How to Read a Discipline

Abstract

This article examines how critical concepts interact between disciplines as a measure of their priorities and possibilities. In particular, the critique focuses on the identity and identification processes of comparative literature and how these might be reconfigured, or remediated, by considering the logic of another discipline: in this case, media studies. The defining works I have in mind include “The Rhetoric of Temporality” by Paul de Man and, perhaps more controversially, the contemporaneous work of Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck. What we find are not the absolute differences of disciplinary procedures but certain grounds of comparison themselves: something that I believe is more than the subject of a historical inquiry alone.