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0:01
A very warm welcome to you all to the first of this term's Receptions and Comparatisms research seminar in the University of Oxford. My name is Fiona Macintosh and I’m director of the APGRD, one of the co-hosts of this seminar series. It's wonderful to have so many of you and it's particularly special for the APGRD to be collaborating with the BCLA, the British Comparative Literature Association, with TORCH, The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities
0:40
and to have the support of Oxford Centre for Comparative Criticism and Translation.
0:49
As so many of you will know, and be particularly engaged with in different ways, Classical Reception and Comparative Literature have undergone many changes in recent years. Classics, and particularly Classical Reception within Classics, has struggled over recent years to find a foothold as a sublist discipline within its own discipline. Comparative Literature, in turn, has been forced in many ways to redefine itself in relation to other disciplines
1:24
within the humanities, notably modern languages, world literature, and postcolonial studies.
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Many of these developments have happened in parallel not in concert and this seminar series is convened by three of us, by myself my colleagues David Ricks and Justine McConnell,
1:49
and all three of us have moved over the years between Classical Languages and Comparative Literature. We strongly believe that much could be learnt, should be learnt indeed, from a dialogue between Classical Reception and Comparative Literature and so each week during the course of this term we will bring together specialists from Classics and those from Comparative Literature to explore some of the
2:22
pressing concerns I think within the humanities as a whole at the moment. We begin today with 'Disciplinarity' which for Classical Reception, in the early days as I've already suggested, has been especially challenging when it appeared to many that Classical Reception studies were undermining or perhaps even diluting the discipline of Ur-Classics. For Comparative Literature, that discipline famously dubbed by William Marx, "a Discipline without discipline"
3:06
escaping disciplinarity from the straight jacket has perhaps been liberating.
3:16
Before I introduce today's speakers I need to just remind returners to our seminar series and
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new participants today that there are just a few rather obvious house rules. The overall format of the seminars will be that the speakers in the first part of the session will speak each of them for 15 minutes. During this time the session is being recorded and then will be made available
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soon after on the APGRD YouTube channel. We will then take a 10-minute break. That 10-minute break is mostly for the three conveners to hastily look in the chat in eager anticipation of receiving your questions in the chat or as we indicated in the publicity
4:20
through the APGRD email account. So we will look at the questions and then we will resume after 10 minutes and I will remind you before the break when that 10 minutes is up
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and we will then invite our speakers to answer as many of the questions as they can.
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And now to the introductions. The first of our speakers today is Emily Greenwood. No surprise at all to the Classicists who are on this call. Emily has just moved to Princeton where she's the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Classics at the University Centre for Human Values.
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Previously, Emily has taught in Cambridge, at St Andrews, and at Yale. She has written widely on Thucydides, Herodotus, Homer and his reception in the 20th century and perhaps known by most people for her extraordinarily important work 'Afro-Greeks: Dialogues between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and the Classics'. Our second speaker extremely well known to many of us in Oxford and those further afield is a specialist in Latin American Studies. She's Associate Professor
5:52
in Spanish-American literature and fellow and tutor in Spanish at Trinity College, Oxford. She’s also and we're extremely delighted that she's with us especially in the opening session. She's TORCH’s academic champion for networks and international partnerships, a really important role and one that we much appreciate in Oxford. She specialises in fin-de-siècle Spanish America,
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she works widely across magical realism, interactions between science and literature, and really excitingly on the numinous and the paranormal.
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I'm going to invite our speakers now to give their 15-minute presentations
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and then as I said a moment ago we will have a 10-minute break. So if during the course of the presentations you can please keep your cameras off so that we can see, I'm going to turn my camera off, and we will go in the first instance to Professor Emily Greenwood and then we will go seamlessly onto María to follow with response. Over to you Emily. Thank you very much, greetings everyone it's good to see you on the Zoom screens. I want
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to start with brief remarks of thanks to Fiona Macintosh, Justine McConnell, and David Ricks both for the occasion of this seminar and for making it accessible to so many over Zoom but also for their seminal scholarship in Classical Reception Studies and just as importantly the community and field building work that they all do in Classical Reception Studies to make it possible for ever more scholars to work in this field. Fiona alluded to some of
7:55
the sort of disciplinary turf wars that Classical Reception Studies has had to contend with always.
