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.

Facts & Figures

March 8, 2014

Report on the Undergraduate Comparative Literature Curriculum: Update

Corinne Scheiner

This report on the national (US) state of the Comparative Literature undergraduate curriculum, updates the conclusions of a similar report done in 2005. As author Corinne Scheiner notes, early questions about whether Comparative Literautre should even have undergraduate programs (visible in the 1965 and 1975 reports) now seem to have entirely disappeared. The practical implications of the theoretical questions debated decennially in the reports on the state of the discipline, she suggests, are most evident in the structures of the undergraduate curriculum.

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