President David Naylor
University of Toronto
Simcoe Hall, Room 2006
King’s College Circle
Toronto, Ontario
M5S 1A1
Dear President Naylor,
As the only faculty member with a majority appointment in the Centre for Comparative Literature, I must express to you the sense of shock and dismay at the potential loss of my academic and intellectual home here at the University. The Centre has provided myself, and all my colleagues, with the space to teach a broad range of subjects, across languages, disciplines and periods. The classroom experience at the Centre for Comparative Literature is truly a meeting of minds. As a medievalist working in Spanish, Catalan, Latin and Hebrew literatures, my classes at the Centre have been an open forum where Comparative Literature students trained in critical theory, and medievalists grounded in the culture, history and society of the European Middle Ages can come together with those conversant with modern Latin American or medieval Japanese literatures to challenge each other’s epistemological and theoretical frameworks and to profit from the more specialized knowledge each student brings from his or her respective departments. Such a dynamic and engaging classroom experiences are at the core of the Centre’s mission – the dialogic exploration of how languages, cultures, geographies and philosophies cross-fertilize each other.
The closing of the Centre would not only constitute the loss of unique and exciting classroom experiences for students, but would also have a negative impact on fostering the kind of innovative research by faculty nourished by such pedagogical practice. The Centre’s reputation has been built upon and sustained by the synergy between its faculty and students. The many wonderful scholars produced by the Centre, now teaching all over Canada and around the world, are a testament to the Centre’s commitment to teaching and research.
I would urge you to reconsider the recommendation to ‘distestablish’ the Centre. The loss of the Centre would not only be a blow to the standing of the University of Toronto as a hub of great research, but also to the university’s commitment to forward-looking, global, multidisciplinary education in the Humanities.
Yours sincerely
Jill Ross
Associate Professor
Centre for Comparative Literature
University of Toronto
Monday, July 19, 2010
Victor Li, University of Toronto
Dear President Naylor,
I am writing to inform you of my disbelief and dismay on hearing that the Faculty of Arts and Science is proposing to dismantle what is acknowledged, nationally and internationally, as one of the crown jewels of the humanities at the University of Toronto--the Centre for Comparative Literature.
I am also completely amazed and dumbfounded by the logic offered in support of this disappointing proposal. It has been suggested that the Centre's very success in promulgating the study of literary theory and comparative studies is also the primary pedagogical reason for its disestablishment. It appears as though success is being rewarded with demotion and marginalization. As any knowledgeable scholar in the field will attest, comparative literature has not become redundant because literary theory and the comparative approach have been absorbed by other disciplines in the humanities. In fact, as the abundance of published books and lively debates in cutting-edge humanities journals clearly indicate, comparative literature remains a highly important and relevant area of academic enquiry in this age of globalization and cultural diversity.
As a recently appointed member of the Centre, I am proud to be associated with the important work carried out by faculty and students and with the new and exciting directions mapped out by the Centre's new director, Professor Neil ten Kortenaar--directions that will position the Centre at the heart of the most significant enterprise in the humanities today, namely, the study of comparativity itself in a world that can no longer afford to be "centric" in any way, "Euro-" or otherwise.
It would indeed be a great pity and an even greater wasted opportunity should the Centre, its illustrious history, and its exciting future be discarded for the short-sighted budgetary savings envisaged by the Strategic Planning Committee. The University may save about a million dollars in the short run, but it stands to lose what is irreplaceable and priceless. I urge you in the name of academic integrity and progress to reconsider this ill-conceived proposal to dismantle the University of Toronto's Centre for Comparative Literature.
Yours sincerely,
Victor Li
Co-editor, The University of Toronto Quarterly
Associate Professor
Department of English and Centre for Comparative Literature
University of Toronto
I am writing to inform you of my disbelief and dismay on hearing that the Faculty of Arts and Science is proposing to dismantle what is acknowledged, nationally and internationally, as one of the crown jewels of the humanities at the University of Toronto--the Centre for Comparative Literature.
