Author Archives: Jonathan Allan

Centre for Comparative Literature: Where “literature, culture, and the imagination itself can flourish”

Neil ten Kortenaar, director, Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto, in a letter to the Editor of the Globe and Mail

Northrop Frye lives on. His books continue to inspire readers, scholars of literature and editorial writers. To remember Mr. Frye’s legacy, as the editorial Fearful Anatomy (July 17) does, is one way to honour it.

Another way is to maintain a space where ideas that measure themselves against the world and that seek to be as large as literature, culture and the imagination itself can flourish. Frye himself established such a space at the University of Toronto, and the work of the many graduates from the Centre for Comparative Literature testifies to the value of a space between languages and disciplines, where one can see what they share and appreciate their diversity.

U of T is the premier place for studying comparative literature in Canada, and its degree programs in comparative literature are now at risk. That is the important news item here.

Northrop Frye Professor of Literary Theory and the Centre for Comparative Literature

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The Centre for Comparative Literature has for three decades invited a professor of international reputation to come to the Centre and deliver a series of lectures, a seminar course, a pro-seminar, and so on, as the Northrop Frye Professor of Literary Theory. The professorship is a visiting position and in recent years, at least since I started at the Centre, those obligations require at least a week long commitment.

During my time at the Centre, I’ve had the chance to talk to scholars about my research, and they have often made interesting suggestions or asked provocative questions. I think here particularly of Emily Apter, who was instrumental in getting me to think deeper about the relationship between Harold Bloom and Northrop Frye. Or, more recently, David Damrosch, who lectured on the virtues of World Literature. For those who do not know, the study of World Literature — and what precisely is meant by it — is a current debate in Comparative Literature Studies. Simon Fraser University recently initiated a “World Literature Program.” And yet the University of Toronto now suggests that it is time to shut down its famous Centre for Comparative Literature just as other universities are beginning to re-conceive and re-imagine the possibilities of comparative literature.

Over the years, some of the most important books in literary theory were written, in part, at the Centre for Comparative Literature: Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative; The Political Unconscious by Fredric Jameson (the first Frye Professor); Culture and Imperialism by Edward Said. The full list of scholars who have been Frye Professors is impressive. And, I should point out, many Frygians have also held the post, such as Alvin Lee and Jonathan Hart.

In 2011, the Centre will welcome Carol Mavor as the Northrop Frye Professor. She will be at the Centre for about two weeks and her visit will conclude with the annual graduate student conference, which has become, in many respects, one of the (if not the) most important comparative literature conferences in Canada. This year, the theme of the conference will be “Iconoclasm: the Breaking and Making of Images“. The theme of iconicity could not be more relevant than right now, especially after the image of Northrop Frye this past week appeared on the front page of the Globe and Mail. Indeed, even David Naylor recognised this in his response to my letter on behalf of the conference committee.

In the coming years, the Centre has already confirmed that Franco Moretti will teach a seminar in the 2011-2012 academic session; and in the 2012-2013 session, we will welcome Judith Butler as Northrop Frye Professor in Literary Theory. As you can see, I hope, the Centre has, through the Northrop Frye Professorship in Literary Theory, managed to invite some of the most exciting theorists of literature who constantly challenge, in Dean Gertler’s words, “what was revolutionary or radical in the 60s.”

The proposed disestablishment of the Centre for Comparative Literature puts the position of Northrop Frye Professor in Literary Theory in significant doubt. Many of those who have accepted the invitation have explicitly done so because of the name attached to it. Piero Boitani, for instance, writes in his letter to President Naylor: “I have the honour of having been Northrop Frye Professor at the Centre in 2006 (and of having met Northrop Frye during a conference devoted to him at this University), and must confess my astonishment at this announcement.” Likewise, James Phelan in his letter says: “I am writing as a former Northrop Frye Visiting Professor at UT’s Centre for Comparative Literature to urge you to reconsider the plan to close the Centre in 2011. […] The Centre for Comparative Literature has long been a jewel in the lustrous crown of UT, because of the quality and diversity of both its faculty and its students. The reputation of the Centre—and its connection to Northrop Frye, a giant in the field of literary studies—made me feel deeply honored by the invitation to serve as a Visiting Professor.”

