Dear President Naylor,
I write as a retired teacher of English and Comparative Literature, having taught for nearly forty years at the State University of New York at Binghamton. During my active career, I wrote or edited some twenty books in several fields, mostly comparative -- e.g., a major study of Vergil's "Aeneid" (Columbia University Press), three books on the important Renaissance Latin poet Marcus Hieronymus Vida, and collections of essays on Renaissance literature. While my major work strictly in English Literature, the edition of the Bodleian Manuscript of George Herbert's "The Temple," is perhaps my best known work, that I think speaks volumes about the narrowness of single disciplinary study.
The suggestion that a department of comparative literature might be disbanded is simply mind-boggling. Such departments seem to me not only immensely valuable in themselves for the contributions made to both teaching and scholarship; they also provide a necessary balance in humanistic study. In the last fifty or sixty years, far too much emphasis in modern literary study has been narrow, sharply focussed on smaller and smaller units of the great world of literature. Personally, were I again a department chair, I would seriously distrust the very narrow specialist, worried that his or her ignorance would dilute teaching. In my pleasant retirement, I subscribe to both the Milton and the Shakespeare lists, among others, and read all the posts, and am regularly astonished at the narrowness of outlook. I think back to the richness offered to us by such titans as Douglas Bush (a Canadian who spent almost his entire academic life at Harvard), who told me once that he read Vergil's "Aeneid" in Latin at least once a year to give body and richness to his study of Milton and other English poets.
I hope that there will be serious reconsideration of any plan to disband the department or to dilute its work.
Thank you for your consideration.
Mario A. DiCesare
Distinguished Professor (emeritus), English & Comparative Literature
State University of New York at Binghamton
Dear President Naylor,
ReplyDeleteI am writing to endorse my friend Dr. Mario DiCesare's comment concerning the potential disbanding of comparative literature at Binghampton. Please understand that my response is prompted by happenstance, as this evening I cruised the Internet and ran across his comment. I do hope that I will not embarrass Dr. DiCesare by adding a comment about which he has had no forewarning. Nor am I ignorant of the forces that necessitate periodic reviews of programs, for I was Chair of English at Quinnipiac University for fifteen years.
Because I did not teach at Binghampton, and because I have no knowledge of the forces that drive this particular deliberation, I prefer offering the courtesy of a short comment, but please indulge my brevity. (I will be delighted to amplify if that would help your deliberations.)
Prof. DeCesare was a guest lecturer at NYU when I was a graduate student in the 1960s. I count his teaching as among the most impressive I received. When I studied Milton with him, he suggested I read other practitioners of epic poetry: Camoens(Portuguese), Vida (medieval Latin), Statius (Latin), Tasso (Italian). I did, and my learning and teaching has been enriched by that "comparative" experience. There is no substitute for first hand engagement with languages, and none for the widest reading of texts and their antecedents. At a moment when we have just lost one of our finest and most learned scholars, Frank Kermode, please, in your decision making, bear in mind that as Prof. Kermode understood, our deepest wisdom often emerges from studying what is foreign in its own terms, and its own language.
My best wishes to you, and to New York State's finest state university. In addition to Prof DiCesare, SUNY Binghampton has been blessed with many fine multilingual teachers. Please protect one basis of scholarship's universal qualities by preserving comparative literature as a key discipline for the future.
With Sincere Respect,
Prof. Emeritus Stephen A. Gottlieb
Quinnipiac University
Hamden, CT
home: stephen.gottlieb@comcast.net