American Academics Research Articles

Latin American Foreign Policy Analysis: External Influences and Internal Circumstances

Giacalone, Rita. (2012) Latin American Foreign Policy Analysis: External Influences and Internal Circumstances. Foreign Policy Analysis, doi: 10.1111/j.1743-8594.2011.00176.x This article reviews the evolution of foreign policy analysis (FPA) in Latin America in order to explore the role played by domestic contextual factors and external theoretical influences. Applying notions that Jorgensen (Journal of International Relations6 (1):9–42) has employed for the study of European FPA, it concludes that incorporating the cultural-institutional context in which Latin American academics write enhances our understanding of national variations and of how internal and external factors get connected.

Data Mining the Humanities:The Impact of “FrenchTheory” on Literary Studies

 Abstract—In his 2003 book, written in French under the title of French Theory, Franc ois Cusset examined how some of the main French thinkers of the sixties and seventies -such as Derrida, Foucault and Kristeva- influenced the development of the humanities in the American academia. The purpose of my research is to see if it is possible to follow the journey described by Cusset through the critical bibliography published about these French intellectual ―stars.‖ Thus, I quantitatively analyze the references to the work of the authors that constitute the French Theory. Since this kind of study is seldom done in literary studies, it implies overcoming several technological and methodological challenges, such as the architecture of the main literary database, the Modern Language International Bibliography, and the lack of tools to easily obtain bibliometric indicators. However, I conclude that this approach is perfectly suitable for analyzing the circulation of ideas and for studying the evolution of literary trends.

Albert H. Hastorf III (1921–2011).

Presents an obituary for Albert H. Hastorf III. Albert H. Hastorf III, a pioneer in the study of social perception and interaction and a celebrated member of the Stanford University administration, died September 26, 2011, in Palo Alto, California. Al was known early in his career as the coauthor of one of social psychology's most famous studies-a study that vividly illustrated the constructive and potentially biased nature of perception-and his contributions to psychology and American academia were wide-ranging. Hastorf joined Stanford's faculty in 1961, serving as executive head of the Psychology Department from 1961 to 1970. He was also a founder of the university's Interdisciplinary Human Biology Program, soon one of Stanford's most popular majors and an attractive gateway for students interested in medicine. Al's unique gifts as an administrator were apparent to all who knew him. His sound judgment, personal graciousness, good humor, and unquestioned integrity made him a popular choice as dean of the School of Humanities & Sciences from 1970 to 1974 and as provost from 1980 to 1984. The esteem in which Al was held by the Stanford community was recognized with a succession of awards, including the Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award for Outstanding Service to Undergraduate Education and the Richard W. Lyman Award for unique and dedicated service to the university.

Idealism, New-Realism and Pragmatism: The American Debate on Reality from Royce to Lewis

In the first decades of the twentieth century new realistic tendencies arose in the United States as a reaction to the idealism dominating American academia. The foremost idealist at that time was Josiah Royce and the first realistic tendency against his idealism was directed by Ralph B. Perry and William P. Montague. In 1910 they promoted the manifesto of the American new realism.In this paper I offer an analysis of the debate that led to the birth of the new realism: it will provide a different perspective on the history of American philosophy and will open new reflections on the impact of the debate.In this debate “reality” was faced as an epistemological issue rather than an ontological one: the origin of this trend was an ambiguity in Royce’s work. Although initially new realists moved on the ground prepared by Royce, later they attempted to release the notion of reality from epistemology and to return it to metaphysics, claiming the priority of logic in both fields. However, the trend was definitive...

