answerto this question- as all comparatists
do from time to time- will find much to ponder in
the volume Building a Profession:Autobiographical
Perspectiveson the Beginnings of ComparativeLitera-
ture in the United States, edited by Lionel Gossman
and Mihai I. Spariosu(Albany,State Universityof
New York Press, 1994). In it, sixteen contributors,
includingthe two editors,offermemoirsof their ca-
reersas scholarsof comparativeliterature.At a mo-
ment in which autobiographicalexercisesby promi-
nent literary scholars are appearing often, this
volume might seem a promising addition to the
trend of elucidatingthe social and culturalpositions
from which critics write. Instead, it is a witness to
how little we as Americanscholars,in a position of
worldwideauthorityover the discipline,agreeabout
our own field- a fascinating collection that will
serve as anecdotal materialin the reconception of
comparativeliteraturethat is now under way. This
resultmight not be what the editorsand authorsin-
tended, but the volume accomplisheswhat most of
the explicitdocumentsabout the disciplinesince the
Roland Greene is Professorof ComparativeLiteratureand
Englishand chairsthe Programin ComparativeLiteratureat the
Ori-
Universityof Oregon.He is the authorof Post-Petrarchism:
gins and Innovations of the WesternLyric Sequence (1991) and
coeditor (with Elizabeth Fowler) of The Projectof Prose:Essays in
Early ModernEuropeanand New WorldWriting(forthcoming). He
of the AmericanCom-
is currentlyservingas Secretary-Treasurer
parativeLiteratureAssociation.
1960s (and they are surprisinglyfew) have omitted
to do: disclose how slipperycomparativeliterature
alwayswas, how contingentmany institutionalreali-
ties and individualcareershave been, and how dark
the cornersof our self-understandingstill are.1
ElsewhereI have proposeda broadlygenerational
model to explainthe conditionof comparativeliter-
ature as we now find it.2 Without repeating too
much, let me say that the disciplinewe recognizeas
American comparativeliteraturewas founded just
beforeand afterWorldWarII by a groupof expatri-
ate scholars led by Erich Auerbach (1892-1957),
Leo Spitzer(1887-1960), and ErnstRobertCurtius
(1886-1956). This cohort invented a discipline
throughits own scholarlypractice,without the ago-
nized reflections on method and boundaries that
have accompaniedmost disciplinarybirths in this
century;like rrianyimmigrantfathersin the firsthalf
of the century,their near-silenceabout theoriesand
values inspiredreverential,often self-consciousimi-
tation by their family of disciples born in America.
That succeeding generationwas paced by scholars
such as Rene Wellek (b. 1903) and Harry Levin
(1912-94), who honored the practicalexample of
theirforerunnersby buildingdepartmentsand other
institutions in which the discipline would be
housed. If the founding generationseldom invoked
comparativeliteratureby name, Levin's generation
used the term almostobsessivelyas part of its schol-
arship, displayingthe newly self-consciouspractice
by its patient applicationto close readingsof texts,
studies of multiple authors,and broad speculations
on the natureof the literary.In demographicand in-
tellectualterms, furthermore,the Wellek-Levingen-
eration was much larger and more far-flungthan
that of Auerbach.It included not only the official
luminariesof the disciplinecalled comparativeliter-
ature,but a vast networkof scholars,mostly situat-
ed in nationalliteraturedepartments,who qualified
as comparatistsin all but name: the linguistRoman
Jakobson(1896-1982), the Romance scholarHugo
Friedrich (b. 1904), the Slavicist Renato Poggioli
(1907-63), the polymaths Kenneth Burke (1897-
1993) and R. P. Blackmur(1904-65), the criticand
novelistAlbertJ. Guerard(b. 1914), and many oth-
ers.
