Below is the transcript of an interview with Professor Eva-Lynn Jagoe (Centre for Comparative Literature and Spanish) conducted by Jeannine M. Pitas, a PhD student at the Centre.
JP: How would you describe your current area of academic specialization?
EJ: I am working on the question of the modernist long novel and psychoanalysis as extended forms that demand a different kind of attention and a different strategy of reading, writing, and teaching.
JP: Why have you chosen to be a professor of comparative literature (in addition to Spanish)? What can you do in this department that you would not be able to do in a national literature department?
EJ: The courses I teach in Comparative Literature are question-based. In them, I get to follow ideas, hunches, themes, without being tied down to a specific area. History, politics, literature, and culture never happen in an enclosed national setting and I don’t think they should be taught that way. Thus in Comp Lit I have been able to teach a course on affinities and collective movements in Europe and America, and another on technology and electricity in literature and cinema in the beginning of the twentieth century. I don’t teach so as to give my students a discrete set of ideas and knowledges about a particular place. Instead, I foster a sense of the interconnectedness of cultural creation and how when a particular question is asked in history, it ramifies throughout different media, countries, and forms.
JP: How will you, as a faculty member, be affected by the university's decision to suspend this program?
EJ: In the past year, I have taught German, Russian, English, and French texts in my courses. In my teaching as well as in my writing I have been moving towards sustained experiments in critical writing and have encouraged my students to collaborate and stretch the envelope of what is expected in scholarly work. I cannot do that kind of work in a national literature department, where I will have to (falsely) connect the work I am doing with the texts from a particular area.
JP: To the best of your knowledge, why has the university made this decision to suspend comp lit and also to consolidate the various language programs into a School of Languages and Cultures? How do you think the university at large will be affected by this decision?
EJ: It’s a School of Languages and Literatures, not even Cultures! I think it shows a profound lack of intellectual vision and coherence about the importance of literature and culture. This proposed School stands to function as a service dept that will provide language instruction for public policy and international relations students. It ignores the fact that Humanities departments fund the more showy Sciences, and demonstrates a short-sightedness about the future of the university as well as the future of the country that will be creating a generation of technocrats with little understanding of cultural formations.
JP: I've heard various people argue that comparative literature is no longer a relevant discipline. What do you think these arguments are based on? How has comparative literature continued to be relevant for the humanities?
EJ: I don’t necessarily hold to a traditional idea of comparative literature, but I do think that a comparative literature department offers the best home for the kinds of interdisciplinary work on cultural phenomena that need to be done in the university. Questions about art, culture, language, philosophy, and history can be asked within their respective disciplines, but when brought together under one roof of what can broadly be defined as cultural studies, then we can really begin to see how social formations are defined and transformed.
But maybe the best argument I can make for the study of literature (not narrowly defined by country) is not about an increase of knowledge but about the sometimes terrifying yet vital possibilities within art to connect us, to unseat us, to reveal to us something that we may not be able to see if not confronted with it. As Marcel Proust says In Search of Lost Time, the power of art “is to recapture, to lay hold of, to make one with ourselves that reality far removed from the one we live in, from which we separate ourselves more and more as the knowledge which we substitute for it acquires a greater solidity and impermeability, a reality we run the risk of never knowing before we die but which is our real, our true life at last revealed and illumined, the only life which is really lived and which in one sense lives at every moment in all men as well as in the artist.”
No comments:
Post a Comment