The loss of the Northrop Frye Professorship in Literary Theory is significant, and for Dean Gertler not to take this into consideration is distressing if not irresponsible. Thanks to this Professorship, students at the University of Toronto have had the opportunity to meet, work with, and learn from some of the most significant figures in Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies, and Literary Theory. This is yet another loss that the Dean of Arts and Sciences has failed to consider in his plan to “disestablish” Northrop Frye’s Centre for Comparative Literature.

Centre for Comparative Literature Update

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Thanks to everyone; please be sure that you sign the petition: http://www.petitiononline.com/complit/petition.html

We are working very hard to ensure that the Centre for Comparative Literature stays at the University of Toronto and that this aspect of Frye’s many achievements is maintained. If you have further thoughts and ideas, please share them with us: www.savecomplit.ca.

Please send a letter to the President of U of T, cc’ing the Provost, Dean of Arts and Sciences, the Chair of Comparative Literature, and the Save Comparative Literature Campaign (contact information: http://www.savecomplit.ca/Protest.html). Stories like the one provided yesterday by Nicholas Graham are exactly what the University needs to be made aware of and, the Frye blog is doing an excellent job of publishing these. Meanwhile, I am preparing a post on the History of the Northrop Frye Professor in Literary Theory.

These links are cross-posted on our Facebook page under the Discussions tab.

The Incomparable Centre for Comparative Literature

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Today is Frye’s birthday, and it has been just about two weeks since we heard the news that the Dean of Arts and Sciences, Meric Gertler, and the Strategic Planning Committee had recommended the closure of the Centre for Comparative Literature which Frye founded 40 years ago. The news was a complete shock. The director of the Centre, Neil ten Kortenaar, in his letter to the dean begins with this very admission:

My initial shock at the news of the proposed disestablishment of the Centre for Comparative Literature has become absolute dismay as the meaning of this proposal has become clear to me. The news comes at a time when Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto was being thoroughly reinvigorated and we were looking forward with excitement to our future.

I can only agree with these sentiments. I was initially shocked by the recommendation and then slowly but surely began to realise the ramifications of such a decision. Ten Kortenaar cites a number of these in his letter.

But, on a much more personal level, the type of research that I do simply cannot be done elsewhere. I chose to attend the University of Toronto, and more precisely the Centre for Comparative Literature, because of its connections to Northrop Frye. When I arrived at the University, I told the faculty of the Centre that my project would focus on Frye’s influence, especially with respect to Harold Bloom. Indeed, in October, I submitted to the Centre a SSHRC proposal called, “Anxieties of Criticism, Anatomies of Influence: A Study of Northrop Frye and Harold Bloom.” In April, I found out that I had been awarded a SSHRC. Since then I have written an article with a very similar title that recently appeared in the Canadian Review for Comparative Literature. It may appear that I could have completed this research anywhere. But that is not the case, I very much needed the University of Toronto and the Centre for Comparative Literature because it provided the archives and the intellectual guidance of people like Linda Hutcheon, J. Edward Chamberlin, and Eva Kushner.

My current research continues with ideas stemming from Northrop Frye’s theories of literature, particularly romance. My dissertation considers literatures written in English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese. This dissertation simply could not happen elsewhere. The study follows Frye’s dictum that “popular literature […] is neither better nor worse than elite literature, nor is it really a different kind of literature” (CW XVIII:23); and thus, my study includes everything from George Eliot and Marcel Proust to Twilight and Harlequin romances. Only the Centre for Comparative Literature could provide a home for such research and only the Centre would encourage such research. The Centre has afforded me many opportunities to explore romance and present these ideas at international conferences. In April, I was at the American Comparative Literature Association’s meeting in New Orleans and NeMLA meeting in Montreal; in May at Congress in Montreal where I presented at the Canadian Comparative Literature Association’s meeting as well as the Canadian Association of Hispanists, in August I will be at the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance’s conference, and in September at a conference on monsters at Oxford.

I look around now at the Centre for Comparative Literature and realise that this Centre is, even in its darkest hours, a powerhouse for intellectual inquiry. Today, the Centre found itself on the front page of the Globe and Mail receiving national exposure. I think I can say that for many of my colleagues this was a huge – and much needed – surprise.