The Wellek-Levingenerationproduced a spawn
of students who have run institutionalcomparative
literaturein the United States and abroadsince the
mid-1960s, and Buildinga Professionis their testi-
mony. The volume begins, appropriately,with new
retrospectiveessaysby Wellekand Levin. As it hap-
294 WORLDLITERATURETODAY
pens, these two pieces tell the story of their genera-
tion's entrepreneurialsuccess in starkly different
ways. Wellek'sis an anecdotalaccount, loaded with
accidents and opportunities.It tells how a young
Czech with a new D.Phil, came to Princetonin late
1927, negotiated the stultifyingcurriculumin En-
glish literaturethere, and graduallybecame a force
in this country's incipient renovation of literary
studiesthroughpositionsat Smith, Iowa, and finally
Yale, where Wellek retiredin 1972 as SterlingPro-
fessor of ComparativeLiterature - a position that
scarcely could have existed when he began his
Americancareer.
By contrast,Levin's essay takes its author'stra-
jectoryas a given, and chroniclesthe institutionof
comparativeliteratureat Harvardas opposed to the
discipline- the administrativeinstead of the intel-
lectual permutations.How did a man with no de-
gree beyond the B.A. become one of the most influ-
ential scholars in the field? No one will find out
from this memoir. Obliviousto the contingenciesof
careers,Levin describesa world in which everyone
is fullyformedwhen they first appearto us- usually
with a fancytitle as well ("thepresentchairman. . .
a native Australianwith a doctoratefrom the Uni-
versityof Minister, is RobertK. and Dale J. Weary
Professor of German and Comparative Litera-
ture")- and the history of the disciplinecan be re-
lated througha list of monographsin the seriesHar-
vard Studies in Comparative Literature. Where
Wellek'stone is often conspiratorial,dishingup sur-
prise at how this or that person got as far as he did,
Levin's resemblesthat of a politician or captain of
industrywhose power relies mysteriouslyon cover-
ing up its own etiology. At its end Levin's memoir
collapses into an inventoryof fifty HarvardPh.D.
graduatesin comparativeliterature,a list that is pre-
sented as though it will overwhelmthe readerbut in
fact throwstogetheran odd collectionrangingfrom
theoriststo philologiststo practicalcritics,from vir-
tuosi to journeymento others who might be de-
scribedas keepinga low profile,at least where com-
parativeliteratureis concerned.The incoherenceof
this group obviouslyreflectsthe same qualityin the
discipline, but Levin, an institution-builderto the
end (and this essay is one of the last things he
wrote), displays no ambivalenceor insecurity. In-
stead he announces that Harvard conferred 210
Ph.D.'s in comparativeliteraturebetween 1904 and
1991, 191 of those since 1949- in other words, in
the forty or so years since Levin's promotion to
tenurebeganhis dominionover the field.
The body of Gossman and Spariosu'scollection,
however,is the memoirsby scholarsof the genera-
tion that succeeded Wellek, Levin, and Victor
Lange (b. 1908), whose essay appears third here.
To run throughthe rest of the contributors - I sup-
ply the dates, places, and -
institutions is to hear a
roll call of the establishment of the discipline:
Thomas M. Greene (b. 1926 in Philadelphia,Ph.D.
from Yale in 1955), Thomas Rosenmeyer(b. 1920
Hamburg, Ph.D. Harvard 1949), W. Wolfgang
Holdheim (b. 1926 Berlin,Ph.D. Yale 1956), Anna
Balakian(b. 1916 Constantinople,Ph.D. Columbia
1943), AlbertJ. Guerard(b. 1914 Houston, Ph.D.
