President David Naylor
University of Toronto
Simcoe Hall, Room 206
27 King’s College Circle
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1A1
13 July 2010
Dear President Naylor,
To begin with, my credentials: I graduated with my PhD from U of T’s Centre for Comparative Literature in 1999, having received my MA in Comp Lit two years before. In 1990 I was one of the original founders of the graduate colloquium, which (to quote the 2009 Colloquium program) “has since evolved into a multi-day international academic conference that continually transcends and challenges disciplinary rigidity in favour of interdisciplinarity”; an event which has evolved from a day long series of papers by grad students to what Dr. Barbara Havercroft calls “a prestigious annual international conference” still entirely organized by students. The 2009 edition commemorated and celebrated the careers of two of the Centre’s most eminent faculty members, each of whom had a formative impact upon me: Dr. Linda Hutcheon and Dr. Ted Chamberlin,
In my own journey as an academic I have travelled a long road, like Dante’s pilgrim, from the hell of grad school to the purgatory of contractual employment, finally reaching the glorious paradise of a tenured position. In my case this entailed moving from Comparative Literature to three years at U of T Scarborough’s English Department, teaching bona fide literature courses, to three more years teaching multiple Cultural Studies courses at McMaster, finally securing my current position teaching Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier, specializing in film theory, where I received tenure this past fall. I mention all of this because I think my experience offers a good example of what the Centre prepares you to do: my training as a comparatist made me more flexible intellectually, more adaptable as a researcher and teacher, and therefore more employable. Even though it has been a rather long journey, since graduating I have never been unemployed and have never had less than a full-time (albeit temporary) contract at each of the above-named institutions. And it has been a journey in which reading and thinking in a critically reflexive manner came to determine my whole worldview (more on this below). I learned from my time at the Centre to read not just closely and exhaustively but with respect and circumspection – a task all the more necessary in the age of electronic databases, Wikipedia, Google Books and the web as ‘virtual archive.’ At the same time I learned that ‘reading’ encompasses far more than Western notions of ‘literacy’ over against specious models of pre-modern ‘orality’. I am not simply talking about the ‘media-’ or ‘cultural literacy’ that students anyway begin to acquire on their own from an early age, and that is on its own no guarantee against ideological mystification or consumerist interpellation. Rather, I am talking about a kind of ‘post-literate’ literacy that can only be acquired at considerable conscious effort and sheer intellectual work; the literacy that makes one into a fully rounded human being, alive to difference and aware of the complex, messy reality of life in a globalized, multicultural world. The Centre for Comparative Literature, as currently constituted, is the ideal place in which to acquire such critically reflexive cultural literacy. I will try to clarify this point in what follows.
A place like U of T’s Centre for Comparative Literature is uniquely positioned to afford what the Faculty’s letter to you calls at once a truly inter- and meta-perspective – a critical reflexivity – upon the verbal, visual, and other texts and artefacts that humans continue to produce in our ceaseless attempt to represent ourselves to ourselves, even as we strive, perhaps in vain, to comprehend others who resist the received modes of representation (and I use this word in both aesthetic and political senses). In short, what Comparative Literature embodies is an increasingly rare chance to overcome what I warn my students about at every opportunity: the condition of living within a culture that is smarter than you are. And this is where it is necessary to clarify the value of ‘theory’ in terms of the Centre’s legacy in contemporary academic and social life generally. Dean Gertler is indeed correct in observing (in a recent Torontoist article) that “the conditions that were necessary for the Centre’s formation are now changed. At the time, it was not possible to do literary criticism of a particular kind any place but in the Centre. Now, it is widespread across the Humanities units”. Apart from the arrogance and narrow-mindedness of his proclamation that “the closure of the Centre represents a significant moment in the evolution of the Faculty of Arts and Social Science”, it must be pointed out that to ‘do’ theory on its own is not enough; nor is it enough to ‘do’ it within the confines of a specific national literature and language or a specific later 20th-century or 21st century discipline – Cultural Studies, Queer Studies, Post-colonial Studies, Global Studies, North American Studies, or (as in Dean Gertler’s case) Cultural Geography. As the Centre’s letter indicates, ‘doing’ theory is okay; the meta- perspective theory affords is important, but on its own this is not enough. Only under the banner of comparative studies proper may students engage in genuinely inter-disciplinary, comparative study of two or more texts (or other objects) from two or more different cultures, while appreciating at the same time the cultural and linguistic and other differences between and among cultures. Only by stepping outside of one’s cultural milieu by virtue of one’s command of other languages and cultural traditions may one achieve a truly critically reflexive perspective upon one’s heretofore taken-for-granted identity and reality, not to speak of those of other people, whose places and times would otherwise remain utterly unknown, and unknowable. In sum, Comparative Literature is a discipline in its own right, founded upon the three pillars of language, literature, and critical theory, and has never been simply another place in which to ‘do’ theory.
