David Damrosch, Harvard

University of Toronto
Simcoe Hall, Room 206
27 King’s College Circle
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1A1

President David Naylor

Dear President Naylor, Provost Misak, and Dean Gertler,

I am writing to express my deep concern and distress over the proposed closure of the University’s distinguished and vibrant Centre for Comparative Literature. Even amid the present financial pressures that the University is no doubt facing, it is an extraordinarily draconian decision to close the discipline's leading program in the country, long established indeed as one of the leading programs in the world in the years following its founding by Northrop Frye four decades ago. I saw the Centre's vitality at first hand this past February as Northrop Frye Visiting Professor; I was strongly impressed by the graduate students for whom I gave a seminar, and found that my public lecture attracted (as is typical for Comparative Literature) a large and lively audience from a wide range of fields, a good indication of the discipline's institutional value even beyond its own walls.

I understand that the plan would be to disestablish Comparative Literature as a degree-granting program, in connection with a consolidation of most literature programs into a single unit. Even if it should prove necessary to effect a consolidation of various national literature programs, this would be all the more reason to preserve as full as possible an identity and institutional role for Comparative Literature. As many universities have found, Comparative Literature serves as a crucial meeting-ground and opportunity for cross-fertilization for students and faculty who work primarily in a national literature. Both intellectually and in terms of institutional health, it is enormously valuable if consolidated literature departments include programs that cut across national and linguistic divisions, countering the danger that the consolidated program will be an uncomfortable yoking together of disconnected specialists, at some savings in costs for support staff but at considerable intellectual and programmatic cost.

At my own university, for instance, even amid our currently severe financial constraints, Comparative Literature has been growing, with faculty from all the national literature departments actively involved in our programs. In my graduate proseminar, I typically have fifteen or sixteen graduate students, even though our own program only admits six per year; the others come from six or seven other departments, not only of literature but in a range of other disciplines. This kind of interconnectivity is particularly true with programs, such as Toronto's, with a strong history of interdisciplinary work.

As with individual departments, so at the national level: the membership of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) has grown steadily throughout the past dozen years, and our annual meeting has seen a tenfold increase in papers delivered, averaging two thousand per year in the past two years. Our participants have come from all around the US and Canada, and from nearly fifty other countries as well, in a reflection of the discipline's expanding role as a central venue for thinking about cultural processes and interactions in a globalizing world. Speaking as a past president of the ACLA, I feel a sharpened sense of concern at the  proposed disestablishment at Toronto when our Association is planning its next annual meeting in Vancouver (our second time in Canada in recent years), where we'll be hosted by the rapidly growing new program in World Literature at Simon Fraser University, founded just a few years ago by a group of faculty led by Paulo Horta, a Toronto graduate.

In Canada as in many countries, our discipline is thriving when programs embrace the possibilities offered in today's intellectual landscape. Altogether, this seems a particularly unfortunate time to consider taking apart Canada's leading program in this vital discipline. This is just the time when Comparative Literature can play an increased and most productive role at Toronto, as it has been doing nationally and internationally. I urge you to reconsider this decision, and to protect and enhance the role of Comparative Literature at the University. Please let me know if I could be of any assistance in thinking freshly about the best ways to move forward with the configuration of literary and cultural studies in this challenging but also promising time.

Sincerely yours,

David Damrosch
Professor and Chair,
Department of Comparative Literature
Harvard University
Dana Palmer House 201
16 Quincy St.
Cambridge MA 02138