Rhetorics of Engagement and Activism:Questions Moving Forward

Rhetorics of Engagement and Activism:Questions Moving Forward E. Johanna Hartelius (bio) Activism and Rhetoric: Theories and Contexts for Political Engagement. Edited by Seth Kahn and Jonghwa Lee. New York: Routledge, 2011; pp. vi + 205. $100.00 cloth; $39.95 paper. Democracies to Come. By Rachel Riedner and Kevin Mahoney. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008; pp. vii + 121. $60.00 cloth. The Public Work of Rhetoric. Edited by John M. Ackerman and David J. Coogan. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010; pp. vi + 308. $49.95 cloth. Rhetorics for Community Action. By Phyllis Mentzell Ryder. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011; pp. vii + 325. $80.00 cloth. Rhetoric for Radicals: A Handbook for 21st Century Activists. By Jason Del Gandio. Gabriola Island, B.C., Canada: New Society Publishers, 2008; pp. v + 235. $17.95 paper. Engagement" has in the last 15 years become a leitmotif of American academe. Sometimes attributed to Ernest Boyer's 1996 summons to reconnect higher learning institutions to society, the concept exerts considerable rhetorical force in research, teaching, and administration. Many universities and colleges have a center, institute, or initiative for civic, community, social, or political engagement. As a transdisciplinary educational project, or "productive coupling of the academy's intellectual resources with the enterprise of generating solutions to current real-world challenges," engagement resonates powerfully within rhetoric, communication, and composition.1 In a recent forum in the Quarterly Journal of Speech dedicated to "engaged scholarship," Joshua Gunn and John Louis Lucaites explore the concept's intersections with rhetorical studies.2 They chronicle the historical development of engaged scholarship in the United States, emphasizing the controversies, risks, and systemic constraints, even penalties, that politically oriented work entails for academics. These issues, and others central to the QJS forum, appear in the books reviewed here. Evidence of the exigency for academic engagement abounds; this is to say that dire circumstances—geopolitical turmoil, social tensions, recession, record unemployment, environmental degradation, and so on—make demands on scholars. The books reviewed in this essay take up the notion of engaged rhetorical scholarship. Specifically, they explicate why and how rhetoricians (in departments of English and Communication) mobilize their academic expertise beyond the university, and conversely, how and why they bring the public into their research and pedagogy. Assuming a democratic orientation to this project, the authors assign rhetoric a kind of mandate to (re)discover its civic functions and purposes. Of particular interest to readers of Rhetoric & Public Affairs is that, in each book, rhetoric is defined quite differently in relation to what the authors call engagement and/or activism. I begin this review introducing each of the books individually. I then proceed to a more thematic treatment of the authors' recurring concerns, offering comments and reflections. In this commentary, I deliberately emphasize and conclude with questions rather than answers; I articulate some of the questions prompted by the books, and leave others to readers' imaginations and motives. I hope that vigorous discussion of difficult questions will strengthen and sharpen rhetoricians' work in the still-emerging project of engaged scholarship. At stake in this movement, it seems to me, is nothing less than rhetoric's academic and sociopolitical purpose." [End Page 782] The Books Activist Rhetorics In Activism and Rhetoric, editors Seth Kahn and Jonghwa Lee present essays by rhetorician-activists from various generations and academic positions. This diversity of approaches, interventions, and definitions of activism reflect well the subject's complexity. Contributors' activism takes place in the Cherokee Nation (Cushman, 56-61), in composition and the writing process (Kahn, 91-99), in contemporary Russia (Feyh, 100-12), in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (Abraham, 115-24), in the "armchair" (DeBlais and Grettano, 170-78), and in the Ivory Tower (Jones, 179-89). Indeed, one of the strengths of this book is its scope. Junior faculty speak to the precarious prospect of disrupting a department's or university's expectations of civility and decorum, while senior scholars locate a lifetime of on- and off-campus work in a well-developed theoretical corpus, reflecting diachronically on the phases of politically inflected scholarship throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Part I of Activism and Rhetoric frames theoretically the project of activism relative to...

Krautrock, Heidegger, Bogeyman: Kittler in the anglosphere

The paper discusses some of the key factors that shaped Friedrich Kittler’s anglophone reception. Four points are of special importance: the truncated appropriation of Kittler’s ‘middle period’ by American academics; the structural and ideological reasons for the failure of North American German Studies to capitalize on the growing interest in Kittler; the charges of technodeterminism; and Kittler’s difficult role in the debate over posthumanism.