Stanford1938), Thomas R. Hart (b. 1925 Raleigh,
Ph.D. Yale 1952), Lilian Furst (b. 1931 Vienna,
Ph.D. Cambridge1957), MarjoriePerloff (b. 1931
Vienna, Ph.D. Catholic University of America
1965), HerbertLindenberger(b. 1929 Los Angeles,
Ph.D. Washington1955), GeraldGillespie(b. 1933
Cleveland,Ph.D. Ohio State 1961), Stanley Corn-
gold (b. 1934 Brooklyn,Ph.D. Cornell 1968), and
the editors.It could be observedthat a few of these
people are not comparatistsin any usual sense, and
in fact Lionel Gossman admitsin the forewordthat
he understood the book at first as collecting the
memoirs not of comparatistsbut of specialists in
foreign literatures.It fits well with the nebulous
quality of the discipline that in a volume such as
this, one of the editors and severalof the contribu-
tors should be quite out of place. Rosenmeyerbe-
gins his essay this way: "Let's not kid ourselves;I
am not a comparatist"(49). Still, everyone'stesti-
mony is taken; in the project of defining this inde-
finable practice, almost every opinion is probably
valid. {Buildinga Professionwas seeminglyproduced
without fact-checking, copy-editing, or perhaps
even proofreading, which makes it even more
nakedly a memoir: lapses of detail and contradic-
tions between one essay and another are every-
where.At one point FredricJameson'sbook is cited
as The Politically Unconscious.)
Unlike those of Wellek and Levin, the third-gen-
erationessays are full of longingsthat seem still un-
fulfilled:for "culture"of the authoritativeEuropean
kind, for stable homes and identitiesin the postwar
world, and most of all for institutionalsanctionand
self-recognitionas comparatists.The last of these
attainmentsis the most elusive. Many of this group
came of age intellectuallyunder the sign of first-
and second-generationcomparatists:Greene and
Hart both worked under Auerbach and Wellek at
Yale, while several others representedhere studied
at Harvard,Hopkins, Cornell, or Columbia in the
era of comparativeliterature'sconsolidation. But
the result of this direct tutelageor at least exposure
is a curious reticence about the nature and bound-
aries of the discipline- as though it would be impi-
ous or dangerousto call a comfortablehorizoninto
question or to speculate too far past the limits of
what had been made safe by one's teachers. This
passageis from Hart'sessay:
If I hadbeenasked,I wouldhavesaidthatmy special
interest[in graduateschool]wasliterarytheory,which
thenmeantalmostthe exactoppositeof whatit means

today. I learnedthat there there is a clear distinction
between literatureand nonliterature.Novels belong to
literature;historyand autobiographydo not. As a grad-
uate student, I read poems, plays, and novels, and in-
terpretationsof them, plus a good deal of literaryhisto-
ry. I did not read Freud or Marx, nor did I learn
anythingaboutphilosophyor politicalscience or sociol-
ogy. AlthoughI was keenlyinterestedin linguisticsand
anthropology,and auditedgraduatecoursesin both, it
neveroccurredto me that they had anythingto do with
my workas a studentof ComparativeLiterature.(100)
Hart's point is that Wellek and the other institution-
builders devised this model of graduate education,
so it must be a standard from which we have fallen
away. But the larger questions that come to mind
are whether this third generation appreciates how a
Wellek became such, what the differences must be
between the esthetic theory propounded in his and
Austin Warren's hard-won Theory of Literature
(1942) on the one hand and the actual training of
graduate students on the other, and in what spirit
any scholarly generation ought to view the one that
precedes it.
Since Wellek's memoir is available in this same
book, a certain generational comparison is in-
evitable. When Wellek was in graduate school at
Princeton, he took a course from Charles Grosvenor
Osgood in which he was assigned to do a report on
"Spenser's Irish Rivers," and another with Thomas
Marc Parrott in which the whole business consisted
of comparing the quarto and folio editions of Ham-
let word by word: "No attempt was made to discuss
anything about what happened in Hamlet, but mere-
ly the verbal differences between the two versions
were noticed and recorded" (2). The critical doc-
trine developed in Theory of Literature and other
speculative works of Wellek's maturity responds to
the aggressively objective, antiesthetic approach of
his teachers; it is the intellectual ending-point of a
trajectory that begins in youthful reaction against a
residual late-nineteenth-century fact-mongering. As
the destination of one generation, this standpoint is
where the next should begin, not end. Scholars of
the third generation, however, tended to see their
teachers' ends as their own, to treat as dogma the
highly provisional conclusions at which Wellek and
Levin and the rest arrived- and finally to resist the
reconception of the discipline that is the responsibil-
ity of every generation of comparatists. The influ-
ence of their mentors being too strong and fresh, the
scholars of this group saw themselves as conserva-
tors, not innovators.
