Lament for a Notion

Abstract

Lament for a Notion Stephen Slemon E nglish Studies in Ca na d a have not always played nicely in the institutional schoolyard.1We have run in the usual races for decreasing Arts Faculty resources; we have skipped alongside other programs while obedient administrative prefects turned maniacally at the ropes and made us trip. But at the same time, reports have been filed which document a sustained proclivity within us towards bullying: marble-stealing in the allocations pool, fighting with the language programs, and ganging up on the little guys, especially on that newcomer to the school whose name implicitly speaks “foreignness” to the object-driven identitarian programs by virtue of its toponomic binocularity. Comparative Literature in Canada is the kid who wears glasses. He sits between grades and is accepted by neither of them. He brings in toys with funny names, like alterity, and intertextuality, and differance—everyone steals them. He blames us for his constantly bloody nose. This pattern of behaviour should trouble participants in both programs, but higher education in Canada is in a post-Darwinian free market, not a l In this review essay, I shall discuss the following book only: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death ofa Discipline. (The Wellek Library Lectures in Critical Theory.) Cloth. Pp. 128. New York: Columbia UP, 2003. u.s. $22.50. ESC 29.1-2 (March/June 2003): 207-218 St ep h en Slem o n teaches postcolonial literatures and theory in the Department of English, University of Alberta. zero tolerance zone for institutional violence, and the Western university has always sought to know more about aggressor cultures than about the aggrieved. Punch in “why kids bully” on a Google search, and the first hit takes you to a Cornerbrook, Newfoundland, page that produces several key insights into the skewed sociability of English Studies in Canada. Kids bully, says the website, because "someone else ... is picking on them." They bully because “they think the world revolves around them.” Above all they bully because “they have no true friends and feel lonely”2 Affective incommen­ surability is the old story of institutionalized English Studies. Secular heirs to John Henry Newman’s idea of the university, we imagine ourselves at the centre of the academia’s domestic life, but in actual practice we find our­ selves banished to the red room during university moments of important decision-making and thus liminally positioned between identities: are we Jane Eyre, or are we John Reed? Our disciplinary cousin, Comparative Lit­ erature, reports us to have said: “you have no business to take our books.” Punch in “why kids get bullied” on Google, however, and the computer will tell you that “your search did not match any documents.” One under­ stands in an instant why it is that English Studies in Canada have arrived at a disciplinary moment of hulking self-interest, arrested development, and line-management violence, while Comparative Literature Studies cower self-protectively in profound institutional crisis. English Studies have a future within the institution, though it bids fair to be a deeply undistin­ guished one. Comparative Literature Studies may soon be stricken from the academic rolls. Or so it is at my University. The Department of Comparative Litera­ ture was once one of academia’s great success stories at the University of Alberta. From within it, Stephen Arnold in the 1970s framed the project of comparative Anglophone/Francophone West African literary studies. A decade later E. D. Blodgett penned a discipline-shaking proposal for a comparative Canadian literary studies, en route to his winning a Governor General’s Prize for poetry. A decade after that, Nasrin Rahimieh developed an iconoclastic and far-reaching challenge to the methodological orthodox­ ies of Middle Eastern Studies—the result is her 2001 monograph Missing Persians.3 In the late 1980s the Department of Comparative Literature was named a University centre of excellence. Its graduate program was consis­ tently top-ranked. But Comparative Literature is no longer a Department 2 http://www.rnccornerbrook.nf.ca/new_page_12.htm 3 Nasrin Rahimieh: Missing Persians: Discovering Voices in Iranian Cultural His­ tory. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2001. 208 ! Slemon at the University of Alberta. It amalgamated with Film Studies in 1992...