Bringing Human Rights into the Migration and Development Debate

International migration is a key aspect of global integration, yet migration is characterised by a global governance deficit: unlike such areas as finance and trade, there is a lack of international institutions to set standards and ensure conformity with international legal norms. State migration policies often fail or have unintended consequences, while for migrants the result may be high levels of risk and exploitation. The US has over 11 million irregular residents, and systematic use of irregular migrant labour can be found throughout the world. In recent years, however, there have been attempts to move towards global governance mechanisms in the migration field. At the same time, migrant associations have grown and linked up with international human rights organisations. The article examines these trends, paying special attention to the Global Forum on Migration and Development – an intergovernmental consultation process that has met annually since 2007 – and the efforts of migrant associations and other civil society organisations to bring human rights into the debate. A final section discusses the initiative of a group of mainly Latin American academics to establish a new conceptual framework and set of strategic indicators to assess the links between migration, development and human rights. Policy Implications • Labour-importing countries can no longer pursue migration policies that ignore the interests, needs and rights of migrants and their communities of origin. • It is important for government and international agencies to work together with civil society organisations and migrant associations to safeguard migrant rights and to improve outcomes for all concerned. • Government policies on ‘migration management’ generally differentiate migrants into the highly skilled who are welcomed and offered legal entry and secure residency, and the low skilled who are treated as temporary migrants with limited rights or – even worse – as irregulars who are subject to criminalisation and high levels of risk and exploitation. Policies of this kind often fail to achieve their objectives or have unintended consequences. • Migration only benefits development if it is seen as part of a broader change process, which includes combating corruption, improving transport and communications infrastructure, upgrading education and health systems and improving rights and political participation. In other words, broadly based sustainable development comes first. • Progress towards a more sustainable migration order that recognises the rights and needs of all involved must be based on the questioning of dominant assumptions and the development of new sets of indicators and new sources of data. • Bringing human and worker rights into the migration and development debate is crucial for the establishment of fair and sustainable forms of global migration governance.

Missing Bodies: Troubling the Colonial Landscape of American Academia

Subjugated bodies continue to be missing from classrooms, faculty meetings, and educational structures everywhere. Where are the excluded bodies? Where is the untheorized visceral experience of everyday discrimination? Possibilities of inclusiveness must be viscerally felt, not simply disembodiedly spoken. Merely claiming to be a progressive teacher-writer isn't enough to achieve a decolonizing praxis. This claim needs to come from an embodied performance in the classroom, a place where teachers and students alike can perform the scars of oppression on their bodies. Teacher and student bodies, in-between the colonial and postcolonial experience, can then become more present in teaching and praxis.

Big Man on Campus?: Hitler and the American University

Big Man on Campus?Hitler and the American University Robert Cohen (bio) Stephen H. Norwood . The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. ix + 350 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $29.99. The cover of Stephen H. Norwood's The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower shows a mortarboard bedecked with a Nazi flag. This image linking U.S. campuses to the swastika is dramatic, but it is also tendentious and unbalanced—and so is Norwood's historical narrative, which has at its core a scathing indictment of Depression-era America's universities for cozying up to Nazi Germany. Norwood contends that U.S. universities helped to legitimate Hitlerism by maintaining amicable relations with Nazi Germany long after the barbarous nature of the Nazi regime had become apparent. Although accurate on many of the particular incidents with which it deals, this study is misleading on account of its narrow scope and failure to confront a large number of actions by American academic leaders that challenge the author's claims. Norwood's indictment of American academics starts at the top—with Harvard University. He portrays Harvard President James B. Conant as playing a key role in this legitimization process. Conant welcomed representatives from Nazi Germany to Harvard's ceremonies, including its tercentenary celebration in 1936, and in turn supported Harvard's participation in academic processions hosted by Germany's Nazified universities. Norwood accuses Conant of repeatedly missing opportunities to criticize the Nazi regime and saying nothing about its increasingly brutal anti-Semitism. Conant also proved indifferent to efforts to rescue persecuted Jewish scholars from Germany. A chapter on Columbia offers a similar indictment of its president, Nicholas Murray Butler, with the added accusation that he sought to suppress anti-Nazi dissent on his campus and punished students and faculty who engaged in such dissent. The elite women's colleges of the Northeast known as the Seven Sisters—Vassar, Smith, Mount Holyoke, Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Radcliffe, and Barnard—come off on Norwood's pages as embracing Nazi Germany through exchange programs that sent students to Germany and had them returning to sing Hitler's praises. He condemns the University of Virginia for allowing its [End Page 163] Institute of Public Affairs Roundtable to give a "respectful hearing for Nazi Germany's apologists" (p. 133). Norwood depicts the American universities' German departments as "Nazi nests" (p. 158) and U.S. Catholic universities as engaging in a "flirtation with fascism" (p. 196). After more than 200 pages depicting academe's callousness and stupidity in refusing to think critically about Nazi Germany, there seems a hopeful sign of change. Norwood begins his last chapter on the Nazi era by stating that, "only in late 1938, after the Kristallnacht pogroms in Germany, did American universities become significantly involved in protest against Nazism" (p. 220). Yet even here Norwood finds academic community leadership wanting because the "initiative" behind these protests "came largely from students" rather than faculty or university presidents (p. 220). He chastises campus officials for not going far enough in their anti-Nazi actions, since they "remained unwilling to press for strong retaliatory measures against Germany" and refused "to assume much responsibility for raising funds to bring refugees from Nazism to their campuses" (p. 220). To his credit, Norwood roots his narrative in extensive evidence from university archives. His indictment is at points powerful, as The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower offers the most detailed and devastating account ever written on American university ties to Nazi Germany. A jury reading only this prosecutor's brief against the university for complicity with the Nazis would surely bring in a guilty verdict. But Norwood's brilliantly provocative book—despite its valuable revelations about academic indifference to Hitlerism—is in its way a kind of case study of the historiographical problems that emerge when a historian assumes the role of prosecutor. It is at times breathtakingly one-sided, argumentative, selective in its use of evidence, chronologically constricted, and out of touch with the political dynamics of isolationism, the American Left, and the Popular Front—which did so much to shape campus discourse on the international crises...