As evidence, these essays contain many tributes
to the Wellek and Levin generation by scholars
whose work qualifies them as rightful heirs, not
timid custodians. Greene's account of Wellek is
noteworthy:
GREENE 295
[He] was the last in the remarkablePleiadeI came into
contact with. In my second year of graduatestudy, I
listened to him as an auditor read chaptersfrom his
forthcomingvolume on romanticcriticism,and in my
final year he directedmy dissertationon the epithala-
mion in the Renaissance. For a decade and a half
Wellek directed all comparativedissertationsat Yale,
regardlessof their subjectand field, and directedthem
with authority.I suppose that one never quite learns
from a professorwhat he or she expects one to learn;
the most importantlessons are transmittedinvoluntari-
ly. What I learnedfrom Wellek intensifiedan impres-
sion gainedfromAuerbach- namely,the inexhaustibil-
ity of all that there is to read, along with its
unquestionableintrinsicinterest.Of courseyou want to
read everything,because you are curious,because it is
there,becauseit enriches.(40-41)
What might be the historical and institutional con-
texts of the impressions Greene records here? Cer-
tainly the traces of Osgood and Parrott are legible in
the lesson of literature's "unquestionable intrinsic
interest," since that is exactly what they had ques-
tioned when Wellek was their student. Moreover,
how much was Wellek's supervision of every disser-
tation due to his heroic, "Olympian" qualities (41),
and how much to the realities of a small, newly
formed department? It is asking too much to say
that Greene- or anyone- should have recognized
how much his teachers had been determined by
their identities as former students, institution-
builders, immigrants, and so forth. But it is fair to
complain that because of their worshipful view of
their teachers, many of this third generation lack the
conviction that the discipline is theirs. Even with
adjustments for historical difference, they refuse to
measure themselves by the same scale as their men-
tors- and retrospectively, their mentors by the same
scale as themselves.
Thus Building a Professioncontains many expres-
sions of this lack of certainty and identity.
I had to take stock of myself.I felt like that Frenchman
in Montesquieu's Les LettresPersaneswho exclaims,
"Buthow can one be a Persian?"Indeed, how can one
be a Comparatist?(77)
Harry Levin, then working to build up Comparative
Literature,askedme to take overhis Proust,Joyce,and
Mann course. I couldn't face three such difficultmas-
ters, not to mention the challengeof followingLevin,
and proposedinsteadHardy,Conrad,and Gide. (92)
I saw the move as a homecoming,a returnto my alma
mater,and I had everyintentionof stayingtherefor the
rest of my career,doing my best to build a department.
Admittedly,after a few days my delight gave way to
panic as I realizedthat I had no idea what Comparative
Literaturewas, and that I was unable to teach more
than a singlecoursein it. (114)
The few of this cohort more or less undistracted by
the previous generation seem to be those who were
trained far from the institutional centers of compar-
296 WORLDLITERATURE
TODAY
ativeliterature;they were perhapsthe most effective
institution-builders of the thirdgeneration,the proto-
typicalcase being HerbertLindenberger'sestablish-
ment of the field at Stanford.In fact, Lindenberg-
er's dialogic essay turns the apologetic tone of the
rest of the volume inside out.
I wasnow, froman institutional
pointof view,a spe-
cialistin EnglishRomanticism, andvariousuniversities
calledme to solicitmyinterestin positionstheyhadto
offerin thatarea.The ideaof spendingthe restof my
lifetwiddlingaroundwiththesixpoetsdeemedcanoni-
calin thosedayswasmorethanI caredto contemplate,
andI remindedall inquirersthatmy trainingand my
intereststookme in otherdirections. (152)
Similarly,MarjoriePerloff's often hilariousessay on
her trainingat the Catholic Universityof America
tells of lookinginto the field from the outside while
hewing to a keen practicalsense of what compara-
tive literatureis supposedto be about.