I am also completely amazed and dumbfounded by the logic offered in support of this disappointing proposal. It has been suggested that the Centre's very success in promulgating the study of literary theory and comparative studies is also the primary pedagogical reason for its disestablishment. It appears as though success is being rewarded with demotion and marginalization. As any knowledgeable scholar in the field will attest, comparative literature has not become redundant because literary theory and the comparative approach have been absorbed by other disciplines in the humanities. In fact, as the abundance of published books and lively debates in cutting-edge humanities journals clearly indicate, comparative literature remains a highly important and relevant area of academic enquiry in this age of globalization and cultural diversity.
As a recently appointed member of the Centre, I am proud to be associated with the important work carried out by faculty and students and with the new and exciting directions mapped out by the Centre's new director, Professor Neil ten Kortenaar--directions that will position the Centre at the heart of the most significant enterprise in the humanities today, namely, the study of comparativity itself in a world that can no longer afford to be "centric" in any way, "Euro-" or otherwise.
It would indeed be a great pity and an even greater wasted opportunity should the Centre, its illustrious history, and its exciting future be discarded for the short-sighted budgetary savings envisaged by the Strategic Planning Committee. The University may save about a million dollars in the short run, but it stands to lose what is irreplaceable and priceless. I urge you in the name of academic integrity and progress to reconsider this ill-conceived proposal to dismantle the University of Toronto's Centre for Comparative Literature.
Yours sincerely,
Victor Li
Co-editor, The University of Toronto Quarterly
Associate Professor
Department of English and Centre for Comparative Literature
University of Toronto
David Damrosch, Harvard
University of Toronto
Simcoe Hall, Room 206
27 King’s College Circle
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1A1
President David NaylorSimcoe Hall, Room 206
27 King’s College Circle
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1A1
Dear President Naylor, Provost Misak, and Dean Gertler,
I am writing to express my deep concern and distress over the proposed closure of the University’s distinguished and vibrant Centre for Comparative Literature. Even amid the present financial pressures that the University is no doubt facing, it is an extraordinarily draconian decision to close the discipline's leading program in the country, long established indeed as one of the leading programs in the world in the years following its founding by Northrop Frye four decades ago. I saw the Centre's vitality at first hand this past February as Northrop Frye Visiting Professor; I was strongly impressed by the graduate students for whom I gave a seminar, and found that my public lecture attracted (as is typical for Comparative Literature) a large and lively audience from a wide range of fields, a good indication of the discipline's institutional value even beyond its own walls.
I understand that the plan would be to disestablish Comparative Literature as a degree-granting program, in connection with a consolidation of most literature programs into a single unit. Even if it should prove necessary to effect a consolidation of various national literature programs, this would be all the more reason to preserve as full as possible an identity and institutional role for Comparative Literature. As many universities have found, Comparative Literature serves as a crucial meeting-ground and opportunity for cross-fertilization for students and faculty who work primarily in a national literature. Both intellectually and in terms of institutional health, it is enormously valuable if consolidated literature departments include programs that cut across national and linguistic divisions, countering the danger that the consolidated program will be an uncomfortable yoking together of disconnected specialists, at some savings in costs for support staff but at considerable intellectual and programmatic cost.
At my own university, for instance, even amid our currently severe financial constraints, Comparative Literature has been growing, with faculty from all the national literature departments actively involved in our programs. In my graduate proseminar, I typically have fifteen or sixteen graduate students, even though our own program only admits six per year; the others come from six or seven other departments, not only of literature but in a range of other disciplines. This kind of interconnectivity is particularly true with programs, such as Toronto's, with a strong history of interdisciplinary work.
As with individual departments, so at the national level: the membership of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) has grown steadily throughout the past dozen years, and our annual meeting has seen a tenfold increase in papers delivered, averaging two thousand per year in the past two years. Our participants have come from all around the US and Canada, and from nearly fifty other countries as well, in a reflection of the discipline's expanding role as a central venue for thinking about cultural processes and interactions in a globalizing world. Speaking as a past president of the ACLA, I feel a sharpened sense of concern at the proposed disestablishment at Toronto when our Association is planning its next annual meeting in Vancouver (our second time in Canada in recent years), where we'll be hosted by the rapidly growing new program in World Literature at Simon Fraser University, founded just a few years ago by a group of faculty led by Paulo Horta, a Toronto graduate.