Academic conceptions of a United States Peace Corps

Contrary to popular understanding that the United States Peace Corps stemmed from a spontaneous idea generated on the campaign trail to appeal to young voters, John F. Kennedy’s celebrated proposal for a federally sponsored, overseas volunteer training programme was drawn from models and theories circulated by American academics. This article examines the mechanisms by which academics attained access to federal officials to lobby for the creation of a programme that would employ educators to train citizens to aid the developing world in the aftermath of the Second World War and in response to the Cold War. It further explores the ideologies that drove four influential academics to call upon their universities to redefine their internationalist role by training graduates to perform voluntary service overseas. These four were Maurice Albertson, Samuel Hayes, Albert Ray Olpin and Walt Rostow, and they came from Colorado State University, the University of Michigan, the University of Utah and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The contributions of academics to the foundation of the Peace Corps have largely been unrecognised. This article contributes to a deeper understanding of the modernising goals of the internationalisation project and the relationship between policy‐makers and professors in a critical phase of American educational history as examples of cultural transformation. The examination of intertwined narratives in primary documents from scholars informs this perspective on the private policy‐making and social‐scientific thought that became embodied in the federal Peace Corps agenda.

Geographic Influences on the Climate Protection Movement

The climate protection movement in American academia is formalized in the American University and College Presidents’ Climate Commitment. As of January 2011, 676 college presidents signed on to the commitment, but there are thousands of U.S. college presidents who have not, and there is some evidence that public opinion on the need for climate protection is fickle. Extending the climate protection movement in the future will depend on understanding a multitude of factors affecting the decisions of college leaders. In this study, we hypothesize that three geographic factors could influence campus leadership: the cost of electricity in the state, the state's level of commitment to renewable energy, and the percentage of jobs in coal mines and power plants in the state. We tested the hypotheses using a Mann-Whitney U test and found significant relationships. We discuss the results and their implications for the future of the climate protection movement.

