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.

Linda Hutcheon’s post “Oh, the Humanities” at The Mark here.

Money quote:

The reason given for one of these cuts – that Comparative Literature has been so successful that every department now does that same theoretical and comparative work, and thus the centre is no longer needed – echoes, or perhaps parodies, Yale comparatist Haun Saussy’s famous lament about the institutional weakness and yet the great intellectual strength of comparative studies in Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization, the 2004 report of the American Comparative Literature Association. But the negative implications of one of Saussy’s sobering conclusions are worth considering: “We may all be comparatists now – and for good reason – but only with a low common denominator.” In intellectual terms, this is hardly something to be proud of supporting.

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.

Story in the Varsity here.