Atwood’s letter to U of T president David Naylor protesting the closing of the Centre for Comparative Literature.  (First posted at the Save Comparative Literature website here.)

Margaret Atwood
c/o McClelland & Stewart
75 Sherbourne St., 5th Floor
Toronto, ON
M5A 2P9

President David Naylor
University of Toronto
Simcoe Hall, Room 206
27 King’s College Circle
Toronto, ON
M5S 1A1

CC. Provost Cheryl Misak, Dean Meric Gertler, Professor Neil ten Kortenaar,

Re. Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto

July 27, 2010

Dear President Naylor,

I am writing to express my disappointment and frustration with the recommendation of the University of Toronto’s Strategic Planning Committee to disestablish the Centre of Comparative Literature in 2011. As you may know, I was a student at Victoria College and studied under Northrop Frye. My admiration for his scholarship, and the work done at the centre he founded, is longstanding.

But the reasons I urge for a reconsideration of this decision are not simply nostalgic. This is a time in which cross-cultural trends are increasing exponentially; interdisciplinary study is booming, and globalization is the watchword of the day. To shunt students off to various linguistic departments instead of permitting conversation and collaboration in a central space is both counterintuitive and short-sighted. This is precisely the wrong time to make a decision of this kind, and would indeed reflect very poorly on the university overall. The University of Toronto, I know, prides itself on being able to dialogue with many of the top universities across our southern border and around the world. The Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto is the only one of its kind in our country. While I understand the temptation to save a few bucks with this closure, I urge you instead to heed the loud reminders (available to read at www.savecomplit.ca) that the costs of closing the Centre might be greater than the University of Toronto can afford.

Sincerely,

Margaret Atwood

Maclean’s has a story today about the University of Toronto Faculty Association filing a grievance over the closure of the Centre for Comparative Literature.  A primary issue for UTFA is that money is being siphoned from Arts and Science to professional faculties.

Money quote:

“All I can say is that structural changes of the kind that have been recommended are always going to be complicated,” Gertler said. “There will be winners and losers, and we have been very careful to assess what we think are the benefits and the costs associated with these proposals.”

Messenger doesn’t buy that argument, and points to a January UTFA report that suggests undergraduate programs are subsidizing professional programs. According to the review, in 2006-2007 approximately $50 million was transferred from arts and science, engineering, and the U of T’s Mississauga and Scarborough campuses to faculties like medicine, management and law. In 2009-2010, the subsidy was $47 million.

“Some of the University’s professional faculties [receive] transfer funds from Arts and Science. Are those faculties therefore unsustainable”?, Messenger asked.

Gertler says cross-subsidization is simply a reality of operating a large institution like the U of T. “We have long abandoned the idea that every unit, department and faculty in the university has to pay its own way,” he said.

Forgive me if, in response to Jonathan Allan’s latest post, I play the devil’s advocate.  I am an admirer of his advocacy on behalf of the Centre, and I too have been thinking about the Centre constantly.  But my thoughts are tempered by my own recent academic choices and my outsider’s perspective.  Not being a graduate student at the Centre for Comparative Literature, I am thoroughly clueless about what goes on within, and all of Jonathan’s posts have provided a helpful perspective.  My own perspective, however, is that of an undergraduate with a BA in Comp Lit who chose to abandon the field for the English Department. The reasons for that decision were many, but they ultimately hinged on the bet that, in the face of a fiscal crisis, the vernacular departments will likely stay open longer.  That was a bet I made a year ago, and within just a few months the recommendation was made to close the program Frye created.  It is not a hunch I ever expected to pan out so soon, nor is it one I relish.  It is, however, one on which I have wagered my future career.

About half a year ago, Michael Happy linked to an article in the American Scholar titled “The Decline of the English Department,” the most damning passage of which exemplifies the reasons for my departure from Comp Lit:

What are the causes for this decline?  There are several, but at the root is the failure of departments of English across the country to champion, with passion, the books they teach and to make a strong case to undergraduates that the knowledge of these books and the tradition in which they exist is a human good in and of itself.  What departments have done instead is dismember the curriculum, drift away from the notion that historical chronology is important, and substitute for the books themselves a scattered array of secondary considerations (identity studies, abstruse theory, sexuality, film and popular culture).  In so doing, they have distanced themselves from the young people interested in books.

Without wading into the swamp of what makes a discipline unified versus what makes it ideologically or bureaucratically centralized (in the manner Bob Denham condemned in his letter to President Naylor), it seems to me that if the scholar seeks to read a text as literature, he or she would benefit most from approaching that text as such.  If literature exists, it has a literary context, which is a melancholy hypothesis to still have to pose after all these years.  That the world of literary words is ordered and coherent is, if anything, a heuristic principle that can facilitate and articulate the critical impulses of the reader, as well as of communication between readers.  There may be a certain equivalence here with the Periodic Table, a diagram that has expedited the discovery of further elements.  And it is something that must be taught in an equally principled manner.  This is not a constraint on diversity, but rather a facilitating context for it.  This seems to be the Frygian position.

Taking postcolonialism as a “commonality” is an ideological centralization for the study of literature, and cannot help working against the diversity of background and opinion that it claims to promote.  Such is also the case with taking any of the “secondary considerations” listed above as commonalities.  Though such methods can bring an additional contingent of readers to the table and an essential expanded perspective, it certainly cannot engage the whole of the text or the totality of readers.  While postcolonialism is a fascinating and broad perspective, and one without which the study of literature would be inconceivable today, it is still a canonical ideology and it cannot itself be a unifying principle.  If it is, to advocate further for the devil, why read Proust?  Just how subaltern is he, or how imperialist?  If a text is read as a cultural artifact, would not the time one spends in seminar be better spent reading other (and shorter) artifacts such as newspapers, graffiti, and sundry bricolage?  Would not the money spent on conducting the seminar be better spent on a course that does just that?  And would not the literature departments be better off subsumed into Cultural Studies?  I suspect that potential students and university administrators both share this view.  It is possible that I may be very misguided in my characterization of Comparative Literature.  But I hold a BA in the field, and my characterizations illustrate the gulf that lies between not only the undergraduate and graduate levels, but also the elementary, secondary, and university levels.  The spiraling changes in emphasis give the student little idea of what to expect.  And given the manner in which promising students are dissuaded from engaging the subject, and the confusion that identifies the department more than anything, the lack of a shared experience is hardly a merit.

From the perspective of an administration encumbered by ballooning budgets and debt, the option of a departmental consolidation makes a lot of sense.  As someone who has worked in California public schools for a few years now, I know from experience that education is the first to suffer in any fiscal crisis.  I am as against it as anyone, but a department of misfits must still make a case for how it fits in broader society (and not only by the manner that it digests broader society).  If the arts—the academic body’s most fleshly and permeable organ, the skin that is most easily cut but also holds all other organs together—are to survive, they must be addressed in ways that take into account the creative, articulating impulse.  As Glenna Sloan has attested here, the transfer of imaginative energy is primal to learning, and it should be primary to the study of literature.

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.