Below is a statement in response to the July 15, 2010 memorandum from Vice Dean Baker, available here, presented to Vice Dean Baker and Vice Dean Smyth (SGS) in a meeting on August 24, 2010.  Link to the statement here.

The recommendation of the University’s Strategic Planning Committee to disestablish the Centre for Comparative Literature as part of the creation of a new School of Languages and Literatures has caused considerable alarm across the University of Toronto and throughout the global community of humanities scholars. One need only peruse the dozens of letters written by the world’s leading humanists, or scan the thousands of signatures on the petition to preserve Comparative Literature, or spend a few minutes assessing the growing media coverage of the SPC’s proposal, to realize that the Centre is seen globally as unique and preeminent in its mandate and accomplishments, that it stands as one of Canada’s major contributions to humanities scholarship, and that its proposed disestablishment is widely perceived as a symbolic attack on the humanities in general and as a particular statement about Canada’s new scholarly priorities. There now remains no doubt what the proposed disestablishment of the Centre would mean for U of T’s reputation and prestige in the humanities; the voices from our peer institutions have weighed in and continue to weigh in, and their opinions are virtually unanimous. General bewilderment surrounds the SPC’s proposal, which has, so far, failed to publicly offer a defense of itself in budgetary terms and, more importantly, failed to articulate any coherent intellectual justification for its recommendations, including the creation of a School of Languages and Literatures and most especially the disestablishment of the Centre for Comparative Literature. That these proposals were made by a committee of 12 members whose proceedings and deliberations remain confidential only increases the general feeling of isolation, disregard, and inability to understand the proposal or its justifications. The directors and faculty of all the affected departments and centres are left to feel angry and slighted, and to conclude that their disciplines were not understood or treated with respect by the members of the SPC.

No one, however, has been more shocked, confused, hurt or anxious than the current students of the Centre for Comparative Literature. Not only do we concur with the sentiments of our administrators and professors, as well as those of our peers around the world, but we must also consider the implications of this proposal for our remaining years as graduate students at U of T and for our careers as professional academics in the field of comparative literature. Of course, this assessment leaves us with many troubling questions, some shared by all and some highly individual—concerning our own research and supervisory needs. We thank Vice-Dean Baker and Vice-Dean Smyth for making time to field our questions in person and sincerely hope that this session will help us as students to better understand the positions and priorities of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and help the Faculty, represented by Vice-Dean Baker, and the School of Graduate Studies, represented by Vice-Dean Smyth, to better understand our concerns, positions and priorities.

In the interest of maximizing clarity and productivity during our brief meeting together, we respectfully put forward the following points, agreed upon by the members of our student body, as a foundation for today’s discussions:

1) We strongly disagree with the SPC’s assessment of our Centre as home to an outmoded discipline whose work is done. The backhanded compliment that “the Centre has succeeded beyond its wildest dreams” simply does not ring true. The notion of a discipline too successful for its own good is absurd and not applied to any other discipline whose central texts are widely read. We strongly assert that, first, the SPC is incorrect to say that the teaching of critical theory is now widespread in the humanities disciplines. This is not the case, as even a cursory perusal of course lists in the national-literature departments reveals. For this reason, students from all these departments come to comparative literature for coursework in critical theory, and some of these departments require their students to take courses in comparative literature in order to obtain a “theory” minor. Moreover, we remind the SPC that, although comparative literature was historically the home of continental philosophy, disseminating this body of thought was never the sole purpose of comparative literature but only one of its pragmatic tasks. We find it hard to believe that any serious scholarly assessment of the work done in comparative literature at U of T, in its relation to the work done by other humanities departments, would find it redundant, antiquated, or superfluous. Therefore, we are suspicious that such an assessment was not undertaken. If it was, we respectfully request to see it. If it was not, we respectfully request that it be undertaken in good faith and with full transparency before any further discussion of comparative literature’s ostensible redundancy.

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It seems that hardly a moment goes by when I am not thinking about the Centre, as we often call it.  The Centre is in many ways a home away from home.  It is the home for misfits, or undisciplined disciples, and yet it is a home also for those disciples of the undisciplined discipline, where misfits fit in.  This is the wonderful paradox of the Centre.

I am reminded of Proust who so eloquently speaks of “inversion” in Sodom and Gomorrah to explain sexuality.  The Centre is, in many ways, an inverted discipline that looks into itself and from that inward perspective turns outward.  I think I can confidently say that there is no one at the Centre with whom my academic interests overlap.  Sure, there are people who work on English, French, Hispanic, and Portuguese literatures, and there are people who read the same theoreticians and critics as I do.  But the overlap is only insofar as we may have read the same theorist, and we often read texts in the same languages.  That is about as far as our shared experience ever goes.  We do not have students studying “Shakespeare,” as might be the case in the national literatures.  When we study “postcolonial literature,” it is not limited to one “linguistic” commonality; instead, readers are asking how “postcoloniality” compares across the spectrum.

In a recently offered course at the Centre, simply called “Proust,” we read In Search of Lost Time.  That was the extent of our shared expectations.  The students and the professor read the same text.  We all had different goals, readings, critical approaches, and, indeed, because of the experimental pedagogy, we all had very different assignments.  But what was remarkable about this course was that it was a collection of students from very different backgrounds and disciplines.  And this is what really illustrates the point of the Centre.