8:03
I want to start by sort of revisiting that and perhaps even more polemically and to say that Classics seldom sounds more parochial than when the topic of Classical Reception Studies comes up and it's an instance in which our field often deals in a form of sanctioned ignorance towards other disciplines and what they might have to contribute and this is a burden that falls particularly heavily on younger scholars, graduate students, early career scholars, so if anything
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that I have to say in my talk is a value then it is dedicated to you. In preparing for this talk I spent a lot of time staring at the conjunction ‘and’ in the phrase ‘Receptions and Comparatisms’. I was wondering how to speak in common about two inherently fissile fields in relation to a third term, disciplinarity. Then it occurred to me that of course what both knowledge practices have in common is their disjunctive character and that this is what I should talk about.
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How do you discipline Reception Studies or modes of reception? How do you discipline Comparative Literature, for that matter? By their nature, as we heard from Fiona, both fields of inquiry escape any coherent disciplinary logic. Both receptions and comparatisms then are sites of disciplinary aporia. To be clear about how I’m using aporia here I will quote Natalie Melas writing in 2007 about the disciplinary consciousness and ethical positioning of comparative literature.
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Melas wrote we "inhabit institutional and disciplinary forms with a sense of their inadequacy but without any indication of the ways in which they might be changed or indeed of the historical circumstances obtain under which they will or can be changed”. End of quotation.
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While Comparative Literature does not have a monopoly on comparatism, it is the academic discipline that has discussed and theorised both the ideology and the methodology of comparatism more strenuously and sharply than any other academic discipline. So in contemplating the phrase ‘disciplinarity’ at the junction between ‘receptions and comparatisms’ I construe this as a question about the aporia over reception in Classics and the aporia over
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the grounds and nature of comparison in Comparative Literature, and I'm interested in what this might tell us about both the strictures and the fluidity of disciplinarity. In the first part of my talk I’m going to focus on these meta-disciplinary questions and in the second part of my talk I’m going to turn to the practice of academic writing as a pluriversal space where disciplinarity is in retreat. Focusing on Classical Reception Studies,
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I'll suggest that it's in and through the activity of deciding how to write about our research that the unruly insights of reception are always already present. In the essay ‘Rethinking Comparativism’ first published in 2009, Gayatri Spivak explains the rationale for rejecting comparison on the grounds that it is always implicitly and, I quote, “comparison in favor of the European tradition”, she goes on to elaborate that, “seen another way,
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comparison assumes a level playing field and the field is never level, if only in terms of the interest implicit in the perspective. It is, in other words, never a question of compare and contrast, but rather a matter of judging and choosing”. End of quotation.
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In her 2007 book, which I've already cited, All the Difference in the World, Natalie Melas provides a historical context for thinking about the axes of comparison, tracing a shift from a temporal framing for comparison in the early decades of the discipline of comparative literature to a notionally more horizontal geographical framing in response to calls for the emancipation of comparison from critics in postcolonial literature.
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Of the earlier temporal, developmental model, Melas remarks, and I quote, “Temporalizing comparison encompassed a multiplicity of cultures as objects of knowledge because the evolutionary scale allowed that comparison to discriminate; it welcomed all the difference in the world, so long as all those differences could occupy fixed places on a hierarchical scale.” End of quotation. Melas
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goes on to observe, agreeing with Spivak, that “If comparison as a space or an ethos of inclusiveness suggests itself to the discipline of Comparative Literature as a corrective, if not a kind of panacea, to the discipline's exclusionary and elitist Eurocentric institutional past,
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comparison as a method or practice presents itself as a perplexing problem.” End of quotation.
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So Melas’ solution of how to compare literatures in an expanded geographical scope relies on emphasising the opacity of complex works and their incommensurability making them resistant to scalar models of comparison. And we might think here as well of Emily Apter's work on comparative literature and translation studies which has a similar emphasis on incommensurability in the form of untranslatability. In terms of canon, however, and in terms of curriculum and hiring,
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these calls for incommensurability or insistence on difference-in-equivalence or equivalence-in-difference are typically perceived as disruptive of disciplinary authority, autonomy, and coherence. As Spivak writes in 'Death of a Discipline', and I quote, “We are afraid to let the permeability be unrestricted by our own moves.”
