President David Naylor
University of Toronto
Simcoe Hall, Room 206
27 King's College Circle
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1A1
Dear President Naylor,
I was very concerned to hear from various Toronto colleagues about the proposed dissolution of Toronto's Center for Comparative Literature (and, indeed, of the proposed amalgamation of various language and area studies departments into one large but miscellaneous mega-department). I write as a comparative literature professor, area studies scholar, former language department chair, and sometime Canadianist whose early training took place in Canada. At the University of Alberta, where I received my BA in 1982, the University of Toronto was CONSISTENTLY held up as THE model of literary study, at least for all humanists in Canada. In that era the U of T was considered the preeminent place to do graduate work in Canada, in any literary or humanistic discipline and especially in Comparative Literature, and I find it hard to believe that is no longer the case. Hence I worry that this proposed move represents a de facto blow to the status and future of the humanities in Canada.
Comparative Literature itself is an extremely important discipline, one central to a bilingual, multicultural society. It is the only literary discipline which focuses intently on linguistic overlaps and differences, on the inner lives of writers attuned to more than one linguistic system, on the separateness and interconnection of linguistic and intellectual worlds in various parts of the globe. In the United States, at least, it is a discipline which is increasingly attractive to undergraduate majors and aspiring graduate students, who recognize in it a way of apprehending the world that matches their own internal map, and are often movingly able to articulate all that means to them. Yet I feel that the mission of Comparative Literature has special applicability to the Canadian situation, echoing as it does the internationalist aspirations of many Canadians, and the emphatically polyglot character of Toronto itself. For many decades, Comparative Literature has been not only the most cosmopolitan but the most intellectually adventurous of literary fields; it is certainly one of the few fields in the university (perhaps along with anthropology and linguistics, perhaps) with a long history of striving for a genuinely global picture of human culture. Institutions interested in globalizing their reach and their curriculum NEED the world picture and worldly understanding only Comparative Literature can give us.
Over the last decade, American universities which have saved money and cut corners by amalgamating their language and literature departments have generally found themselves far less able, over the longer run, to attract first-rate graduate students, mount full graduate programs, or remain full "players" in a range of research fields. (The forcible dissolution of area studies departments also risks destroying webs of interdisciplinary dialogue and interaction that other universities are struggling precisely to foster.) Where such amalgamations have had some compensations, it has been in institutions with strong histories of comparative literature, and where comparative literature has played a central role in creating a new framework for cross-disciplinary discussion. (This has been true, for instance, both at Stanford and at Johns Hopkins.) An amalgamation which ALSO involves the dissolution and institutional disappearance of Comparative Literature seems to me a recipe for real disaster--or at least for a new departmental structure that CAN'T create new kinds of knowledge but instead falls prey to competition and to parochialism.
PLEASE reconsider your recent decision. Please save the money somewhere else, spare the Center for Comparative Literature, and envision a different way forward for the literature and area studies departments. (Were money no object, wouldn't there be creative ways of creating additional layers of divisional communication and cross-over among departments, WITHOUT severing historians from semioticians, anthropologists from experts in oral poetics--and without destroying one of the university's few disciplinary spaces to enable genuinely polyglot exchange?)
I share the dismay of my Toronto colleagues at the restructuring plans announced so far, and their firm hope that you will reflect and reconsider.
Katie Trumpener
Emily Sanford Professor of English and Comparative Literature,
Yale University
Editorial Board member, English Studies in Canada
Supervisor, The English Institute
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