Marlene Goldman, University of Toronto, Scarborough

Dear Professor Naylor,

 

I am shocked and saddened to find myself writing this letter to you concerning the proposal to close the Centre for Comparative Literature. I read about this plan in The Globe and Mail with dismay and a sense of shame that my university would conceive of this as a cost-saving mechanism.

 A bit of history: I came to the University of Toronto in 1989 to do my PhD in English. At the time, it was commonly understood that the best and the brightest students went into Comparative Literature. Those of us who had not been lucky enough to receive a stellar scholarly education—which would enable us to read literature and literary theory in at least three languages—settled for English. Throughout my graduate career, it became even more apparent that the very best work in the Humanities is often done by comparativists whose training prepares them to transcend the narrower trends of particular disciplines and nation-states, allowing them to develop comprehensive analyses of transnational and global movements. Professor Hutcheon’s internationally celebrated books on postmodernism, irony, parody, adaption, opera, and, most recently, late style and aging constitute some of the best examples of the scholarly contributions made by Comparative Literature’s faculty and students.

 While I understand the need to cut costs, it strikes me as regressive and even dangerous to attack the few institutions, namely, the Centre for Comparative Literature and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnationalism, whose mandate is to promote interdisciplinarity. As it is currently configured, the University of Toronto tends to isolate scholars in discrete silos; faculty and students who work on similar topics have absolutely no knowledge of each other’s scholarship. Though we pursue information and the cultivation of great minds, we are like the proverbial blind men touching the elephant. Indeed, due to the silo-effect, we are both blind and mute if we lack crucial opportunities to converse with each other across disciplines, departments, and faculties.

 Currently, I work in the English Department at UTSC. Thanks to the inspiration and support of professors in Comparative Literature such as Professor Hutcheon and Neil ten Kortenaar, my research has taken me outside the silos. Knowing firsthand the excitement that comes from learning and adopting new ways of approaching intellectual and social problems—I am currently working on representations of memory loss and dementia in literary and biomedical discourses—I urge you to reconsider the closing of the Centre of Comparative Literature. I want to ensure that future students continue to have access to the very best education that the University of Toronto has to offer.  

 

Yours sincerely,

 

Dr. Marlene Goldman,

Associate Professor, English, UTSC

The Centre for Diaspora and Transnationalism

Institute for Women and Gender Studies