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We're in the process of similar anxieties and calls for emancipation as well as the rear-guard action in Classics. We can see this as a reaction against hierarchical modes of thought and idioms as well as a reaction against exclusive hateful histories and then there's the backlash against the de-centering, devolving, dismantling, and provincialising of the discipline on the grounds that this is to usher in a form of disciplinary chaos.
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We might figure this following Spivak as the fear of permeability, and another thing that I'd like to discuss in the questions is this idea of disciplinarity in its relationship with fear. As Spivak noted in 'Death of a Discipline', anxieties over disciplinary permeability sometimes intersect with political discourses about immigration and the permeability of borders.
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Certainly, part of the rationale, not the entirety of the rationale but part of the rationale, for replacing the nomenclature of Classics and Ancient History with the terms Ancient Mediterranean Studies or Ancient World Studies is an ethical response to the politics of immigration in the present where myths of classical antiquity are drafted into service of white nationalist ideologies. And my colleague Professor Padilla Peralta has done
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excellent work in laying bare these logics in the case of discourses surrounding immigration in the US. But the example that I want to focus on now is Classical Reception Studies, since we've been invited to explore disciplinarity at the junction of Receptions and Comparatisms.
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In his 2013 retrospective on the 20th anniversary of 'Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception', Charles Martindale explained that in writing that book his theoretical agenda had been to use the two-way creation of meaning via reception as a challenge to positivistic attitudes to how classical texts mean. There's a fruitful analogy here I think with a turn away from positivist methods of comparison and comparative literature,
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but what really strikes me, reading Martindale's retrospective article again, is the way in which he describes the institutional and curricular impact of redeeming the text and the wave of Classical Reception Studies in the United Kingdom as a story of success that has generated problems of permeability. So, I quote, “The result”, Martindale wrote in 2013,
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“is that any text from any culture or any period in any language or any medium which has some connection with antiquity might now – at least potentially – find itself in a Classics degree. And this necessarily creates problems in constructing a credible syllabus based on defensible pedagogical principles (the key questions being, as ever, what should students read, and within what intellectual framework(s), and what should they write).”
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End of quotation. I cite this passage not as a criticism of Charles Martindale, whose scholarship has done so much to open up the field of Classics to reception studies, but because he well articulates a common mode of aporia that attends reception studies: what exactly has this got to do with Classics? Does it tell us anything about ancient Greek or Roman literature or culture? What is the rationale? How do I know if this is any good or not?
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Martindale's formulation is more sophisticated than this and potentially in the paragraph that I just quoted allows for limitless creative fluidity and disciplinary and cultural permeability, providing courses meet the standard of a credible syllabus and a coherent rationale and intellectual framework. In other words, providing courses are pedagogically accountable, which is I would think the minimum standard that we should apply to anything
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in curricula in our universities in every single discipline.
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But this model of Classical Reception Studies does not seem to include students within the horizon of the reception. The answer to the question ‘what should students read?’ needs to be cognizant of the frames and scripts and texts that students bring to the exchange and the social, institutional, and historical contexts in and for which we're educating them, which extend right up to the present and into the future. In her introduction to the 1991 volume The
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Politics of Liberal Education, which she co-edited with Darryl Gless, Barbara Herrnstein Smith reflects on students as a moving target audience and suggest that, and I quote, “one implication, well known to all humanities teachers who take seriously their responsibilities to the students in front of them (as distinct from their recollections or fantasies of students elsewhere or in some previous era) one implication is that they must be exceptionally canny and resourceful
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in designing their courses and selecting readings for them.” End of quotation. Gayatri Spivak has framed this in terms of training for the habit of the ethical, borrowing from Antonio Gramsci's concept of the democratic philosopher, for whom there is “an active relationship … between the intellectual and the cultural environment that he is proposing to modify. "The environment”, Spivak writes, “reacts writes reacts back on the philosopher and imposes
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on him a continual process of self-criticism.” End of quotation. Spivak applies this to pedagogy in the humanities, suggesting that we learn to learn how to teach from the historical cultural text within which a certain group of students might be placed. Developing this line of argument, I'm tempted to say that one of the many things that the permeability of Classical Reception Studies is good for in the classroom is that it gives students from different disciplinary and/or
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demographic backgrounds roots into the space of inquiry and fosters an exchange of knowledge potentially helping to combat epistemologies of ignorance on the part of both educators and students. I had prepared some remarks about scale but I think that this is a topic that is going to come up even more astutely in Professor del Pilar Blanco’s paper, so I will hold those remarks but perhaps they will come back in the discussion. I’m going to
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move now to the second part of my talk which I'm calling ‘Writing and Rewriting Disciplinarity’.