Whereas EnglishLitin [the1950s]wasstillconfinedto
the studyof specificperiodsand authors,CompLit
wasthe disciplinethataskedthe big questions: whatis
literatureand literariness?what is the differencebe-
tweenspecificgenresandforms?howis "image"to be
differentiated
from"metaphor" and"symbol"? whatis
a "character"?howdo we distinguish "freeverse"from
prose?(128)
In many ways comparativeliteraturein this country
would be very differenttoday if it had been in the
hands of these relativeoutsidersthroughthe 1960s
and 1970s: perhapsless internationalin one way-
with fewer openings to the literaturesof countries
and regionsotherthan Europe,becausethey tend to
wear their Eurocentricbias unapologetically - but
more internationalotherwise,in that it would con-
verse more easily with the scholarship of other
countries,wherethe magnetismof strictly"literary"
questionslike the ones Perloffraisesstill holds.
As it was, the coming to institutionalauthorityof
the thirdgenerationpostponedthe rethinkingof the
field from what it had been in Wellek'sand Levin's
time, and when the sixties and seventiesbroughtan
inevitablepressureto open comparativeliteraturein
severaldirectionsat once- toward an autonomous
"theory,"toward the literatureof the developing
world, toward "comparison"not of languagesand
literaturesbut of disciplines and standpoints- the
field exploded in all these ways at once. There was
no core of consensusleft for these revisionsto inter-
act with; they simplyrouted what was left of Theory
of Literatureand other documents of the Wellek-
Levin era. Of course, it was rightthat they did. The
movementof the field awayfrom Europeanmaster-
pieces as celebrated in Levin's course "Proust,
Joyce, Mann" (whichturns up everywherein Build-
ing a Professionas a touchstone of the era) would
have been irresistiblein any case. But the deadly
reticenceof the thirdgenerationhad profoundinsti-
tutional consequences with which many of us are
still living; the discipline would feel very different
today if it had operated under a strong charterin
the years of the institutionalhandoff between one
generationand the next, if Wellek'sand Levin'sstu-
dents had developed a sense of self-definitionas
strong as their scholarship.It may seem strangeto
some readers,but Buildinga Profession witnessesthe
fact that first-rateintellectualworkis not alwaysac-
companiedby a sure sense of what one is doing, or
how to convey one's assumptionsand valuesto oth-
ers. A unique version of this reticenceis chronicled
in Stanley Corngold'sfine, acidic essay on Paul de
Man: here was a lack of explicitnessthat went as far
as lack of candor- the morallyflawed limit-caseof
what in the rest of his generationwas a collapse of
certainty,not ethics. A Levin product and probably
the key transitionalfigure into the next era- Corn-
gold's piece on de Man as teachercan be cross-read
with Levin's remembranceof him as graduatestu-
dent- de Man is the hidden villain among his con-
temporaries,his deep relativismand creepy silence
maskedby theirinnocentversionsof the same.
Among other things, a more deliberatediscussion
about the future of the field in the sixties and early
seventieswould have minimizedthe perceptionthat
at least two entire generationsof practitionerswere
cut adriftwhen Americancomparativeliteraturebe-
came a vehicle for literarytheory after about 1975.
Buildinga Professionis an anthology of complaints
about how disempoweredand betrayed several of
these scholarsfelt when the field came to accommo-
date poststructuralisttheoreticalwork as its primary
activity. (The most striking exception here is W.
WolfgangHoldheim, whose reflectionson the uses
and abuses of "theory"[70-71] are irreverentlyper-
ceptivewithoutcrossingthe line into defensiveness.)
