Monsieur le Président, Cher Collègue,
I have just learned, to my great dismay, that the University of Toronto is considering the elimination of its Centre for Comparative Literature. I am writing to you because my connection to this Centre goes back many years. I first came to the Centre in 1992 as the holder of the Northrop Frye Professorship. My seminar, entitled “Proust et le temps sensible”, and its ensuing lectures formed the basis of my book of the same title, which came out the following year. I subsequently returned several times as a Visiting Professor to give lectures which led to two other books in my trilogy on the female gender: Hannah Arendt (1999) and Colette (2002). Finally, in 2000, I had the honor of being named Doctor Honoris Causa at your university.
I am convinced that the role Northrop Frye played in literary studies, and more widely in the global understanding of literature as a particular type of thought (and not merely as a hobby or affectation) merits an interdisciplinary approach that Canadian academics and the international academic community must develop and deepen as part of his legacy.
Frye initiated a research perspective that is urgently contemporary in its relevance: the idea of literature as sharing the same space as the aesthetic (both the perceptible and the beautiful) and the need to believe (spiritualities and religions). Comparative Literature thus has a heretofore unexpected role to play in a time of religious clashes.
UNESCO passed a resolution in favour of cultural diversity that both France and Canada inspired and actively support. This policy, which is intended to be a new social contract for globalization, based on the interaction amongst diversities—against banality as a “radical evil” (Arendt)—must be supported by a precise knowledge of languages of their cultural expressions , a knowledge that Comparative Literature and the humanities can indeed deepen and provide.
Mr. Naylor, please understand my worry concerning these proposed administrative changes. They appear drastic and they carry with them an implication of obscurantism. I hope with all my heart that the University of Toronto will not accept the recommendation "disestablish" its Centre for Comparative Literature.
En vous remerciant de l’attention que vous voudriez bien porter à cette lettre,
Recevez, Monsieur le Président et Cher Collègue, l’expression de ma haute considération à de mes meilleures pensées,
Julia Kristeva
[Translation of Julia Kristeva's letter of July 21 by Adleen Crapo, PhD student, Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto]
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