President David Naylor
University of Toronto
Simcoe Hall, Room 206
27 King’s College Circle
Toronto ON
M5S1A1
September 2, 2010
Dear President Naylor:
I am writing as one of the associate faculty members of the Centre for Comparative Literature to voice my opinion as to the recent recommendation made by Dean Meric Gertler that the Centre should be closed as of June 2011. For the past seven years, I have witnessed first hand devotion and accomplishments of distinguished members of the Centre, faculty, students, staff and alumni through teaching courses, advising students and communicating with colleagues. The centre has been such a source of intellectual inspiration and collegial support that my work has grown in a meteoric curve for the past few years, including publishing one single-authored book, many book chapters and several journal articles, as well as two SSHRC standard research grants and the Jackman Humanities Institute faculty research fellowship. The Centre has helped me to redefine myself as a scholar, critic and educator. Indeed, I cannot imagine myself remaining intellectually active without the presence of the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, as I have configured my current research in consideration of how I might produce critical work that is relevant to peers in comparative literature.
It seems to me that my position differs from the TPC’s in that while the committee sees the present moment as the end of Comparative Literature, we at the Centre see ourselves standing at a turning point, filled with the wealth of tradition and enthused with the prospect of a productive future.
As we ask whether or not Comparative Literature as a discipline has completed its mission and exhausted its potential, I suspect I am in a unique position to answer the question; I experienced a comparable phase in my days as a graduate student in Comparative Literature at the University of Tokyo, Japan (MA ’88; ABD ’91), one of the few institutions in the country that nourished the discipline, which they had characterized “young and beautiful.” It was the time that the first generation of the graduates from the department ran the department as successive chairs and were expected to retire soon—somewhat analogous to our institutional history as you can easily see. I heard it said that comparative approaches, which used to be non-existent in national language and literature departments, had been successfully adapted by them, and thus Comparative Literature was deprived of its reason for existence.
In the 90s, at the time of fundamental restructuring, however, the Comparative Literature department did not go down as a thing of the past at the University of Tokyo. Instead, it extended its program into undergraduate (till then it had been a graduate-only unit—again, the similarity to our system is all too obvious) and began to produce full-fledged Bachelors (previously they only had minors). Now their dual structure is fully implemented and functioning well, producing influential works on topics that still cannot be covered in nation-originated units. For example, a national language and literature department might now nurture a study of foreign literary influences on an author who wrote in the language, while that author’s legacy in international literary scene (how s/he was read in translation in other languages and inspired writers active in languages other than his/her own) cannot be fully addressed in the language and literature department due to the focus on texts in those other languages. As posterity as well as ancestry of literature, and diversified posterity at that, becomes more important to study in the irrevocably globalizing world, the presence of Comparative Literature is essential and is invested with promises of future research accomplishments.
In the past year, the Centre for Comparative Literature has taken a firm step toward future by revising its PhD language requirement, recognizing a body of disciplinary knowledge as an equivalent of a third language. This responds to the changing status of Comparative Literature, in which “comparative” means more than comparing two “distinct” literary traditions, but also engaging different media and introducing different procedures of inquiry. These newer dimensions have been solidified as legitimate and constructive in the global community of comparative literature scholars, at other universities and at international conferences such as American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), annual meetings of which I have been participating in for the past four years. Comparative literature has expanded its corpus from inter-national studies to inter-media and inter-disciplinary inquiries, and it is exciting that the Centre is responding to the general change of tide. The size and quality of the ACLA conferences attest to the thriving state of Comparative Literature. There is so much Comparative Literature can offer and contribute to the humanities, for which the discipline deserves and needs a distinct institutional unit at the University of Toronto as elsewhere.
The Centre for Comparative Literature has never been confrontational to national language and literature departments. Instead, its presence has resonated constructively with nation-based literary studies, by highlighting trajectories between territories, lingual, geographic and disciplinary, and urging national literary studies to further sophisticate and intensify their consideration of borders and identities. In return, comparative literature benefits from rigorous studies of national languages and literatures. In order to ensure reciprocal and balanced exchange of ideas, one centripetal and the other centrifugal, it is important that both orientations are institutionally represented on equal footing, not one engulfing the other.
I hope the above will add to my colleagues and peers suggestions that the Centre for Comparative Literature should continue to exist and thrive as a unique and essential presence which enhances the intellectual well being of the University of Toronto. I thank you for your attention to this letter and look forward to learning of how you will respond to our collective voice in support of the Centre.
Yours sincerely,
Atsuko
Atsuko Sakaki
Professor