It is difficult, moreover, not to take umbrage at the fact that Dean Gertler, a geographer by training, is in charge of the restructuring committee, tactfully explaining in the Chronicle of Higher Education that “it’s time to move around the furniture a bit. A number of departments and units are quite small, so, by restructuring and amalgamating, we can save significantly on overheads”. Again, it is difficult not to hear in these words the attitude of an administrator who deals with technology, industrial practices and the “manufacturing of culture” (to quote the title of one of his books) and who seems intent on turning the proposed School of Languages and Literatures into a Chaplinesque outpost of assembly-line cultural production – an all-too-familiar sign of these (modern) times. I freely admit that I might be completely wrong about the Dean’s intentions, but these sound bites leave little room for a more positive interpretation.
In Barbara Havercroft’s words: “The proposed disappearance of the Centre will undoubtedly have an extremely negative impact on the future of the discipline in Canada, and it reflects the general depreciation of the humanities and their essential contributions to knowledge and society”. I couldn’t agree more. With all due respect, Dr. Naylor, it is painfully obvious from the available information that the Centre for Comparative Literature, along with the affected national language departments at U of T, is being scape-goated by an administration that needs to cut millions of budgetary dollars but cannot imagine doing so in areas outside of the Arts and Humanities. The tragic fact of the current and ongoing devaluation of the Humanities disciplines – and inter-disciplines – in Canada, North America and, indeed, in much of the developed globalized world, is far too big a problem to address in this space – even though it is clear to me that the climate at U of T is directly symptomatic of this larger backdrop of cultural-moral-ethical degradation. The most painful realization to emerge here is that this administration, like many others across the country, is taking advantage of a (now historical) financial crisis to eviscerate those programs, departments and disciplines it deems trivial or even useless. It would be preferable if the Humanities were seen as dangerous or corrupting, but from what I can tell this administration (and again, it is not alone in this respect), simply does not care about academic areas outside of the hard sciences, business, and IT. The Arts and Humanities do not conform to the received economic model and they never will. This has not been a big problem in the past but it obviously is one now. What is required, however, is not that an entity like Comparative Literature be shut down but rather that University administrations across Canada take the trouble to change their way of seeing things. Do I believe that this will happen anytime soon? No, but there is nothing to be gained by not trying, and a great deal to be lost.
The timing of the announcement, finally, is unavoidably suspicious, coming as it does in the dead of summer, when many people are stupefied by heat and humidity, World Cup soccer or the Tour de France, or are simply not around. It is as if it had been calculated to make as small an impression as possible, but fortunately this strategy (if such it is) is not succeeding. The only question now is whether the efforts of thousands of well-intentioned people – people who, quite frankly, know better than the so-called ‘restructuring committee’ – can make any difference. As far as I know, the decision begins with you, Dr. Naylor. Please don’t make the wrong choice. Please don’t allow these changes to go through. Please reverse the committee’s decision and save the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. By doing so, you will prevent the inevitable loss of many of your best faculty, and many more of your most promising students, whose critically and linguistically informed work would otherwise contribute directly and profoundly to the ways in which we perceive and interpret our world. You will, in short, be saving the University itself.
Sincerely,
R. J. A. Kilbourn
Associate Professor
English and Film Studies
Wilfrid Laurier University
rkilbourn@wlu.ca
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