The State of Catalan Studies in the United States

Having been asked to comment on the state of Catalan in the United States, I must consider it an invitation to speak about myself. Not because my vanity prompts me to say, as Louis XIVth allegedly said, that I am the thing itself, but rather because, in the absence of programs of Catalan in this country, I can only refer to my subjective experience to answer a question that has been addressed to me for reasons that must appear pertinent to others. At the outset, a word of caution with respect to terminology is in order. American academe is fond of attaching the word to just about anything as a way of producing instant disciplines out of virtually any passing interest or fad. is the pedantic version of the isms that proliferated in the early 20th century. The word, in the current context of academic instability, operates much like the suffix ism did, albeit adapted to an era that has sought to dismantle aesthetic certainties. On seeing the word used as a crutch, it is useful to ask whether the radical to which it attaches refers to a structured branch of knowledge or is the telling sign of institutional indefinition. A term like Literary launched by F. R. Leavis to propose the reform of English into a self-grounded discipline--the very discipline that has now been dismantled beyond repair--, displays the same oblivious redundancy as the term Lake Lagunita, which marks one of the features of the Stanford campus landscape. It shows, that is, a semantic layering indicative of the cultural substitution affecting a relatively invariable object. Study, in its ordinary acceptation, began simultaneously and inseparably with the invention of literacy, while the latter, in its alphabetical modality, came to be in the process of transmitting through study, i.e. memorization, poetry that previously had been performatively composed. The Spanish language still retains a vague memory of the essential synonymy between literacy and learning in the term letrado, which refers to a person qualified in the legal profession. Mechanically, appears to endow with structure and epistemological coherence things that often lack both. An anecdote will show what the stakes are. A few years ago, when the proposal to change the name of Stanford's department of Spanish and Portuguese was being considered, I met with the director of the Latin American program to ask for his thoughts on the new name: Iberian and Latin American Studies. Contrary to my expectation, this affable colleague offered insurmountable opposition to the word and so we settled on the alternative term cultures. He did not object, as one might expect from a serious academic, to the ambiguity of the term but rather to use of it, a rather peculiar objection in view of its proliferation throughout the university. I was told that you, that is, a literature department, not studies, we do. Etymology was certainly not my interlocutor's strong suit. If we did not do studies, what might our pedagogical mission be? Never mind that I had previously taught in departments of Hispanic and of Romance Studies, had co-founded a Literary Studies program, and had published in journals that flaunt the word in their titles; none of this seemed relevant or sufficiently empirical when it came to define academic turf. One could reasonably object that Iberian Studies, a concept I have promoted for years, suffers from the same vagueness that prompts the unrestrained and sometimes imaginative use of studies. Although I am inclined to grant the point, I would nevertheless offer a line of defense, which goes roughly like this: by itself the adventitious and potentially redundant concept of cannot substantivize adjectival objects of interest (i.e. visual studies) and is thus superfluous in relation to well-established fields of inquiry. We not have poetry studies but rather poetics, rhetorical studies but rhetoric, historical studies but history, law studies but law, philosophical studies but philosophy, and so on. …

Johann Gottfried Herder Revisited: The Revolution in Scholarship in the Last Quarter Century

A veritable tidal shift in Herder scholarship has taken place over the last quarter century, primarily but not exclusively in German. This review essay seeks to evoke the richness and vitality of this revival with the hope of persuading American academics that some ill-founded opinions still circulating concerning Herder's "irrationalism" and chauvinistic, even racist nationalism, and his philosophical naivety and literary effrontery, might at last be put to rest. The recent revival has brough sharply to the fore two crucial aspects of Herder. First, there is the contribution of Herder's thought to the emergent cultural and social sciences. Second, for Herder the "science of man" was also a natural science: the division between the humanities and the natural sciences that has been such a hallmark of the age from Kant until very recently did not exist for Herder.

Hurdles in Tissue Engineering/Regenerative Medicine Product Commercialization: A Survey of North American Academia and Industry

The Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine International Society-North America (TERMIS-NA) Industry Committee was formed in February 2009 to address the common roadblocks (i.e., hurdles) in the commercialization of tissue engineering/regenerative medicine products for its members. A semiquantitative online opinion survey instrument that delineated potentially sensitive hurdles to commercialization in each of the TERMIS constituency groups that generally participate in the stream of technology commercialization (academia, startup companies, development-stage companies, and established companies) was developed. The survey was opened to each of the 863 members of TERMIS-NA for a period of 5 weeks from October to November 2009. By its conclusion, 215 members (25%) had responded. Their proportionate numbers were closely representative of TERMIS-NA constituencies. The resulting data delineate what each group considers to be its most difficult and also its easiest hurdles in taking a technology to full product development. In addition, each group ranked its perception of the difficult and easy hurdles for all other groups, enabling an assessment of the degree of understanding between groups. The data depict not only critical hurdles in the path to commercialization at each stage in product development but also a variable understanding of perceptions of hurdles between groups. This assessment has provided the Industry Committee with activity foci needed to assist individual groups in the technology-commercialization stream. Moreover, the analysis suggests that enhanced communication between groups engaged in commercialization will be critical to the successful development of products in the tissue engineering/regenerative medicine sector.