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It's tempting to lampoon the conservative straight jacket of disciplinarity as a credentialising, gatekeeping institution. Instead, I want to end with a modest constructive suggestion for how Classical Reception Studies might contribute to a more creative model of disciplinarity in Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies.
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At the heart of disciplinarity is a conversation about disciplines and their horizons of knowledge and interpretation, and how to train students to succeed within these horizons. In the contemporary academy, these discipline-specific conversations converge with larger conversations about the use-value of both undergraduate and doctoral education in the humanities and questions about how universities might better use curricular and program requirements to train
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students to apply their knowledge in creative ways and key here are concerns about giving students more agency in this process as opposed to passive models of being disciplined or mimetic reproductive models of education in which students learn to emulate their professors. In turn these questions of disciplinarity intersect with debates about diversity and inclusion where disciplinarity
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can also be a proxy for group identity along other vectors. For example, memetic reproductive models of disciplinarity are particularly challenging if the professoriate in a particular discipline lacks diversity of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, religion, nationality, and therefore offers students from underrepresented or even unrepresented backgrounds little existence-proof that they can do this discipline and they can succeed and thrive in it too.
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One of the primary tools with which we discipline and mediate our ways of knowing is in our hands, and this is writing. Writing is one of the most versatile research tools that we have and one that permits free expression and experimentation regardless of the subject matter. It is an activity and a space of risk and innovation because it is paradoxically unscripted until it is not. And yet we systematically downgrade writing with an
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amateurish instrumentalist approach to academic writing. In their introduction to a recent anthology showcasing compelling academic storytelling in the discipline of history, Aaron Saches and John Demos offer the following protreptic, and I quote, “We think of artfulness as literature's basic requirement […] Perhaps our deepest conviction about artfulness is that it embodies indirection, suggestion, and illumination rather than didactic, schematic, authoritative
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explanation. Careful scholars can certainly claim some sort of authority based on their research, but why should an authority or any of the other goals of scholarship require any particular style or discourse? Nonfiction writers should have access to just as many literary techniques as fiction writers; some of the tricks of our trade should arise from a sense of craft. We shouldn't be stuck with the now classic academic templates emphasising straightforward,
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declarative argumentation. Those templates tend to lull readers into passivity.” End of quotation.
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We might add that these templates tend to lull writers into passivity too and if we're writing passively then we're also thinking passively or at least in the doldrums of the imagination. This is disciplinarity at its most perfunctory and we can and should disrupt it by going off script. Notwithstanding the adage that all writing starts from and is about other writing, an article on Demosthentic rhetoric, for example, doesn't have to start from the template of other
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articles on ancient Greek rhetoric or other articles on Demosthenes. It might better start with an incentive to the reader to pay attention and for those of us particularly who work in the halls of philology, there's no excuse. Haven't the works we work on taught us and countless others a thing or two about writing? whether it's energeia or the whole panoply of remarkably persistent topoi that we find in classical literatures? And yet how often do we stop in
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the midst of our interpretation to acknowledge this deep reciprocity as Amy Richlin does in her article ‘Cicero's Head’ when she writes talking of “Seneca and the boys in the scholae” that “They taught me how to write, after all.” This is not to argue that all academic writing has to be fully fledged critical fabulation in the manner of Saidiya Hartman, although our field would definitely benefit from more of that. But it should be active writing that
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prompts the writer and reader to think in fresh ways about the subject and purpose of the writing. Joanna Hanink has written persuasively about the need for more women to write “big books”.
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The invocation to write more imaginatively and creatively is related. If we were to encourage a bigger, more open horizon approach to our academic writing we would liberate so much creative original talent in the fields of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies.