In Canada as in many countries, our discipline is thriving when programs embrace the possibilities offered in today's intellectual landscape. Altogether, this seems a particularly unfortunate time to consider taking apart Canada's leading program in this vital discipline. This is just the time when Comparative Literature can play an increased and most productive role at Toronto, as it has been doing nationally and internationally. I urge you to reconsider this decision, and to protect and enhance the role of Comparative Literature at the University. Please let me know if I could be of any assistance in thinking freshly about the best ways to move forward with the configuration of literary and cultural studies in this challenging but also promising time.
Sincerely yours,
In Canada as in many countries, our discipline is thriving when programs embrace the possibilities offered in today's intellectual landscape. Altogether, this seems a particularly unfortunate time to consider taking apart Canada's leading program in this vital discipline. This is just the time when Comparative Literature can play an increased and most productive role at Toronto, as it has been doing nationally and internationally. I urge you to reconsider this decision, and to protect and enhance the role of Comparative Literature at the University. Please let me know if I could be of any assistance in thinking freshly about the best ways to move forward with the configuration of literary and cultural studies in this challenging but also promising time.
Sincerely yours,
David Damrosch
Professor and Chair,
Department of Comparative Literature
Harvard University
Dana Palmer House 201
16 Quincy St.
Cambridge MA 02138
Susan Wolfson, Princeton & Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers
20 July 2010
President David Naylor
University of Toronto
Simcoe Hall, Room 206
27 King’s College Circle
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1A1
Dear President Naylor, Provost Misak, and Dean Gertler:
Re: Dismantling of the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto
The Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers is dismayed to learn from our distinguished professional colleagues at the University of Toronto, Linda Hutcheon and Tilottama Rajan about the imminent dismantling of this internationally distinguished Centre. We write to support an appeal of this unhappy decision. While we appreciate your wish to consolidate several seemingly cognate departments for greater efficiency, both administrative and economic, we think that this particular decision, though it may seem to promise immediate benefits, is a long-term misfortune—not only for the credit and reputation of the University of Toronto, but also for the vital culture of Comparative Literature studies in North America. The founder of the Centre, the incomparable Northrop Frye, embodies its prestige, its long-established excellence. With its generations of remarkable scholars and students, the Centre for Comparative Literature is virtually synonymous with the vibrancy and distinction in Humanities at the University of Toronto.
So we write to express our deep concern over this proposed termination and to urge your reconsideration. How unfortunate to disestablish the degree-granting programs! If anything, the Centre for Comparative Literature might be formally elevated to be what it has become: a capacious and generative global village (to evoke another notable member of the faculty at the University of Toronto, Herbert Marshall McLuhan) for all the modern languages, where students and faculty interact, inspire one another, improve one another’s work, and in sum elevate the profile of the university. Comparative literature has been at the forefront of just about every significant development in literary study, most recently, the advent of global literary studies.
At Princeton University even amid our financial constraints, Comparative Literature is being protected—and more, encouraged, successfully, to develop a few crucial, galvanizing senior appointments. This program, far from being consolidated, is actually the amalgamation of jointly appointed faculty from several departments, including my own (English). In consequence, and by force of its own energy, classes offered by this program typically draw students not only from across the University, but from across the region, from nearby universities. Departments of, Programs in, and Centres for Comparative Literature typically have this kind of appeal, this kind of influence. In our increasingly pragmatic public culture, where economic productivity tends to trump scholarship and critical inquiry, where sports facilities are refreshed while libraries are under stress, where learning and erudition can be ridiculed by a recent former President and recent candidate for vice President, we need the leadership of major universities, such as the University of Toronto, and distinguished entities, such as the Centre for Comparative Literature, to shape and influence the vital force of the humanities and scholarship in the challenges of the modern world. We urge you to reconsider your decision, and to imagine better ways to manage the resources of your distinguished university amid the crises, but also in light of the prospects, of twenty-first century academia.