I urge readers of this blog to consider the future of Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. We have a series of ways you can follow our story and I provide to you a series of links:

www.savecomplit.ca — Main Resource and Information Page; if you send letters to the Dean, Provost, and President, we will happily publish them here. All media stories will be included on this webpage.

www.PetitionOnline.com/complit/petition.html — Petition to Save Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. Major figures in Comparative Literature have already signed (as have many Frye Scholars): Ian Balfour, Svetlana Boym, Rey Chow, Jonathan Culler, Jonathan Hart, Nicholas Halmi, Linda Hutcheon, Andreas Huyssen, Ania Loomba, Franco Moretti, Tilottama Rajan, Germaine Warkentin.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Save-Comp-Lit-at-U-of-T/128346170533811 — A Facebook page with information as it becomes available.

http://twitter.com/SaveComplit — Our Twitter account which will post links to news stories.

And, of course, we will continue to update the Frye community here at The Educated Imagination.

Saving the Centre for Comparative Literature

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As many readers of this blog know, Northrop Frye was the founder of the Centre for Comparative Literature. The Centre recently celebrated its fortieth anniversary, and today, a year later, we are mourning its demise. The University of Toronto has in effect decided that the Centre for Comparative Literature will be closed and the graduate program in Comparative Literature will be suspended, effective the end of the upcoming academic year. All students in the program will be permitted to finish their Comparative Literature degrees, but this will also mark the end of the road for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto.

I provide here a paragraph from the “recommendation” (well, it is less a recommendation, it seems, and more an order) from the University of Toronto:

The Strategic Planning Committee (SPC) has recommended that the Departments of East Asian Studies, Germanic Languages & Literatures, Italian Studies, Slavic Languages and Literatures and Spanish & Portuguese be incorporated into a proposed School of Languages and Literatures, a new unit designed to strengthen the profile of teaching and research in languages in the Faculty. The SPC has also recommended that the Centre for Comparative Literature be transferred to the proposed School and be redefined as a Collaborative Program. The School will have a single Director and centralized administrative services; individual language groups will retain responsibility for their undergraduate and graduate programs. The specific structure and operating principles of the School will be determined through a process of consultation with academic administrators, faculty members, and other stakeholders in the relevant units. The Dean will appoint an Advisory Committee to complete this process by December 2010.

All of our current faculty will be “returned” to their home departments despite the fact that the kind of teaching they do in Comparative Literature may very well not mesh with their home departments. For instance, I think here of Eva-Lynn Jagoe, about whom I blogged earlier this year, who will be returned to Spanish and Portuguese, and then, of course, to the School of Languages and Literatures.

We are all shocked by this “recommendation,” and students and faculty have responded with the creation of two Facebook Groups where information is being posted about the situation as it develops. The links for the groups are here:

Save Comp Lit at U of T: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Save-Comp-Lit-at-U-of-T/128346170533811?ref=ts

Students Against the School of Languages and Literatures at U of T: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=122802167763519&ref=ts

It is a sad day when we witness the demise of Frye’s Centre for Comparative Literature, and yet we see the inspiring success of the Northrop Frye Festival in bringing Frye to the forefront and reminding Canadians (and the world) of just how influential and important Frye was as a public intellectual, writer, and teacher.

Experimental Teaching, Experimental Learning

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Parts of this post come from my introduction to Eva-Lynn Jagoe’s plenary lecture – The Linda Hutcheon and J. Edward Chamberlin Lecture in Literary Theory – at the annual conference at the Centre for Comparative Literature.

I recently had the great pleasure of studying and learning in an experimental setting. The goal of the course – Proust and Modernity – was to read Proust in relation to Modernity alongside various theoretical texts. The theory texts consisted of the usual suspects: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Fredric Jameson, Jacques Lacan, Kaja Silverman, Julia Kristeva, Malcolm Bowie, and Carol Mavor. The course itself consisted of response papers, presentations, and a term paper. Nothing, so far, out of the ordinary. Well, let me introduce the first oddity: only one of the students had read Proust previously, and the professor like the rest of the students was reading Proust for the first time. We ultimately, toward the end of the class, called this “virginal reading.”

