What Can American Studies and Comparative Literature Learn from Each Other

Abstract

The fields of comparative literature and American studies long have had a fraught relationship. Although both fields emerged almost contemporaneously in the American academy, flourished during the Cold War era with the support of the National Defense Education Act of 1958, and engaged in a reflexive approach to literary studies that addressed diverse topics from an interdisciplinary perspective, the relationship between these two fields, both pedagogically and intellectually, has been rife with anxiety about professional status and a conspicuous lack of interest in each others' disciplinary approaches. This disciplinary tension is evident, for example, in the 1975 Greene Report on Professional Standards to the American Comparative Literature Association, in which the authors of the report drew attention, with evident concern, to “the growth of interdisciplinary programs” such as American studies (30), considering them a factor in the dangerous trend in the academy where, according to the authors, “[i]n at least some colleges and universities[,] Comparative Literature seems to be purveyed in the style of a smorgasbord at bargain rates” (31). Although both fields have undergone major transformations since the mid-1970s, most importantly the rise of “high theory” and the growing interest in non-European literary traditions in comparative literature and the integration of ethnic literatures and the emergence of an anti-exceptionalist critical attitude in American studies, comparative literature and American studies continue to maintain strict disciplinary boundaries as demonstrated by the marginalization of American literature and culture in the field of comparative literature, and the persistence of a monolingual and exceptionalist approach to literature in the field of American studies.