Yours sincerely,
Susan J. Wolfson
President, Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (2010)
Professor of English, Princeton University
22 McCosh Hall
Princeton University
Princeton, New Jersey 08544-1016 USA
President David Naylor
University of Toronto
Simcoe Hall, Room 206
27 King’s College Circle
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1A1
Dear President Naylor, Provost Misak, and Dean Gertler:
Re: Dismantling of the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto
The Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers is dismayed to learn from our distinguished professional colleagues at the University of Toronto, Linda Hutcheon and Tilottama Rajan about the imminent dismantling of this internationally distinguished Centre. We write to support an appeal of this unhappy decision. While we appreciate your wish to consolidate several seemingly cognate departments for greater efficiency, both administrative and economic, we think that this particular decision, though it may seem to promise immediate benefits, is a long-term misfortune—not only for the credit and reputation of the University of Toronto, but also for the vital culture of Comparative Literature studies in North America. The founder of the Centre, the incomparable Northrop Frye, embodies its prestige, its long-established excellence. With its generations of remarkable scholars and students, the Centre for Comparative Literature is virtually synonymous with the vibrancy and distinction in Humanities at the University of Toronto.
So we write to express our deep concern over this proposed termination and to urge your reconsideration. How unfortunate to disestablish the degree-granting programs! If anything, the Centre for Comparative Literature might be formally elevated to be what it has become: a capacious and generative global village (to evoke another notable member of the faculty at the University of Toronto, Herbert Marshall McLuhan) for all the modern languages, where students and faculty interact, inspire one another, improve one another’s work, and in sum elevate the profile of the university. Comparative literature has been at the forefront of just about every significant development in literary study, most recently, the advent of global literary studies.
At Princeton University even amid our financial constraints, Comparative Literature is being protected—and more, encouraged, successfully, to develop a few crucial, galvanizing senior appointments. This program, far from being consolidated, is actually the amalgamation of jointly appointed faculty from several departments, including my own (English). In consequence, and by force of its own energy, classes offered by this program typically draw students not only from across the University, but from across the region, from nearby universities. Departments of, Programs in, and Centres for Comparative Literature typically have this kind of appeal, this kind of influence. In our increasingly pragmatic public culture, where economic productivity tends to trump scholarship and critical inquiry, where sports facilities are refreshed while libraries are under stress, where learning and erudition can be ridiculed by a recent former President and recent candidate for vice President, we need the leadership of major universities, such as the University of Toronto, and distinguished entities, such as the Centre for Comparative Literature, to shape and influence the vital force of the humanities and scholarship in the challenges of the modern world. We urge you to reconsider your decision, and to imagine better ways to manage the resources of your distinguished university amid the crises, but also in light of the prospects, of twenty-first century academia.
Yours sincerely,
Susan J. Wolfson
President, Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (2010)
Professor of English, Princeton University
22 McCosh Hall
Princeton University
Princeton, New Jersey 08544-1016 USA
John Bell, University of Western Ontario
Dear Professor Naylor:
It was with the greatest dismay that I learned recently of the University of Toronto’s proposal to close its Centre for Comparative Literature. Comparative Literature has a particularly important role to play in today’s multicultural world, and the Toronto Centre, with its innovative curriculum, dedicated faculty, and corps of highly motivated students, is a world-renowned institution in the field. The closure of the Centre —the very suggestion of which furnishes yet another instance of the present unfortunate tendency of university administrators to devalue the study of Arts and Humanities —would, if carried out, have a devastating impact on literary and multicultural studies in Canada. I urge that this disastrous proposal be rejected.
Yours sincerely,
John L. Bell, FRSC
Professor of Philosophy
Professor John L. Bell, FRSC
Department of Philosophy
University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario N6A 3K7
Canada
It was with the greatest dismay that I learned recently of the University of Toronto’s proposal to close its Centre for Comparative Literature. Comparative Literature has a particularly important role to play in today’s multicultural world, and the Toronto Centre, with its innovative curriculum, dedicated faculty, and corps of highly motivated students, is a world-renowned institution in the field. The closure of the Centre —the very suggestion of which furnishes yet another instance of the present unfortunate tendency of university administrators to devalue the study of Arts and Humanities —would, if carried out, have a devastating impact on literary and multicultural studies in Canada. I urge that this disastrous proposal be rejected.
