From: TABRON-AT-BINAH.CC.BRANDEIS.EDU
Date: Tue, 15 Apr 1997 23:48:27 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Re: poco lit course readings


Hi Alpana,

Perhaps this collection is too pedestrian for the task, but I'm having a
field day reading "Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism",
a book edited by Charles Bernheimer apparently under the aegis of the 
American Comparative Literature Association (Johns Hopkins, 1995). The
book is a collection of three committee reports to the association on
"the state of the field" from 1965, 1975, and 1993, and accompanying
essays discussing the state of the field, the reports, the definition
of comparative literature, the status of translation, etc. I don't know
if there are any essays I would recommend alone; the interest of the book
is following the discussion among the various authors -- but one may
address your purpose.

I particularly love this sentence from Rey Chow's essay, "In the Name of
Comparative Literature":

"The many different types of postcolonial writings which continue to be
produced in the "single" language of English or French should require us to
rethink comparative literature's traditional language requirements, so that,
in principle at least, it should be possible for some students to do work
in comparative literature using one language (even though I very much
doubt that that would ever be the case)."

I love it because I think that's exactly what "commonwealth studies" or
"world literature written in english" needs to be: comparative work (in the
sense of deeply aware of the historical and cultural production of said
work) in literatures from the different parts of the former commonwealth
but having between them the common characteristic of having been written
in english (for varying and often interestingly problematic reasons.)

Judith Tabron
Brandeis University
Waltham, Massachusetts U.S.A.
tabron-AT-binah.cc.brandeis.edu

(enjoying this book)


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