Toward World Literary Knowledges: Theory in the Age of Globalization

While the literatures of the (third) world are being rapidly curricularized in revamped Comparative/World or Postcolonial literature classes, the theories and methodologies used to interpret and evaluate these texts are still drawn primarily from the Western tradition. The field of literary theory remains a resolutely Eurocentric high ground relatively untouched by the rising tide of globalization reshaping American academia. Neither the marginalized subdiscipline of Comparative Poetics nor the more influential field of Postcolonial Studies has managed to challenge effectively the assumption that theory is the product of a uniquely Western philosophical tradition. This essay argues for the need to globalize the field of literary theory beyond inducting a few non-Western greats into theory's hall of fame toward radically redefining theory itself in ways that include not only dominant, formal, explicit high textual traditions of poetics, but also subaltern and popular epistemologies that may be “emergent” or “latent” in praxis. Toward this end, the essay proposes an alternative in the form of “world literary knowledges” and presents three examples of “literary knowledge” from the (pre- and post-colonial) Indian context.

Reconciling Pragmatism and Scientific Rigor

Seen through European lenses, American academia is struggling with a disconnection between scientific rigor and pragmatic relevance that has taken hold during the last decades within management and organization studies. The implications are serious: a potential loss of relevance to business and society; a domination of stand-alone-constructs that neglect their intellectual heritage; a limited dissemination of research findings to a relatively small audience; and the institutionalization of intellectual homogeneity within a self-supporting academic community. I explore some of the reasons behind this development and argue that change can only emerge from within academia itself. My hope is that current developments within leading journals and academic institutions might lead to a different future where new voices and a more global outlook will encourage a redoing of American pragmatism at its best.

The Circulation of Ideas across Academic Communities: When locals re-import exported ideas

The circulation of ideas across academic communities is central to academic pursuits and has attracted much past scholarly attention. As North American-based scholars with European ties, we decided to examine the impact of Organization Studies in North American academia with the objective of understanding what, if anything, makes some Organization Studies articles more likely to have impact in North America than others. To set the stage for better understanding the role of Organization Studies in this academic community, we first present the key characteristics of North American academia. Secondly, relying on archival data spanning the first 29 years of Organization Studies (1980 to 2008, inclusive), we identify an apparent dynamic of select re-importation of exported ideas. Put otherwise, top North American journals tend to re-import ideas authored (and exported) by select North American scholars in Organizations Studies. Thirdly, we discuss the implications of this process on the field of organization studies and on the circulation of ideas across academic communities.

Interior Monologue: Reflections on a Journey into Guyana's Heartland

In 2002, a group made up mainly of American academics embarked on an excursion to the interior of Guyana. It was soon very clear that there would be a shift in accepted assumptions about the relationship between the developed and the developing world. But it was only when the group left the city behind and entered the rain forest itself that the travelers understood the true power of the experience, the encounter with the majestic landscape and the indigenous peoples who had lived in harmony with it for millennia; and, in the silence of the forest, the encounter with the self.

Literature and Language

Early in their careers, most comparatists no doubt have faced the challenging task of explaining to curious interlocutors what comparative literature as a discipline is. Part of the challenge of explaining the discipline is that over the decades since its institutionalization in American academe it was been relatively flexible in expanding and reconfiguring itself to accommodate new areas and techniques for teaching and research. This flexibility and elasticity notwithstanding, one of the enduring characteristics that has served as something of a hallmark and a distinguishing feature over and against national language and cultural studies departments is the comparative juxtaposition of literary works from differing cultural and linguistic backgrounds--ideally in their original language--with the anticipation that this contrastive strategy will reveal important aspects of the texts under consideration more forcefully and clearly than their study in the context of their culture of origin alone. Although universal admiration for both the breadth and depth of the erudition of some of the earliest practitioners of the discipline remains undiminished--for Spitzer, Auerbach, and Curtius--during the early phases of its institutional life, comparative literature was comparing things that were not very different. As has been so often noted, the locus of attention was clearly western Europe centering on the Rhine River valley and North America. More recently significant initiatives to include the rest of Europe, Latin America, east and south Asia, the Middle East, the traditions of the Pacific basin, and north as well as sub-Saharan Africa have been undertaken and proven generally successful. The International Comparative Literature Association has affiliated associations in all these areas and is sponsoring major research efforts dealing with many of them. Just as the cultural-geographic purview of the discipline has expanded so have its methods and focus. During the 1980s in many institutions, comparative literature became the principal domicile of literary theory, which now has migrated in a number of different directions and more recently has been particularly hospitable to various approaches to identity formation and definition. It has responded to new methods of instruction and research that have come from both relatively proximate as well as more remote disciplinary investigations. Among the most recent of these--world literature--is obviously closely allied to comparative literature and at once addresses its historical Eurocentricism. It offers an exciting and highly stimulating new strategy that, as a number of books published in the recent years clearly suggest, has important implications for how literature is taught and for new emphases that can be brought to bear on understanding the production and dissemination of literary works. In a pioneering volume, David Damrosch defines world literature with an elegant succinctness that explicitly excludes any claim to chaotic universal inclusiveness, but rather as a mode of circulation and reading (5) applicable to individual as well as collections of works that range from established canonical masterpieces to new works that come to the attention of scholars and critics. He begins his discussion of world literature in this sense with a detailed presentation of Goethe's famous use of the term Weltliteratur in a discussion with his secretary Johann Peter Eckermann and interestingly draws Eckermann out of the shadows cast by Goethe's luminous presence in which he has for so many years remained all but hidden. I would like, though, to revisit this exchange and some of Goethe's other references to the all-important concept of world literature in order to examine some telling details. As is very well known, on Wednesday, January 31, 1827, Goethe advised his young secretary that the age of national literatures had passed and that the morning of Weltliteratur was dawning. …