Yours sincerely,
John L. Bell, FRSC
Professor of Philosophy
Professor John L. Bell, FRSC
Department of Philosophy
University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario N6A 3K7
Canada
David Goldfarb, Polish Cultural Institute
Dear President Naylor, Provost Misak, and Dean Gertler,
I am very disappointed to learn of plans to disestablish the Centre for Comparative Literature and to consolidate the smaller language and literature departments into a single school.
When I was getting my M.A. in Slavic at Toronto in 1990-91, Comparative Literature was a refuge for those of us who were interested in theory and serious interdisciplinary and comparative work that didn't quite fit under the rubric of Slavic Studies. I completed my doctorate in Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center, because that was a particularly vibrant department at that time and as a U.S. citizen it was more difficult for me to fund a Ph.D. in the humanities in Canada (I funded my M.A. with a scholarship from the Harry S. Truman Foundation), but had I stayed at Toronto, it would have been in Comparative Literature, and I would not have regarded a doctoral program in Comparative Studies in Slavic Literature as a serious alternative.
In merging departments as proposed, universities imagine administrative efficiencies that make no disciplinary sense, even as administration seems to be ever expanding at higher levels.
The Slavic Department is already an amalgam of languages with a range of historical and cultural traditions, some of which are not even Slavic, and as a specialist in Polish literature, I am concerned that Slavic, Baltic, and non-Slavic East European languages that are already overshadowed by Russian in virtually all North American Slavic departments will be further marginalized and lost in a larger program, just as these countries are becoming more integrated into Europe and are gaining in prominence on the international stage as political, economic, and cultural forces.
Comparative Literature needs strong independent national language departments as a resource for students who require total competency in more than one literature, and they need Comparative Literature to be strong and independent as a department to insure the integrity of the core of the discipline of Comparative Literature, which is comprised of theory, criticism, and the history thereof without bias toward the theoretical traditions of any particular national literature. I have been in the field of Comparative Literature now for nearly twenty years, first as a graduate student, then as a lecturer at Queens College (CUNY), Hunter College (CUNY), an Instructor at New York University, and as an Assistant Professor in the Slavic and Comparative Literature Departments at Barnard College, Columbia University and I directed the Doctoral Program in Polish Literature at Columbia University, and it has been my experience that Comparative Literature attracts the brightest and most ambitious students in the Humanities, because it has been an incubator for the most important currents in humanistic discourse that could not at their beginnings fit easily in existing departments. Without Comparative Literature, we would not have seen the rise of Gender Studies, Postcolonial Studies (including many fields such as Francophone Studies devoted to French literature outside of France), Film Studies, and presently the emergence of Translation Studies as a serious academic discipline.
Disestablishing the Centre for Comparative Literature and creating an amalgamated School of Languages and Literatures would represent a step backward in every respect. The consolidation of smaller departments creates a "Department of Others," and is a movement toward their eventual liquidation in an increasingly globalized world where it is ever more important to develop greater and deeper competency in languages and cultures other than our own. The elimination of Comparative Literature as an established independent Centre would close off the most active unit of intellectual innovation in the Humanities at Toronto at a time when it is most needed in the curriculum and as a center of research.
Sincerely,
David A. Goldfarb
Literary Curator
Polish Cultural Institute
350 Fifth Avenue, Suite 4621
New York, NY 10118
--
http://www.polishculture-nyc.org/
--
http://www.davidagoldfarb.com
I am very disappointed to learn of plans to disestablish the Centre for Comparative Literature and to consolidate the smaller language and literature departments into a single school.
When I was getting my M.A. in Slavic at Toronto in 1990-91, Comparative Literature was a refuge for those of us who were interested in theory and serious interdisciplinary and comparative work that didn't quite fit under the rubric of Slavic Studies. I completed my doctorate in Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center, because that was a particularly vibrant department at that time and as a U.S. citizen it was more difficult for me to fund a Ph.D. in the humanities in Canada (I funded my M.A. with a scholarship from the Harry S. Truman Foundation), but had I stayed at Toronto, it would have been in Comparative Literature, and I would not have regarded a doctoral program in Comparative Studies in Slavic Literature as a serious alternative.
