Natalie Pendergast. University of Toronto

Dear President Naylor, Dean Meric Gertler and Members of the Strategic Planning Committee:
Professor Meric S. Gertler (Chair) Dean, Faculty of Arts & Science
Professor Parth Bhatt Chair, Department of French
Professor Arthur Hosios Chair, Department of Economics
Professor Janet Paterson Principal, Innis College
Professor Craig Boutilier Chair, Department of Computer Science
Professor John Magee Director, Centre for Medieval Studies
Professor Robert Baker Vice-Dean, Research and Graduate Programs
Professor Stephen Rupp Vice-Dean, Faculty and Academic Life
Professor Suzanne Stevenson Vice-Dean, Teaching and Learning
Ms. Nadina Jamison Assistant Dean and Executive Director, Office of Advancement
Ms. Vera Melnyk Assistant Dean and Director, Office of the Dean
Mr. Isaak Siboni Assistant Dean and Chief Financial Officer

I write this letter with the hope that you will consider why I believe that by closing the Centre for Comparative Literature, the University of Toronto will lose a very vibrant intellectual community of scholars.

I have been dwelling recently on a passage from In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. The narrator is confronted with the choice of taking one road or another on his daily walk. Although the passage seems insignificant in this early chapter, the trauma of having to choose one way or the other, whilst knowing that neither suits him perfectly, stays with him over the course of the seven novels in the series. With regard to Proust’s own lifestyle, some critics have wondered whether the two unfitting options symbolized the famous writer’s feelings toward the binary of homosexuality and heterosexuality.

If I consider my situation as a student at the Centre for Comparative Literature through this passage in Proust, I too feel what the narrator feels: that none of the (proposed) choices suit me. If given the option of studying the national languages of French or English, I will be faced with a trauma that will stay with me long after I complete my academic promenade. No, like Proust, like my comparatist colleagues, the only path that suits exists somewhere in the savage pasture between these roads, somewhere in between national literature departments. For, we do not place our feet neatly into the footprints provided by the shoes of our forebears, on a smooth and well-trodden road, already cemented to the earth. No, we would rather wade through the thicker, thornier areas and see what may be hiding in the longer grass. Some of us need to forge our own, new paths.

I am certain that the academic growth of many of my colleagues would be stunted were the Centre transformed into a collaborative program at the School of Languages and Literatures for several reasons.

1. Not only do we have our fingers on the pulse of new criticism, but we respectfully critique new criticism. This is an ongoing process, not a one-time revolution.
2. The Centre for Comparative Literature is our home department. We did not start off at a national literature department, but rather started off with the incentive to compare. We compare languages and literatures, cultures, theories, media and perspectives. If the Centre is closed, we have nowhere to go “home” to.
3. Whether or not other departments “use” the literary theory that comparatists have brought to the fore of humanities scholarship, it is most evident that the way in which they approach literary/critical theory is not as progressive as that of the Centre. As I mentioned above, the loss of the Centre will signify a loss of a community that is built upon an epistemology that I have not experienced in courses at other departments. The way that we learn at the Centre is characterized by a blending of ideas and strategies that we students adopt from our eclectic faculty. We do not only improve our methods of study from reading and writing, we also learn the art of rhetoric, presentation and collective critical thought in various group settings that include different mixes of students and professors. We are encouraged to not only “use” theory critically like in other departments, but also creatively, by reinterpreting theories in parallel with other theories, or by building upon theories from different literary periods, cultural and geographical contexts and with various media, sometimes all at once. 
4. We are an undisciplined discipline. We are united as comparatists not because we all study literatures of different languages but because we share in common an unwillingness to limit our humanities scholarship just because providing administrators with a succinct one-line definition of Comparative Literature will appease them and make for more efficient paper work. We seek to challenge the scope of academic study by including as many different perspectives and approaches as possible—not by excluding and stifling our comparative exchange with one another for the sake of brevity. And I likewise provide you—the people who in many ways hold the fate of future students like me in your palm—with the challenge of trying to fit my own large scope of research into a tightly defined national literature department. My proposed dissertation explores conceptions of subjectivity by way of queer and feminist theory and psychoanalysis, forms such as the novel and the graphic novel, interfaces of images and text, genres such as autobiography and romance, French, English and German literatures and Berliner, Parisian, rural Pennsylvanian and San Franciscan subcultures.