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And if we were to do this, again I think that there would be less criticism of the classical curriculum as a site for miseducation in the sense of a site that sanctions ignorance about various histories and traditions. Here I think of C.L.R. James’ critique of British colonial education in his 1966 essay ‘The Making of the Caribbean People’, with his claim and complaint “They have not educated us, they have mis-educated us”. In closing I submit that the interface of writing
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is a key site for out-thinking, outwitting, and outdoing disciplinarity. At the end of their chapter on disciplinarity, the Postclassicisms Collective, in the book 'Postclassicisms' frame the future of disciplinarity for Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies in terms of conversations with those outside the field. They observe, and I quote, “the discipline is facing questions of how to integrate the perspective of practitioners in the creative arts, or the work of
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translators, into its understanding of scholarly work and professional labor.” End of quotation.
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Perhaps another way of conceiving of this question is that, at the level of how we choose to write, the perspective of the creative arts is integral to our scholarly work. With this in mind I return to Charles Martindale's formulation of the permeability of Classics via reception studies and reply that any text from any culture or any period in any language or any medium regardless of whether or not it has any pre-existing connection with antiquity is potentially
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grist to our writing which if done well should be a creative problem space of reception. Thank you.
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Thank you so much Fiona, and everyone, for giving me the opportunity to speak at this first event of what I think is a really necessary series of conversations about the state of the disciplines of Comparative Literature and Classics but also the humanities as a whole. I'm also really thankful to be placed in conversation with Emily whose reflections on Classics and Classical Reception bridge so well with anxieties that I have been encountering as an educator and researcher.
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This is overall a very good opportunity for me to reflect out loud about a disciplinary world and I suppose the academic condition that I have inhabited since I decided to embark on my doctoral studies which is now quite a long time ago and there's a lot of water under that bridge. I studied Comparative Literature actually as an undergraduate and a postgraduate in the United States in the 1990s and the early 2000s, that age of crisis and defensiveness over Comparative
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Literature that Susan Bassnett identifies in her introduction to the discipline from 1993.
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This defensiveness of Comparative Literature arises from the constant need for self-definition or self-justification and also the threat of becoming absorbed by more powerful institutional entities or, to be more specific, stand-alone language departments, particularly English.
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In the UK at least we still see departments behave in what Paul Jay described in 2001 as, and I quote, “a curricular world organised along the lines of a political map”. End quote. Since I started my career as a student of Comparative Literature we've seen the emergence of another interesting debate. The undisciplined discipline’s relationship with world literature, Goethe’s dream of a cosmopolitan reading practice in a period that
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saw the birth of nationalisms whose limitations and possibilities have been persuasively and problematically theorised by the likes of David Damrosch, Franco Moretti, and Pascal Casanova. World literary debates are not a fait accompli of course, particularly in the current curricular moment in which so much reflection is devoted to ideas of decolonisation. Because we are so attuned to ideas about our syllabi and Emily has been speaking very, very persuasively about this,
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it seems logical to return to the question of what World Literature and Comparative Literature look like in the formative moments that take place in our classrooms. Back in 2001 Vilashini Cooppan wrote about the relation between the world literary and comparative literature practically and pedagogically speaking.
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World Literature she writes and, I quote, “displaces its students, obliging them to shuttle and shift like literary texts themselves across the borders of geography and time, language and culture. Against the great books, or western civilisation models which underwrote the 20th century convergence between the idea of world literature and a particular canon, comparative literature's version of the world literature course
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logically enough seeks its own methodological imprimatur, a literal disciplining of the classroom in which the act of comparison prevails over the codification of the canonical.”
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End quote. At their utopian best, Comparative Literature and World Literature understand the study of global texts is a relational transaction within which are embedded different histories of power, inequality, colonisation, aesthetic preferences and rhythms. Politically they perform what the Cuban José Martí noted in his 1882 essay about Oscar Wilde, and I quote, “to know foreign literatures is the best way to liberate oneself from the tyranny embedded in some of them.”
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End quote. Equally they are disciplinary laboratories working through the possible relationships and networks amongst writers, experiments that remind us of another Latin American Jorge Luis Borges and his wonderful essay from 1951 ‘Kafka and his Precursors’. What Cooppan describes as the prevalence of comparability over canonicity, and I should add comparability over national exceptionalisms, René Wellek’s dream of national vanities disappearing, comes with a
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tutor's ability to present each text regardless of its provenance or its generic form as important, worthy of students’ patient exploration. That is, to suspend received ideas about a text’s reception and to begin the process of reception anew within the exploratory space of a classroom.
