Lines in the Sand: Comparative Literature and the National Literature Departments

Abstract

Colleagues, Fellow Comparatists: I have looked around us this morning and would like to begin with an observation. Many of you are wearing sandals. If there are 275 of us in this room, there are at least a couple of thousand toes laid bare, unprotected and ready for the sun. It is not a thrill to step on anyone's toes, including my own. Please forgive me if I do. I am here to talk about our professional relationship, within a university or college setting, with our beachmates, the national literature departments, modern, classical, Asian, the whole lot. And I do so with a ready awareness that, as th'e Bernheimer report puts it, nothing is more constructed than national literature departments, not only because nationality is something of a fiction, tuning out far more voices than it tunes in, but also because literature itself is irrepressibly mixed, stereophonic, porous, marked by exchanges and influences, international (Bernheimer 79). I also concede from the outset that in smaller colleges, as well as in some larger ones, departments of English or national literature no longer exist, and that the study of literature itself, as concerns its disciplinary or departmental segmentation, is polymorphous, a tide that may wash away all our lines in the sand.' Where are we in the evolution of our discipline? Descended as we are from national literature departments (mine was formed by representatives of English, Spanish, French and German departments), how are we today with our national literature parents? Are our national literature parents (or uncles and aunts) ready to die? Will the Ph.D. in French at the University of Massachusetts, like so many Ph.D.'s in Russian elsewhere, be dropped? Let us first review the numbers, as a small measure of our standing. I draw from both the Winter 1997 issue of the ADFL Bulletin and the Digest of Education Statistics. Comparative Literature, as many of you know, gathers no numbers, or relatively few, in national charts. Our discipline figures only once in the Digest, with reference to the