Most readers of this blog will likely have never encountered Eva-Lynn Jagoe, the author (currently at work on “the long novel”) or the professor, so let me briefly indulge here in giving some account of her as instructor. In the classroom, Professor Jagoe’s central goal is always to test ideas and question students and their ideas. Her classroom is a laboratory for readers. The first thing to know is that Eva-Lynn often seeks to break down the institutional walls of the structure: we ultimately tossed the syllabus. In its place, each student agreed to offer commentary, work through Proust, and decide with Professor Jagoe (I’m oscillating between the professorial and the personal precisely because blurring of lines is so important, and to show that students ultimately did recognise there was a professor in the room) how we would be evaluated – but evaluation, as a university requirement, takes on a new role in her classroom. Throughout the course on Proust, we experimented with a new pedagogy and a new classroom experience (or, perhaps, just new to me, but something felt novel). The classroom always has food, always has drinks, always had laughter: these were the requirements. Additionally, we were to read and discuss the novel from personal, subjective, and confessional starting points – which, naturally, makes Proust the near perfect subject of study. It is in this space that we, students and professor, began to experiment with modes of teaching, modes of learning, modes of reading.

Initially, we had set upon reading a series of theorists in addition to Proust and we had agreed to follow Roger Shattuck’s plan of study for reading Proust. However, as we began to read, we realised that something was not working; we were not able to do what we had wanted to do, which was read Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Thus, the critical readings became optional and then later they became obsolete. In addition to tossing the theory, we added an extra hour to our Friday sessions. One of our meetings lasted over five hours, we left around 6 pm on a Friday, we began at 1, and the discussion continued over email. In the classroom, Professor Jagoe managed to create something of a utopian space in which Proust was read, discussed, and in many ways dreamed into the living. In these moments, Proust became real, or we became Proustian and from here the text was no longer studied in and of itself, but in relation to the greater problem of the imagination. Proust, of course, will teach this very lesson in the last volume of the novel, he writes: “In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without his book, he would perhaps never have expressed himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is a proof of its veracity.”

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A Tale of Two Conferences

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I have just returned from two conferences: the American Comparative Literature Association and the North Eastern Modern Language Association. Six flights, ten days.

My attendance at the NeMLA was limited because my flight out of Toronto was cancelled and I arrived a day late; just in time for my own panel, in fact. However, as I walked among the book stalls at the conference, I was very happy to stumble across Robert Denham’s edition of Northrop Frye’s letters front and centre at the McFarland Press table. When I wandered by later in the day, it was gone, sold out completely. So I made my way over to the Queen’s-McGill University Press table to purchase J. Russell Perkin’s Theology and the Victorian Novel – a really rather stunning book.

At the American Comparative Literature Association’s meeting – convened this year in New Orleans (“Nawlins,” if you’re native) – I was part of a seminar discussing the romance. Unlike many similar settings, the ACLA meeting has excellent organization in that participants send abstracts to the seminar group which also meets each day of the conference. The result is real discussion on ideas being steadily accumulated by way of ongoing lectures and discussions. In our seminar group, at least half of the panellists quoted Frye directly, and Frye made his way into almost every discussion period precisely because the romance as a genre is not dying and neither are Frye’s explorations, explications, and expectations of it.

At the ACLA I was quite impressed to find people reading Frye’s work on genre not with disdain but rather with a great deal of respect and curiosity. His work was applied from the romances of Virginia Woolf right through to Chick-Lit, and from the Anglo-American tradition all the way to Bollywood, Latin America, and Africa. If Frye is to have his much anticipated “resurgence,” it may well occur in the field of romance studies. Allow me to conclude by plugging an organisation where this seems most likely to happen, the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance: www.iaspr.org.

At any rate, both conferences re-affirmed and refreshed my own ideas about the romance and Northrop Frye’s continuing influence on the field. I have four more conferences to prepare for in the next few months, including the annual meeting of the IASPR where Frye will undoubtedly be present. His work will certainly make a star turn in my talk on Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series. So, I look forward to continuing to discover Frye being read closely and carefully by my peers; and, additionally, to posting brief dispatches from these conferences.

Hope to see you all again soon.

Frye Alert

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A link to Mario Valdes’ address to the 2009 Annual Graduate Colloquium on Comparative Literature here. Valdes opens with extensive remarks on Frye.