In merging departments as proposed, universities imagine administrative efficiencies that make no disciplinary sense, even as administration seems to be ever expanding at higher levels.
The Slavic Department is already an amalgam of languages with a range of historical and cultural traditions, some of which are not even Slavic, and as a specialist in Polish literature, I am concerned that Slavic, Baltic, and non-Slavic East European languages that are already overshadowed by Russian in virtually all North American Slavic departments will be further marginalized and lost in a larger program, just as these countries are becoming more integrated into Europe and are gaining in prominence on the international stage as political, economic, and cultural forces.
Comparative Literature needs strong independent national language departments as a resource for students who require total competency in more than one literature, and they need Comparative Literature to be strong and independent as a department to insure the integrity of the core of the discipline of Comparative Literature, which is comprised of theory, criticism, and the history thereof without bias toward the theoretical traditions of any particular national literature. I have been in the field of Comparative Literature now for nearly twenty years, first as a graduate student, then as a lecturer at Queens College (CUNY), Hunter College (CUNY), an Instructor at New York University, and as an Assistant Professor in the Slavic and Comparative Literature Departments at Barnard College, Columbia University and I directed the Doctoral Program in Polish Literature at Columbia University, and it has been my experience that Comparative Literature attracts the brightest and most ambitious students in the Humanities, because it has been an incubator for the most important currents in humanistic discourse that could not at their beginnings fit easily in existing departments. Without Comparative Literature, we would not have seen the rise of Gender Studies, Postcolonial Studies (including many fields such as Francophone Studies devoted to French literature outside of France), Film Studies, and presently the emergence of Translation Studies as a serious academic discipline.
Disestablishing the Centre for Comparative Literature and creating an amalgamated School of Languages and Literatures would represent a step backward in every respect. The consolidation of smaller departments creates a "Department of Others," and is a movement toward their eventual liquidation in an increasingly globalized world where it is ever more important to develop greater and deeper competency in languages and cultures other than our own. The elimination of Comparative Literature as an established independent Centre would close off the most active unit of intellectual innovation in the Humanities at Toronto at a time when it is most needed in the curriculum and as a center of research.
Sincerely,
David A. Goldfarb
Literary Curator
Polish Cultural Institute
350 Fifth Avenue, Suite 4621
New York, NY 10118
--
http://www.polishculture-nyc.org/
--
http://www.davidagoldfarb.com
Neil ten Kortenaar, Letter to the Editors, Globe and Mail
Where ideas come to life
Northrop Frye lives on. His books continue to inspire readers, scholars of literature and editorial writers. To remember Mr. Frye’s legacy, as the editorial Fearful Anatomy (July 17) does, is one way to honour it.
Another way is to maintain a space where ideas that measure themselves against the world and that seek to be as large as literature, culture and the imagination itself can flourish. Frye himself established such a space at the University of Toronto, and the work of the many graduates from the Centre for Comparative Literature testifies to the value of a space between languages and disciplines, where one can see what they share and appreciate their diversity.
U of T is the premier place for studying comparative literature in Canada, and its degree programs in comparative literature are now at risk. That is the important news item here.
Neil ten Kortenaar, director, Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto
Letters to the Editor
Northrop Frye lives on. His books continue to inspire readers, scholars of literature and editorial writers. To remember Mr. Frye’s legacy, as the editorial Fearful Anatomy (July 17) does, is one way to honour it.
Another way is to maintain a space where ideas that measure themselves against the world and that seek to be as large as literature, culture and the imagination itself can flourish. Frye himself established such a space at the University of Toronto, and the work of the many graduates from the Centre for Comparative Literature testifies to the value of a space between languages and disciplines, where one can see what they share and appreciate their diversity.
U of T is the premier place for studying comparative literature in Canada, and its degree programs in comparative literature are now at risk. That is the important news item here.
Neil ten Kortenaar, director, Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto
Letters to the Editor
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