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Cooppan herself notes in this essay that such democratising practices in the classroom take time and one also runs out of time if one wants to do that text any justice.
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To discipline the act of comparison is to engage in an understanding of our limits; linguistic, political, for example, and to continue working within this mode is to embark on a slow accumulation of our knowledge of the world. In the time that I have left today I want to consider how this act of slower exploration in the classroom and in the act of individual learning relates to the swirl of current pressures in the humanities.
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In the interest of time I'm going to ground this within a discussion of the academic nook of Modernist Studies, the subfield and very problematic period that has been my research home for quite some time. This will help in establishing what I feel is an all-too-common trend in contemporary academia where full-time positions are scarce and many of those that do exist are requiring expertise in the world rather than in more discrete areas.
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As many of you will know, the new Modernist Studies, a diversification since the 1990s of the discipline that was once attached to the study of, for example, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and Joyce, has come to embrace the global. In its embrace of the world, top critics in the field of Modernist Studies, who overwhelmingly come from English departments, have navigated the idea of the ‘planetary’, and this is another ethical dimension in
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the relation between Comparative Literature and World Literature. Gayatri Spivak, she will come up again, launched the term planetary into the Anglo-American scholarly conscience and a lecture delivered in Zurich in December 1997, and this was then expanded in Death of a Discipline from 2003.
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In the latter she proposes that we think in terms of the planet in order to, and I quote, “ to overwrite the globe”, close the quote, and also to override the framework of globalisation. For her, globalisation entails, and I quote again, “the imposition of the same system of exchange everywhere”, end quote, through which a blindness to alterity is enacted. Instead of continuing with this monolithic model of literary study, Spivak beckons us to
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“make home uncanny”, those are her words, in our development of a future Comparative Literature.
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Spivak's proposal represents an invitation to think of literature well beyond national paradigms and to embrace the planet's utter complexity rather than adopt an idea of ‘global’ or ‘worldly’ oneness. She's also signalling a practice of discomfort which stems from the idea of moving through understanding and also misunderstanding and also actually moves her idea of dynamic learning about the unfamiliar and the new. For Spivak, planetarity offers an as yet
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undeveloped study model in which, quote, “collectivities cross borders under the auspices of a comparative literature supplemented by area studies”. End quote.
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Spivak and also scholars like Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell spell out forms of reading
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that are, to say the least, difficult to accomplish given our disciplinary realities, ensconced as they are within set period, linguistic, and cultural boundaries. In Spivak's call for an uncanny study of literature she asks for a renewed understanding of what it is to be human, which means, and I quote, “to be intended for the other”. End quote. This renders planetarity not only a proposal for scholarly reform, but also an ethical proposition
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that asks for an incorporation of relationality and ecological thinking into our readings of our shared lived space. Such a position is invoked in subsequent proposals for planetary thinking.
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Now Spivak expresses strong resistance to applying world systems theory, a methodology employed by Franco Moretti and Pascal Casanova for example, to the field of literary studies. In dialogue with Moretti's essay ‘Conjectures on World Literature’ from the year 2000, she questions the formation of a global comparative literature that relies on, and I quote, “the close reading practice by
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national literary scholars on the periphery.” End quote. Skeptical about producing what she calls authoritative totalising patterns produced from the opinions of, quote, “small groups of people treated as native informants”, and I close the quote, Spivak asks a different and very pertinent question. She asks, and I quote, “the others provide information while we know the whole world. Why should the novel in the whole world as our object of investigation be the task of
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every comparativist, who should give up on language learning?” End quote.
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Here Spivak puts her finger on what I see as an essential question that scholars who espouse the categories of planetarity and world literature within English, Modern Languages, and Comparative Literature programs must continue to consider. What does a responsible, ethical planetary reading practice look like? and what would such an expertise demand of us, as students and scholars, who want to produce an account of the planet's diverse populations, languages, and histories?
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For me, one of the most poignant features in Spivak's essay on planetarity in Death of a Discipline is an admission about the limits of her own readings.
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She says, I keep feeling that there are connections to be made that I cannot make.
