“So, what do you do for a living?”

It’s a question that makes me cringe. “I’m a Ph.D. student in comparative literature,” I say. And even though this admission is almost always received positively, I’m still hesitant to tell people.

But now, after two years of study at University of Toronto’s Centre for Comparative Literature, I’ve been rethinking this attitude. Why should I be reluctant to tell people what I do? I wouldn’t respond so timidly if I were studying law, or medicine, or engineering. Why should comparative literature – or any discipline in the humanities – be so different?

For many the answer is obvious. Wherever you go, there is a huge demand for doctors, lawyers and engineers. But humanities scholars? What do they contribute? Even though thousands of undergraduate students continue to major in the liberal arts each year, many in society question the value of an education which grants knowledge and critical-thinking skills but little practical vocational training.

Another reason, perhaps, for society’s skepticism toward academics is the archetypical image of the university as an “ivory tower” whose existence has little bearing on the world outside.

After several years spent studying and working in various educational institutions, I’ve come to accept the validity of both these concerns. When I started my undergraduate education at Sarah Lawrence College, a liberal arts school in New York, I knew that I was choosing a rough road. Five years after graduation, many of my old friends are deeply in debt, shuffling from job to job, and still unsure of their place in society.

And after two years of advanced graduate study, in which I occasionally have read opaque, jargon-filled academic articles, I too must question the value of ideas that don’t make it outside of the ivy-covered walls and into the real world.

But all these doubts dissipate whenever I enter a classroom full of undergraduate students.

As a teaching assistant for a class entitled “Ancient and Medieval Literary Modes,” I spent this past year leading 25-person discussions on some of the great works of the literary canon: Homer’s Iliad, Virgil’s Aeneid, and Dante’s Inferno, among others. As we discussed such topics as the meaning of honour, the nature of familial love, and the age-old question of what constitutes a good life, I dared to hope that my students’ insights would make their way beyond those classroom walls.

I chose to study the humanities because I wanted answers. I wanted to know why people who seem honest turn out to be liars. Why war, violence and injustice persist in every part of the world. I wanted to know how it is that people have overcome the most terrible conditions to fight for human dignity. And I wanted to know how, in this time of global terrorism, economic crisis, continued human rights violations and environmental destruction, we as individuals are supposed to live.

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Sylvia Maultash Warsh is the author of the recently published The Queen of Unforgetting.

When I was at the University of Toronto years ago, like many young undergrads, I didn’t know my own mind and somehow ended up in Psychology instead of English.  So though I was a student at U of T, I never had Northrop Frye for a professor. It wasn’t until I had to research the venerable critic for my new novel, The Queen of Unforgetting, that I realized just how much I had missed.

I had good reasons for making Frye a character in my story. I like to set my books in Toronto—my first three are historical mysteries that take place on and around Beverley Street, near the university.  For this book (not a mystery) I needed an academic superstar, and Frye was the obvious choice. My protagonist, a grad student more ambitious than most, needs a supervisor for her thesis. But not just any supervisor. She knows that a Frye protégé will have a good chance at an academic placement when the time comes.  To this end, she chooses a thesis topic that will interest him: E.J. Pratt’s epic poem, Brébeuf and His Brethren.  Pratt was Frye’s mentor and he is pulled in. For my research, I pored over many of Frye’s books and journals; I watched videotaped interviews in which he sits before the camera and gives dazzling little lectures in his famous deadpan.

He doesn’t look the part, but he was a mythic figure in his own time. Sometimes referred to as The Buddha, the shy brilliant scholar had assimilated vast quantities of literature, philosophy, art, and religion. It was this storehouse of knowledge that let him connect disparate ideas and themes into meaningful patterns. His omnivorous reading made it possible for him to cross borders and draw comparisons between cultures, and particularly their literatures.

Our world has shrunk almost beyond imagination since 1969 when Frye founded the Centre for Comparative Literature at U of T. Today’s global realities require, more than ever, broader understanding of the world around us. Through literature we recognize the similarity in the other, the stranger who looks nothing like us but who lives, loves and dies just the same, only defined by a different set of symbols. A centre dedicated to looking outward toward the other is in a unique position to forge cross-cultural and interdisciplinary ties. A university that doesn’t recognize the value of such an enterprise is in the wrong business.

Sign the petition in support of the Centre for Comparative Literature here.

Every time I return to Europe, my friends and family members ask me the same question: “Why exactly did you move to Canada?”  And, as if I hadn’t asked that question  myself often enough, it appears the University of Toronto’s plan to close the Centre for Comparative Literature requires me to account for my decision yet again.

