Futures

African Languages, Writ Small

Jeanne-Marie Jackson

What is Comparative Literature’s stake in the supposed “resurgence” of African writing, most work on which is being done in monolingual departments? The following remarks sketch out some practical and intellectual challenges that greater emphasis on African language study might pose to the discipline. To take African literatures seriously, world literature in English must become a comparative domain.

Futures

RGP: Hassan Melehy, University of North Carolina

Hassan Melehy

Eric Hayot’s invitation to design an entire PhD program from the ground up offered me a welcome opportunity, since one of the last things I did in the five years (2006-11) I spent as Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Romance Studies at UNC–Chapel Hill was to coordinate the restructuring of the our program. We have since implemented this proposal, and the students whom we’ve just accepted for fall 2015 will be the first to enroll in it.

Futures

RGP: Markus Reisenleitner, York University

Markus Reisenleitner

My presentation introduces two initiatives: diploma programs in Comparative and World Literature (implemented in 2014/15); and a re-thinking of course work that substitutes topic-oriented seminars with a much smaller number of skills-oriented mandatory courses while providing supervisors with the opportunity to regularly meet with their graduate students in a group-like setting (“privatissima”; not yet implemented).

Futures

RGP: Eric Hayot, Penn State

Eric Hayot

I recently shared some statistics on the current state of the humanities job market with my colleagues.The number of tenure-track jobs in language and literature is down, this year, 50 percent from where it was in 2007. At the same time, humanities enrollments are declinining dramatically nationwide; maybe not in every program, and not always for the same reasons (English enrollments at Maryland are for instance down 40 percent in three years, probably as a result of a change in the General Education program). Nonetheless the situation certainly seems to have changed.

Futures

RGP: Eva-Lynn Jagoe, University of Toronto

Eva-Lynn Jagoe

The White Paper on the Future of the PhD in the Humanities (WP) looks at the increasing number of PhDs and the decreasing number of academic jobs, and argues that there is much to be gained in a society by having people pursue graduate work in the Humanities–i.e., the ability to think critically, to read across discourses, to nurture the senses, and to imagine alternative futures – but that we need to better equip students with skills that are not just honed for academic careers.

Futures

RGP: Rachel Gabara, University of Georgia

Rachel Gabara

My B.A. and Ph.D. degrees as well as my first academic job were in Departments and Programs of Comparative Literature. I also received French Maîtrise and Diplôme d’études approfondies (D.E.A.) degrees in Comp Lit, so I claim a certain international experience of the discipline. After all of this training, however, I find myself in my second year serving as Graduate Coordinator for the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Georgia

Futures

RGP: Paul Saint-Amour, University of Pennsylvania

Paul Saint-Amour

Offered the chance to rethink an entire graduate program from the ground up, I started by informally canvassing graduate students and faculty in several departments and institutions (including my own) about what they found most dissatisfying in their programs.

Futures

Rethinking Graduate Programs

Eric Hayot

This year's ACL(x) conference, held at the University of South Carolina, included a panel on the future of graduate education in the languages and literatures. Its participants were asked as much as possible to reimagine graduate programs from the ground up -- to begin with no assumptions about what a PhD program might include (classes, for instance), and to from that starting point come up with some practical suggestions about ways things might be different.

Futures

Arabic: Acceptance and Anxiety

Alexander Key

Being an Arabist elicits warm acceptance in Comparative Literature in 2015, but Arabists are still in no position to advocate for the inclusion of Arabic thinkers on our departments’ theory reading lists. Why?

Futures

Close Reading and the Global University (Notes on Localism)*

Rey Chow

What might close reading, the literary method associated with critics such as I. A. Richards and his contemporaries and followers such as Allen Tate, J. C. Ransom, M. Beardsley, W. K. Wimsatt, William Empson, T. S. Eliot, Cleanth Brooks, and others, and strategic to the consolidation of English as a (historically recent) field of study, have to tell us about the shifting academic institutional relations around 2015?

Futures

Future Reading

Rebecca Walkowitz

How will we read literary works in the future? And how does thinking about the future of literary works change the way we read?

Futures

The Reign of the Amoeba: Further Thoughts about the Future of Comparative Literature

Gail Finney

Based on recent curricular trends in Comparative Literature, publications in leading online and print journals, and practices implemented by current graduate students and young faculty, this essay suggests that the discipline of Comparative Literature promises to move in increasingly interdisciplinary directions. The metaphor of the amoeba reflects the ability of Comparative Literature to assimilate and nurture itself from other media, such as film and television, and other fields, such as art history, aesthetics, queer theory, gender and sexuality studies, philosophy, theater, ecocriticism, and, notably, Cultural Studies, whose importance for Comparative Literature is exemplified in the online journal CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture. The Winter 2014 number of Comparative Literature, examining the concept of remediation from the perspectives of media studies, ecocriticism, the law, disability studies, and education, likewise points to the growing interdisciplinarity of Comparative Literature.

Futures

Institution, Translation, Nation, Metaphor

Lucas Klein

Comparative Literature is defined in part by anxiety about its institutionality. Approaching translations as works of literary scholarship equivalent to our articles and monographs can address this anxiety and also work against the Herderian assumptions of national literatures. Ultimately, the comparison of comparative literature is a metaphorical process, putting it in the same process of negotiated familiarity and strangeness as translation. In this way, institutionalizing translation might help us de-institutionalize our other institutions.

Futures

Minimal Criticism

Jos Lavery

The word “discipline”, designating as it already does a socialized process of individuation, must include not just the quasi-public objects with which we are beginning to grapple (Twitter, para-academic blogs, this report) but the quasi-private objects that we generally prefer to let rest unexpressed (Facebook, the hotel bar). This axiom might have some general applicability, but it is especially important for the discussion of CompLit for two reasons.

Futures

Comparative Literature: The Next Ten Years

Haun Saussy

We can confidently predict that ten years from now, comparative literature will be in a state of crisis. It is always in crisis. In 2004 I ventured that nothing has ever defined comparative literature so well as the search for its own definition, a search conducted between and against better-established fields. That continued sense of crisis, however, is one we make for ourselves. External conditions impose another shape on comparative literature’s sense of crisis.