Comparative Literature versus World Literature

Recent theories and pedagogies of alterity such as multiculturalism and postcolonialism have had a significant impact the discipline of Comparative Literature and the teaching of World Literature. They have, in many institutions, taken over the activity of comparative analyses between cultures and literatures and have achieved this importance in venues that preempt the traditional role of Comparative Literature. Goethe's call to form a Weltliteratur and enrich one's own culture through the acknowledgment of other models of artistic expression, such as Sanskrit kavya, may seem anachronistic and naive to us today. However, we should not forget that the discipline of Comparative Literature was formed from just such a cosmopolitan desire to embrace diversity. Comparative Literature began by seeking to engage the known world, albeit with very insufficient tools. Over time, it became institutionally far less global in its perspective. However, even in its most Eurocentric and isolationist moments, it is preferable to the cynicism that often motivates the market-based consumerism that has come to define present-day academic encounters with the Other. In American institutions today, it seems that we engage the world less out of curiosity than because of marketing concerns. Marketing in this context is twofold. First, there is marketing to and through university administrators who buy into the idea that alterity initiatives are the most advanced and logical approach to the miasma of competing cultures and ethnicities. In such cases, engaging the other easily degenerates into the diversity of college catalogues and state- or corporate-managed United Colors of Benetton pluralism (Shohat and Stam 6). Through such initiatives, institutions can recruit and pretend to restructure with supposedly radical responses to new socio-economic realities. One such recent restructuring can be seen in the development of new programs in World Literature. I wonder if the recent rediscovery of World Literature, a field often housed in Comparative Literature departments, and its establishment as free-standing programs of study might not be conceptualized as the latest avatar of the theories and pedagogies purporting to engage alterity that have sprung up campuses in the last three decades. If the recent revival of World Literature is a reflection of identity studies as currently configured in American academe, what, if any, common features does it share with other recent attempts to engage the Other? What effect do pedagogies of alterity have our field and how do we train students to engage the world? The practical reason for this packaging of alterity, whether it be a newly-minted World Literature departments, Multicultural or Postcolonial Studies programs, is obvious: all these specializations are relatively easy. They do not involve in-depth knowledge of another culture or demand learning foreign languages. In such pedagogies, each text preserves its own heritage as long as it speaks English (Prashad 112). Such pedagogies also feed American isolationism. In the Internet age, when the globalization of English has contributed to diminishing the need to learn languages, the Other can in these formats be consumed on the cheap. Furthermore, such celebrations of otherness and diversity in no way compromise American tendencies to cultural provincialism, triumphalism, or indifference to the world. Like those popular ethnic fairs one finds in the States, World Literature, like Multicultural and Postcolonial Studies, allows students to taste other cultures without digesting them. The resounding global education that such pedagogies offer a literature student can consist of nothing more than snippets from endless recycled representative authors writing or translated into the English language. Moreover, within such pedagogical initiatives, there is a real incentive not to respect the intellectual history or genealogy of an area of study. …