I was born in a small post-Soviet country where the humanities are in a position hardly comparable to the Western world. “Interdisciplinarity” and “theory” are still pretty much foreign concepts and, because I wanted to study comparative literature, I had to go abroad. Germany seemed the most obvious choice. I’d lived in that country for over a year, I was familiar with its people and customs and its university system.  I speak and read both vernacular and academic German. However, this familiarity was actually the reason I didn’t choose Germany, but rather chose the mysterious and terrifying and yet fascinating Canada.

When discussing my choice with my professors (all of them German), I heard many positive things about the Centre for Comparative Literature at U of T, particularly its international reputation which could only enhance the opportunity for a budding Comp Lit scholar to obtain significant international experience. Indeed, the wish to explore a new approach to comparative literature and new ways of thinking was probably the most compelling reason for me to choose Canada and Toronto – I was fighting the Eurocentric in myself. I was especially attracted to post-colonialism, a widely studied area in North America but still quite underdeveloped in Germany.  I was also attracted by the Centre for Comparative Literature itself, which I’d had the chance to experience during a brief visit the year before, and where I discovered a close and unmistakably open-minded community, where someone like me — new to the country, the continent, and to academia — wouldn’t feel lost.

I am glad to say that all of my expectations were met. In just this past year, I’ve learned more than during my entire undergraduate career.  I have learned what it means to do rigorous research, and what a scholarly paper should offer to the wider academic community.  I have learned to open my horizons and explore the most arcane theories and approaches because you never know what they may reveal.  Not only have my professors been willing to help me, but my fellow students have proven to be great teachers and loyal friends. I continue to be amazed by their intelligence, vivacity and professionalism. A recent comparative literature conference, organized by the Centre’s students, even made me change my dissertation topic – after hearing Svetlana Boym and a whole panel on nostalgia, I discovered that this is what I really want to pursue as a scholar.

Any time I had doubts about my place at the Centre – either personal (being so far from my friends and family), or professional (I am a European working on European literature, is my place really in Canada?) — I also had to acknowledge that there are still so many things I need and want to learn from the Centre, from Toronto, and from Canada. The entire experience has always been very special, coming as I do from a xeno- and homophobic part of Eastern Europe and making my home in a wonderful city like Toronto, which was recently dressed with the festive rainbow flags of Gay Pride Week. This remarkable country by its singular example manifests a humane and tolerant diversity, and it is definitely something we can learn from in my home country. I believe that as literary scholars we can be the crucial link between cultures and communities.  As cliche as that may sound, part of the delight of my experience here has been to discover how true it remains.

Moving to Canada was not an easy step.  But I have never regretted it because I knew that this is where I want to be – the Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto.  I do hope, therefore, that we can save the internationally renowned Centre so that for many years to come people like me from all of the world will have a chance to benefit from the treasures it has to offer.

In the 70s I took a course offered at the at the Centre under the direction of Prof. Graham Nicholson, entitled “Hermeneutics”.  We focused on Gadamer’s Truth and Method. It was that course that changed my life. I had come to Canada from Ireland where it was thought to be revolutionary to be reading the Canadian Lonergan and his book, Insight (1957). What the Centre allowed me to do was to explore the notion of “method” in Gadamer’s book and so expand the notion of “method”, which I had from Lonergan’s Method in Theology (1972)

This course offered by the Centre also inspired me to organize the York Literary Society and hold the international conference on “Hermeneutics and Structuralism: Merging Horizons,” 1978,  at York University. The guest speakers included: Gadamer, Voegelin, Allan Bloom and Lonergan. The entire conference was video taped and is now available on DVD entiled, Voeglin at York ‘78 and is available from Amazon on line. Here you can see all the guest speakers in action, which is perfect for any classroom.

The Centre for Comparative Literature was also the inspiration and source for the founding of the York Literary Soeciety of which in those years I was president.  We made an appointment to visit Frye at his Massey College, office, to invite him to the conference. He asked to see our poster listing all the guests and speakers and after some time he said he regretted that he had to decline our invitation because of a schedule conflict, but added graciously that we had picked all the right guys.

So the course at the Centre  not only served as an excellent introduction to Gadamer, the founding of the York Literary Society,  but was also the catalyst for what my friends like to say was my “conversion” from Lonergan to a lifetime commitment to Frye and his writings and his legacy.

I am presently working on a book, Frye on Dante, with the chairman of the Italian Department at U of T, Domenico Pietropaulo, who was also a student of Prof. Graham Nicholson and a graduate of the Centre.