One wonders:how could a set of establishedschol-
ars at the top of the field- for their positions and
awardsaccumulatein these pages in a strikingdis-
play of self-congratulation - be overthrown so
quickly?How could theirpracticehave been held so
lightly by their younger colleagues, their students,
and those in adjacentfields?Whateverthe reason-
and I believe it was in what they did not do, namely
articulatea freshrationalefor comparativeliterature
in their time of ascendancy- the result is that al-
most every departmentnowadaysincludes scholars
of differentgenerationswho scarcelysee one anoth-
er as pursuingthe same discipline.Americancom-
parativeliteraturetodayfeels disjunctwithinitself;it
looks in the mirrorand sees an unfamiliarface. Peo-
ple join departmentsof comparativeliteraturein the
United States without participatingin the disci-
pline- as in the ubiquitouscase of a seniorappoint-
ment in a nationalliteraturedepartmentdemanding
a courtesytitle as "Professorof ComparativeLitera-

ture"- while some of the most active practitioners
of the disciplineof all generationsare institutionally
estrangedfrom their local "comp lit" departments.
One Americanuniversityrecentlyhad the presidents
of both the AmericanComparativeLiteratureAsso-
ciation and the InternationalComparativeLitera-
ture Associationon its faculty,but neither of them
was a member of its Department of Comparative
Literature.In the memoirs of Buildinga Profession
one finds an eyewitness, almost blow-by-blow ac-
count of how we arrivedat this point. It is the auto-
biographyof a field that has been unableto know it-
self.
To widen the scope of the collection, Gossman
and Spariosu would have done well to include
memoirs by the group of scholars whose careers
were made successful, not obsolete, by the theory
boom of the seventies and eighties. Many of these
were immigrantsto the United States, and quite a
few were educatedfar from the institutionalcenters
of the discipline.Their professionalhistorieswould
tell us a great deal about the recent expansion of
comparativeliteratureawayfrom its customarytop-
ics, issues, and values;and the book would probably
stand to lose the tone of irritabledefensivenessthat
is sounded in many of the essays-a noise that is all
the harder to hear sympatheticallybecause the
memoirists are all prosperousand successful, and
have become more so duringrecent years in which
which many Ph.D.'s in comparativeliteraturehave
gone unemployed, underemployed,or out of the
professionentirely.Having some younger contribu-
tors would also raise the level of disciplinarycog-
nizancein Buildinga Profession, becausefew scholars
since the seventies have found jobs in American
comparativeliteraturewithout knowinghow to de-
scribe the discipline, even if only as a set of inter-
lockingproblems.The rise of an explicitlytheoreti-
cal discourse in the field had some drawbacks,of
course, althoughthese were outweighedby the ren-
ovative chargegiven to a moribundfield; but what
goes almost unremarkedin this volume- perhaps
because it is the alterationthat many of these essay-
ists reallydeplore- is that since the sixties and sev-
enties it has become ever more difficultto think of
comparativeliteratureas a set of intellectualprac-
tices and academic customs as opposed to a disci-
pline, but at the same time the identityof the disci-
pline is not much easier to define except as
problematic.A certainatmosphericpressureto the-
orize comparativeliteraturehas been exerted over
the last twenty-fiveyears or so, but without conclu-
sive or even widely validatedresults;the only thing
gone for sure is the clubbysense that because this is
what our teachersand we do, it must be all right. It
would be instructiveto hear from some of the peo-
ple whose careerscame to fruitionsince that time.
GREENE 297
Anna Balakianwrites near the end of her essay
that "innovationsare what keeps a disciplinevigor-
ous and dynamicbut each generationcannot rein-
vent ComparativeLiterature from scratch" (84).
With this second clauseI disagree.I believethat one
of the virtues of the recent cycles of reinventionis
the arrestingdemonstrationthat comparativelitera-
ture is change;the jolts of the last twentyyearshave
reminded everyone that the field is permanently
under construction,and that- ironicallyin view of
the third generation's exaggeratedregard for its
forerunners - this is how the Auerbachsand Spitzers
would have wanted it. (Recent years have seen a
growing interest in Auerbach and his contempo-
rariesas objects of scholarship,as the field's fourth
and fifth generationsinsist on relearningthe history
of comparativeliteraturefor themselves;and with
that interesthas come, I think, a new awarenessof
how radicalthe foundersoften were.)3Comparative
literature is properly obsessed with borders, but
more than merely national and linguistic ones.