This course, like any other course, the Dean would have us believe, can be taught in any “national” literature program.  This may, indeed, be the case.  The course itself can be taught elsewhere in the same way that Proust can be taught by any number of different people in any number of different ways.  But — and this is my point — the people who take the course will be very different.  I have never been in a course at the Centre where the entire course was comprised of comparatists.  This is why the Centre matters.  It allows for the undisciplined and the disciplined to come together and consider a single text or a single problem from multiple perspectives.  The Dean and the Strategic Planning Committee may insist that courses can be taught in their “home” departments (and this is ultimately not the case at all), but what they cannot argue is that the approaches, the methods, and the ideas that arise from these courses will be the same as in these “home” departments.  This is one of the problems that the Dean and the SPC have yet to resolve, and one that they seem unwilling to address.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vsIZAFOd-c

Eva von Dassow’s presentation before a recent public forum of the University of Minnesota Board of Regents.

Story here.

Please sign the petition in support of the Centre for Comparative Literature here.

One of my favourite hymns as a child was “Oh, for a thousand tongues to sing!”  Today, I am basking in the glory of not just a thousand tongues, but more than five thousand of them singing in defence of Northrop Frye’s Centre for Comparative Literature.

We’ve had an overwhelming response to our petition: within a week of posting it, we have received over than fifty-five hundred signatures are steadily working our way now toward six thousand.  The emails continue to pour in and fill the inboxes of President David Naylor, Provost Cheryl Misak, and Dean Meric Gertler.  Both the petiton and the emails have allowed our appeal to be heard over and over again, and I ask that you to continue to write in and to encourage others  to sign the petition — and, of course, to follow developments on this wonderful blog.

The petition itself is an incredible vote of confidence.  As I said earlier this week, so far there are only twelve votes of non-confidence, represented by the officials who are overseeing the proposed closure of the Centre.  The five thousand-plus votes of confidence, meanwhile, come from some of the most important names in the field, from writers, from the international reading public, and, of course, from readers of our blog.

Here now are some of names of those who have signed the petition.  When I first posted about the petition the following prominent names quickly appeared: Ian Balfour, Svetlana Boym, Rey Chow, Jonathan Culler, Jonathan Hart, Nicholas Halmi, Linda Hutcheon, Andreas Huyssen, Ania Loomba, Franco Moretti, Tilottama Rajan, Germaine Warkentin.  In recent days, we have seen people like Margaret Atwood,  Harold Bloom, Robert D. Denham, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Darko Suvin, Judith Butler, Ngugi wa Thing’o, Avital Ronnel, Balibar Etienne, Mary Louise Pratt, Cathy Caruth, Michael Taussig, Michael Hardt, Françoise Lionnet, Angela Esterhammer, George Yudice, Shu-mei Shih, Wai Chee Dimock, Jacques Lazra, Eric Santner, Stanley Fish, Natalie Zemon Davis, Dominick LaCapra, Sander L. Gilman join the list.

If you haven’t yet signed the petition, please consider doing so to add your name to this growing chorus of supporters.  With your support, the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto will prevail.

This is not the first time that Comparative Literature at Toronto has faced a threat. Northrop Frye in an extended 1982 interview (“Towards an Oral History of the U of T) recalls: “The disadvantage is that the comparative literature department has been rather left out in the cold.  Toronto dragged its feet on comparative literature for so long that [Ernest] Sirluck finally – I won’t say got around to organizing it because it was one of his priorities from the beginning – but when he did start to organize it, the medieval and Renaissance fields were preempted by those institutes, so that all the comparative literature department could take was Romantics and moderns and the theory of criticism” (CW 24,623).

Now, in 2010, U of T is once again dragging its feet, and now is the time to join us in protesting the ill-advised recommendations of the Strategic Planning Committee at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Arts and Science.  So, as always, please sign the petition and please forward this information to your colleagues, friends, and family.  Together we can save Northrop Frye’s Centre for Comparative Literature and, together, in two years, we can celebrate the centenary of Northrop Frye birth at the very Centre he created.

In chronological order:

Centre for Comparative Literature’s graduate student Jonathan Allan’s original post on the issue when the story began to break here.

Front page (above the fold) story in Globe and Mail here.

Roanoke College professor emeritus and editor of a number of Frye’s Collected Works Bob Denham’s letter to U of T President Naylor here.

Jonathan Allan’s account of the Centre’s unique scholarship and international communication, as well as links to the petition and the Save CompLit Facebook page here.

Centre graduate student Natalie Pendergast’s praise of the CompLit Centre and the closing of it as representative of “Canada’s cultural famine” here.

Former student of Frye, past president of McMaster University and current General Editor of the Collected Works Alvin Lee’s letter to the Globe and Mail here.

Letter to President Naylor by former Frye research assistant, current Chair of English at Baldwin-Wallace College, and editor of a number of volumes in the Collected Works, Michael Dolzani, here.

An update of developments here.

Story in The Varsity here.

Nicholas Graham of the University of Toronto on the legacy of the Centre here.

Bob Denham offers some interesting insight on a promised “Northrop Frye Chair” and its once proposed affiliation with the Centre here.

Globe and Mail Editorial on Frye and the Centre here.

Further media links, including to the Chronicle of Higher Education and the New Yorker here.

Update here.

Bob Denham’s no-nonsense response to the Globe and Mail editorial here.

A reminder to sign the petition here.

Jonathan Allan’s account of the history of the post of Professor of Literary Theory and the Centre of Comparative Literature here.

Neil ten Kortenaar, director of the Centre of Comparative Studies, in a letter to the Editor of the Globe and Mail here.

Jonathan Allan’s update on the public campaign to save the Centre here.

Frye Festival Newsletter here.

The creation of a separate “Category” for the “Centre for Comparative Literature” to assist readers here.

Graduate student Olga Bazilevica’s testimonial to the Centre here.

A reminder to sign the petition and visit the Save CompLit Facebook page here.