If I shelve for a moment my emotional response to the proposed School of Languages and Literatures, I also have many questions about the logistics of such an edifice. Firstly, what will it look like? Most of my dismay comes from the fact that there is so little information about the school available to those whom it will concern the most. Will this be a standing structure unto itself, or will we be a group of floating academics, using whatever classrooms are available in various basements or libraries across campus? If a new school will indeed be built, where will we be “placed” in the meantime?

The Strategic Planning Committee has from the onset claimed that due to financial constraints it will be necessary to close the Centre of Comparative Literature. I then would like the committee to explain how they are planning to finance the building of a "new" school of Languages and Literatures?

Please understand that by closing the Centre for Comparative Literature you will be closing some of the most open minds in the humanities. Please do not leave us with the undesirable Proustian choice of no right direction. Do you, in good faith and in your heart of hearts, think that closing the Centre for Comparative Literature is what is best for the continuation of comparative scholarship at the University of Toronto? If so, please, convince me how.


Sincerely,



Natalie Pendergast
Ph.D. Student, year 1
Centre for Comparative Literature
University of Toronto

Harold Skulsky, Hofstra University, and emeritus, Smith College

Dear President Naylor,

I'm afraid I must agree with many of my colleagues that the dissolution of the Centre for Comparative Literature is a squalid act unworthy of a great university. In particular, it is a blow to humane studies (which are all by nature comparative) at a time when humane studies are already gravely threatened by indifference and hostility from many quarters. Being a survivor of countless planning committees in academia, I am very well aware of the superficially plausible budgetary and pragmatic arguments that inspire proposals of this kind. The arguments are, I submit, as shortsighted and philistine as they are plausible.

Toronto, as the institution we know and love, has little to gain and much to lose in the long run from this penny-wise act of self-mutilation. I will not go on at boring length about the legacy of Northrop Frye, a wise and wonderful comparatist whom I had the pleasure of welcoming to a convention at Smith many years ago, and who is commemorated by two of the Toronto Centre's essential institutions. But it should be clear to you that one of the treasures the University is in danger of losing is its reputation. But bad as that will be, it is far from all. When the Centre is no more, we will all be losers.

Our consolation, such as it is, will be that WE will not have done the deed.

Yours very truly,
Harold Skulsky
Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English Language and Literature
Emeritus, Smith College
Adjunct Professor of Philosophy, Hofstra University

Mario DiCesare, emeritus, SUNY, Binghampton

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

Rosa Mucignat, King's College London

Dear President Naylor,

I am writing as a young academic who has greatly benefitted from contact with the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. I have taken part in the 2008 Graduate Conference on 'Recognition' and I was thoroughly impressed with the quality of the work presented, the excellent organization and the resourcefulness of the centre's graduate students and staff. Not only did the organizers secured the participation of some of the bigger names in the CompLit world, but they also managed to find a publisher for the conference proceedings.

Initiatives such as this are crucial to the development of our discipline, and, as testified by the hundreds of letters you are receiving, the Centre itself is a point of reference for scholars of Comparative Literature worldwide.

At a time when many Universities around the world are setting up or expanding Comparative Literature Programmes, your decision to close an established Centre such as yours, with a long tradition and a high international reputation simply defies belief.

I strongly hope you will re-evaluate your decision and avoid measures which will damage not only the institution you are responsible for, but an entire community of students and scholars.

Yours sincerely,


Dr Rosa Mucignat

Lecturer in Comparative Literature
King's College London