Rather,the field is enacted whereverliterarystudy
finds its own borderlands:in the east of philology
and the west of culturalstudies, the north of theory
and the south of historiography.It is the continual
examinationcarriedout by literarystudy on itself;it
is the paradisciplinethat reinvests meaning and
value in the disciplineof literature.The oversightof
the third generationwas in treating the particular
constructionthey inherited as a given, not a con-
catenationof intereststhat reflectedthe trainingand
biases of their forerunners.Instead of realizingthat
Wellek, Levin, and the rest had staked out a posi-
tion literallyand productivelyeccentricto the rest of
literarystudies- and perhapsbeguiledby the condi-
tion of institutionalsolidity in which they received
that position into their care- the third generation
imaginedthat place as a livablehome.
The memoiristsin Buildinga Profession often por-
tray themselves as "born"into comparativelitera-
ture- a telling expressionof theirrefusalto confront
the meaning and contingencyof the discipline ex-
plicitly, as though it is literallypart of their identity,
like nationalityor religion.Is one a comparatistbe-
cause one has more than one national allegiance?
Because one grows up with two languages? Of
course not, no more than one is born into the pro-
fessional study of physics because one is subjectto
gravity.But notions like these point up the skewbe-
tween those scholarswho thinkof the space of com-
parisonas a safe place of high culture- the choice of
which reflects favorablyon them- and those who
treat it as a disciplinarybackstreet,those who claim
that it feels naturaland those who find it fiercelyun-
natural.The latter,I think,have a bettergrip on the
condition of comparativeliterature,which properly
calls into question all comparison, including its
own. Perhapsthis book will finallyclose the postwar
298 WORLDLITERATURE
TODAY
chapter of the field's history- a glorious period of
expansionand consolidation,but also an object les-
son in how problematicallydisciplinesmature.The
next Americancomparatists,includingmy students,
are more widelyspacedfrom one anotherintellectu-
ally than any previous group in the history of the
field: it is the vanguardistcondition of comparative
literaturethat as each generationtests the bound-
ariesit receives,it pushes awaythe outlines of what
constitutesthe field ever farther,and the clearingat
the center becomes larger,not to mention safer for
habitation by noncomparatists.But these newer
comparatistsare, I notice, much better convincedof
the purposeand value of the disciplinethan any re-
cent generation.A multifariousfield does not have
to be a disintegratedone. Without all the trappings
of common experience,such as the trainingin a few
centralplaces or the 1958 bus ride to the firstmeet-
ing of the InternationalComparativeLiteratureAs-
sociation in Chapel Hill that Balakian chronicles
here, new scholars of comparativeliteraturemay
well be finding the articulateidentity that eludes
theirpredecessorsin Buildinga Profession. As a con-
"Biti^^
fessional monument to an era of inarticulateness,
the book will have a curiousbut indispensableplace
in the historiographyof Americancomparativeliter-
ature.
Universityof Oregon
1A rare
example of positivist self-reflection by and about the
field of the 1960s - though late in its appearance- is Robert J.
Clements, ComparativeLiteratureas Academic Discipline:A State-
ment of Principles, Praxis, Standards, New York, Modern Lan-
guage Association of America, 1978. In fact, the book described
a field that was swiftly vanishing at the same time. A recent, rear-
guard action is Claudio Guillen, The Challenge of Comparative
Literature,tr. Cola Franzen, Cambridge, Ma., Harvard Universi-
ty Press, 1993.
2 Roland
Greene, "Their Generation," in ComparativeLitera-
ture in the Age of Multiculturalism,ed. Charles Bernheimer, Balti-
more, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, pp. 143-54.
3A
prefiguration of this interest was Paul Bove, Intellectualsin
Power: A Genealogy of Critical Humanism, New York, Columbia
University Press, 1986. More recent is Michael Holquist, "The
Last European: Erich Auerbach as Precursor in the History of
Cultural Criticism," Modern Language Quarterly,54 (1993), pp.
371-91. A conference on Auerbach's legacy was held at Stanford
University in 1992-93; its proceedings are in press.