Quote of the Day

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Further to Russell’s post

“Even the biggest book is fragmentary: to finish anything, you have to
cut your losses. Nobody ever writes his dream book, like Coleridge’s
treatise on Logos. That’s why we make scholars finish a thesis first,
that is, a book which, almost by definition, nobody wants to write or
to read, to show how closely the reproductive & excretory systems are
connected.” (CW XV:79)

David Damrosch and World Literature

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David Damrosch of Harvard has recently been extolling the virtues of world literature in a series of books, papers, and lectures. You can see his lecture last year at Simon Fraser University here. Last week he lectured at the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto as the Northrop Frye Professor in Literary Theory. During his seminar on “How to Read World Literature” (also the title as his most recent book), he provided an example of how we might go about “teaching” world literature with three poems: one from the east, two from the West (one British and one Argentine). Moreover, the poems were from three different periods and one author was unknown. (These are in fact the first three poems discussed in “What is Literature?” in How to Read World Literature, 8-13.) In other words, the only thing that seemed to unite these poems is that they are understood – for one reason or another – to be poems and in some way identifiable as literature. Throughout his talk, Damrosch spoke in terms which had such an obvious affinity with Frye that I was surprised it wasn’t declared outright to be derived from Frye. Therefore, after being encouraged to think about modes, symbols, myths, seasons, genres, and themes for more than an hour, I found it impossible not to ask outright: So what is new about this, and how is it different from Northrop Frye?

Damrosch’s method, however, is different from Frye’s inasmuch as it appears to consist of little more than a kind of archetype-spotting where the critic pursues a recurring symbol and then duly catalogues the instances of its recurrence. For Damrosch, as long as the symbol is in play, then there is relevant critical activity in chasing it down. This is not really what Frye had in mind when he laid out the principles of archetypal criticism. Frye’s attitude, that is, seems to be, “yes, of courses there are symbols, but the question is why they recur, not merely how they recur.” In this regard, if there is to be a conception of world literature, as seems to be the goal of this “New” Comparative Literature as represented by scholars like Damrosch, it is only possible insofar as it seeks a homogenization of literature according to some universal experience manifested by recurring archetypes.

Damrosch writes in How to Read World Literature: “[w]riters in metropolitan centers do not necessarily need to adapt their methods in order to be accessible to readers beyond their home country, since many of their literary assumptions and cultural references will be understood abroad on the basis of readers’ past familiarity with earlier classics in their tradition” (107-8). Damrosch thus provides a defence of the Great Tradition or the Western Canon or the Canon of whatever tradition, and appears to argue that it is necessary to know other Canons in order comprehend work outside of one’s own tradition. The aim of world literature, therefore, is not to celebrate difference but rather to find sameness. We only need look to Anatomy of Criticism to find a similar but extensively elaborated mode of reading: “[t]he repetition of certain common images of physical nature like the sea or the forest in a large number of poems cannot in itself be called even ‘coincidence,’ which is the name we give to a piece of design that we cannot find a use for it. But it does indicate a certain unity in the nature that poetry imitates, and in the communicating activity of which poetry forms part. Because of the larger communicative context of education, it is possible for a story about the sea to be archetypal, to make a profound imaginative impact, on a reader who has never been out of Saskatchewan” (AC 99, emphasis mine). Frye argues that “[o]nly the archetypal critic can be concerned with its relationship to the rest of literature” (AC 100). Moreover, and with specific reference to Damrosch’s argument: “[t]hus the centre of the literary universe is whatever poem we happen to be reading. One step further, and the poem appears as a microcosm of all literature, an individual manifestation of the total order of words” (AC 121). However, unlike Damrosch, it does not seem that Frye is advocating the practice of mere archetype-chasing. In his comparison of two poems – “Western wind, when wilt thou blow” and the Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik’s “Nombrarte” – Damrosch comes to the conclusion that “[i]nstead of a fertile spring wind that can reunite loves, here we have an ill wind that blows no one any good and only brings a bitter aftertaste” (9). So what unites two poems, for Damrosch, is simply an “image of physical nature” (which is to say, precisely what Frye noted over fifty years ago but without saying nearly as much).

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