Interviews

From Rozanov to Harry Potter: Diagnosing the Discipline of Comparative Literature

For Haun Saussy, comparative literature’s potential lies in its seemingly endless capacity for revision and its desire to view itself with a critical eye. Himself a proudly perpetual student, Saussy is known for his tireless attempts to grasp at more—his willingness to sit through Introductory Russian just to understand the obscure essays of Rozanov, or his endless recitations of memorized passages from Sappho on long bike rides. His repertoire of knowledge, coupled with his fluency in a range of language literatures and cultures, stems from his varied experience as a teacher and researcher. After holding positions at Stanford, UCLA and the City University of Hong Kong, he returned to Yale, his alma mater, where he took appointments in the departments of Comparative Literature and Near East Asian Languages and Literatures. In 2006, he was named Bird White Housum Professor of Comparative Literature. He has served on the editorial board of Stanford University Press and the advisory boards of the Modern Language Association and the American Comparative Literature Association. He edited Comparative Literature in the Age of Globalization: The 2005 ACLA Report on the State of the Discipline (Johns Hopkins University Press). Along with countless other essays and articles, he has also authored Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China (2001; Harvard University Press), an examination of ways thought within a discipline—here specifically that of Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies—affects collective thought about the subject at hand.

Saussy began his conversation with Chris Boehm, Tracy Graves, Kate Parker, and Yanning Wang with a nuanced notion of what he calls comparative literature’s “institutional selflessness,” weighing the possibilities such a diagnosis implies. He sees the field’s identity crisis as linked to the constant negotiation between its inherent emptiness and innate altruism, i.e. its desire to remain undefined and its ability to work on the fringes of and, therefore, bring together a broad range of disciplines. Saussy sees the promise of comparative literature as lying in a positive announcement of its domain at the interstices of other fields—English, foreign language and literature studies, to name just a few. The promise of Comp Lit’s affinity for the negative, as Saussy explains, does not exist simply in its choice of itself over other disciplines. More broadly stated, the plotline of negativity actually shares much with the tradition of comedy. Just as the margin sometimes comes to occupy the center—however shakily—in a comic plot-line, Saussy foresees a moment in which the discipline of Comparative Literature might equally deploy its own marginality as a means of announcing and claiming itself.

But how is this to be achieved? Given Saussy’s holistic approach to the intimate relations between research and other, more administrative, aspects of our field – teaching, for example – it is not surprising that he proposes a return to the basics in our own research: in other words, a return to the book. A solution to our problem of institutional identity is to broaden our own reading strategies, and to teach others—our students, colleagues, even our mentors—to do the same. Rather than question the validity of our comparisons by seeking only to find what fits our established model, Saussy advocates a radical openness to oppositions, asking us to purposefully invite contradictions in our reading. Such a liminal position, in keeping with the comparatist tradition, allows us to honor the literary objects of our inquiry without reducing them to limiting models. Moreover, as Saussy sees it, such a strategy might also aid in the creation and establishment of new relationships between the literary objects we study and the cultures from which they originate. The transcript which follows attempts to capture the energy and scope of Saussy’s delight in literary study and his deep reverence for its past and present objects.

By Kate Parker and Tracy Graves

 

The conversation with Professor Haun Saussy of Yale University took place on October 3, 2007 at Washington University in St. Louis.

 

Interview

Let’s start with what I call the “institutional selflessness” of Comparative Literature, a phrase with some funny connotations. One is that it is a kind of deficiency, as if we don’t have any personality, or as if there is no core in Comparative Literature—and that is something people have been saying for decades. On the other hand, when you say that somebody is “selfless,” it is very high praise.

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