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And she hopes that, quote, “a future reader may get there in the end”. Read in this light, planetarity as a proleptic configuration for criticism is bound within the dimensions of our present condition as scholars whose vision is frustratingly reduced and limited at an institutional level. Indeed, if planetarity represents a future for criticism our current aspirations to such a model continue to spell out our limitations as readers as well as
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the limits to our access to a planetary corpus. The realisation of our own limit as a reader,
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or as readers, highlights a difficulty in thinking about planetarity in tandem with modernism. The recent interest in considering this aesthetic movement or tendency as spatially or even temporarily unbounded, and here I’m reminded about the idea of classicism being unbound and undisciplined, this possibility is perceived as a corrective to the commonly held assumption that modernism must be understood mainly according to such Eurocentric paradigms
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that would make an Anglo-American author like Ezra Pound, for example, on which the movement hinges. So the most eminent proponent of a planetary framework for modernist studies is Susan Stanford Friedman. For quite some time now Friedman has proposed what she terms as "comparativity" as a way forward in the field as a whole. In her book 'Planetary Modernisms' from 2015, which is a culmination of these interventions, she lays down a proposal
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for an understanding of modernity and a modernism unbounded in both space and time, and I quote, “modernity need no longer reside solely in a specific set of institutional, ideological or aesthetic characteristics emerging in the post-Renaissance West, radiating globally along the pathways of empire and postcoloniality and appearing as pale copies of Western genius. Instead, a particularised modernity located in space and time could potentially emerge wherever
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and whenever the winds of radical disruption blew, the conditions of rapid change flared up, or the reflexive consciousness of newness spread, whether these were eagerly sought or resisted, whether imposed from without or developed within.” End quote. Now this proposal which Friedman avowedly puts out there to provoke more debate radically refigures received histories of art, of literature, but it also raises a number of problems that deserve our careful attention.
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Working on newness and rupture as the ultimate principle of modernity and modernism, Friedman paradoxically leaves on question a definition of the modern that has its roots in an Anglo-American centre in the period European and Anglo-American institutions have commonly ascribed to modernism. A second and widely discussed point for this book has certainly led to a lot of debate is the impressive stretching of the category of the modern in her intervention, a term on which she
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relies so heavily as a way of setting things right for cultures and time periods that Eurocentrism has cast to the side or altogether ignored, that it risks stretching itself out beyond recognition. Despite its reparative intentions and its seeming watchfulness over the limitations of the Eurocentric practices, this will to planetarity runs the danger of becoming a palliative, unrigorous and, I should also stress, quick form of critique,
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if it is intent on dismissing certain core formations and periods. And despite those complex and evolving transactions between diverse cultural actors, critical formulations of planetarity currently run the risk of broadening the scales of our analysis only to the extent that we manage to see the world through filters provided by institutions of the global North.
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Critical approaches that mobilise planetarity will always have to contend with complex and evolving transactions between diverse cultural actors. As such those approaches will always be fraught with the limits of competency and selection as they produce new literary cartographies of comparison. And for this reason we must remain alert to the risk of reading the world through those interpretive and translational filters provided by institutions of the global North. Emily
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proposes in her paper a practice of active creative writing as a way forward in the fields of Classics and Reception Studies. This is really excellent to me and how it would require the writer or the student to consider their relation to a text no matter what background they came from and to see that relation change through time. As I have been arguing we should also return to the idea of actively patient, actively slow reading in the fields of literary study across
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the humanities, and here I belatedly add my name to the list of critics of Franco Moretti
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and his distant reading. It is okay to not know everything, to step away from the corporate models of that distant reading, and it is okay to learn slowly and to get things wrong.
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Emily Ogden has this lovely line, and I quote, “the record of our dawdling may sometimes be the yardstick that the present moment requires. It is even a remote possibility that precisely by lagging behind these times we may be making ready for the future.” End quote.
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We should look critically at current imperatives to amass knowledge quickly, to feverishly crowdsource on Twitter, to tick our diversity boxes when we compose the syllabus or write an essay, to have our default defensive reaction be that we always and already know the world and we know it quickly. Ideally what we need is more diverse classrooms where our collective slow readings will not only allow us to learn from each other's experience of reading,
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but to navigate what we know and what we don't know in a responsible and human way. Thank you.
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