Alvin Lee: Letter to the Globe & Mail

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Here is my letter to the editor yesterday regarding the Centre for Comparative Literature

Dear Editor,

I have not seen the Gertler report with its recommendation to close the Centre for Comparative Literature at the U of T and to fold it (what would be left of it) into a School that would also include the five departments of Italian, German, East Asian Studies, Slavic languages and Spanish and Portuguese. As a university scholar/teacher and a university administrator, I saw firsthand what precedes and follows such decisions.

Because each individual language and literature department is a linguistic minority in an English-language university, its very existence depends on unusual professional commitment and hard work. It also depends on its ability to convince budget officers that when you fold the cultural milieu of a language and literature department into a broader English-speaking mix, you destroy the identity of the original, and much of its reason for being. The professors no longer use the identifying language in most of their daily work, the staff have to function mainly in English, and the language context in which students are meant to become proficient ceases to exist.

The paramount strength of the graduate programs in the Centre for Comparative Literature has been its ability to attract, for work at an advanced level, able students from around the world who have had deep exposure while undergraduates to more than one language and literature in at least two of the kind of department that would disappear into the proposed new School. There is a close symbiotic relation between the U of T Centre and the separate language and literature departments at the U of T and the other universities from which the students come. As the Northrop Frye Professor of Literary Theory in the Centre in 1991-2, I saw this fact in every class discussion: the accuracy and incisiveness of what a young scholar says about a literary text is convincing only when the text is being read in its original language. It is an important part of Frye’s legacy that he knew this and that he championed the need for just the kind of intellectual and imaginative work that the U of T Centre has been doing for 41 years.

Sincerely

Alvin A. Lee

Professor of English Emeritus and President Emeritus, McMaster University

General Editor, The Collected Works of Northrop Frye, 30 vols (University of Toronto Press)

Natalie Pendergast: Canada’s Cultural Famine

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Bryan Lee O’Malley‘s cover for Shojo Beat

Is it any coincidence that the terms “starving artist” and “poor student” have become stereotypes in this country?  As one of the latter I can tell you that although these terms may stick around for a long time, what they refer to—their “signified”–certainly will not. No, I’m afraid that if one continues to get poorer and poorer, hungrier and hungrier, he/she will eventually waste away. If left to starve, if left homeless for long enough, the artist and the student will die.

Right now, this type of negligence is occurring at the University of Toronto. The Centre for Comparative Literature is in a battle for its life. By extension, this battle is only one example of the perpetual struggle for artists and humanities scholars who promote and study culture in Canada. We are in the midst of a bona fide arts and culture famine.

Margaret Atwood, in an article published in the Globe and Mail, on Wed., Sept. 24th, 2008 and updated on Tues. Mar. 31, 2009, wrote the following:

[Prime Minister Stephen Harper] told us that some group called “ordinary people” didn’t care about something called “the arts.” His idea of “the arts” is a bunch of rich people gathering at galas whining about their grants. Well, I can count the number of moderately rich writers who live in Canada on the fingers of one hand: I’m one of them, and I’m no Warren Buffett. I don’t whine about my grants because I don’t get any grants. I whine about other grants – grants for young people, that may help them to turn into me, and thus pay to the federal and provincial governments the kinds of taxes I pay, and cover off the salaries of such as Mr. Harper. In fact, less than 10 per cent of writers actually make a living by their writing, however modest that living may be. They have other jobs. But people write, and want to write, and pack into creative writing classes, because they love this activity – not because they think they’ll be millionaires.” She prefaced these concerns by citing that the Conference Board estimates Canada’s cultural sector to have generated $46 billion, or 3.8 % of Canada’s GDP in 2007. She threw in another quote from the Canada Council that the sector consists of 600,000 jobs, which is the same as agriculture, forestry, fishing, mining oil and gas and utilities combined.

Her frustration is directed toward the lack of funding given to Canadian artists, but there is another—perhaps more painful—reality that lends to the anxious tone of her words: the lack of support and appreciation from Stephen Harper. It seems that “ordinary people” have trouble seeing the value in arts and culture, and this simple point is at the very core of the current Canadian divide between humanities scholars, writers, researchers, teachers, students, enthusiasts, and others. What will it take to prove that arts and culture are important?

In light of the recent World Cup Football Championship, I find myself wondering why it is that sports like soccer and hockey seem to have such a huge cultural following. When Canada won the Winter Olympics hockey final, I knew everything about that game,even though I am not a hockey fan. I could not avoid it—it filled up every space of my life: the people in the streets prevented me from going home, every channel on TV was broadcasting highlights, the neighbours’ celebratory cheers were ringing in my ears. The difference is that, when it comes to hockey, we Canadians feel a personal attachment. We “own” it.

By contrast, the arts are less a part of our culture as Canadians, and more a cultish obscurity. When, for example, I discovered that the Scott Pilgrim manga artist, Torontonian Bryan Lee O’Malley was coming to The Beguiling comic book store this summer, I nearly screamed with excitement. And what is more astounding, the famous artist/author, whose manga series is now being adapted into a major motion picture starring Canadian Michael Cera, is charging nothing for his book release party that includes a concert with four bands. In Toronto, I am sure that most people could not recognize the name Bryan Lee O’Malley despite his fame in the comic reading (under)-world and even in the entire high school and university student world!

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Jacques Derrida

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dj1BuNmhjAY

An interview with Derrida on love and being. (This video cannot be embedded; click on the image, and then hit the YouTube link that appears.)

Today is Derrida‘s birthday (1930 – 2004).  Here is a selection of Frye’s references to Derrida in various interviews.  (Imre Salusinszky’s interview with Derrida in Criticism in Society here.)

In a 1979 interview, “The Critical Path”:

Herman-Sekulic: What, in your opinion, are the major trends in the theory of literature today?  In what direction is literary criticism heading now?

Frye: I think that the word “direction” is over-optimistic.  I think there is a good deal of mining and blowing up being done, and that after the dust settles the context of a foundation may become visible.  I think Lacan’s conception of the subconscious as linguistically structured is worth following up; so is Derrida’s conception of metaphysical presence; and there are many things that interest me in the work of the new Marxist critics who have got away from the old notion that ideology is something that only non-Marxists have.  But I am not capable of making a unifying theory out of this mess, and I doubt if anyone else is either. (CW 24, 481)

In a 1985 interview, “Criticism in Society”:

Salusinszky: If Bloom has, to some extent, challenged the Christian direction of English literary studies, it is Derrida who has challenged the persistent Platonism that one can also see running through English literary studies.  Criticism has always tended to think of any great literary work as possessing unity, with some sort of closure, and as being, in some sense seminal.  Now Derrida seems to have opened up a whole range of new possibilities, where instead of closure and insemination he has his concepts of dissemination, of trace, of displacement.  Derrida, however, is a philosopher, and I wonder if you regard his present influence as merely one of those enclosure movements which you describe in the Anatomy, as coming from outside and wanting to take it over.

Frye: It certainly seems to be the way his influence has operated, yes, but I don’t think it’s entirely fair to Derrida that it has operated that way.  I think he’s genuinely interested in opening up, as you’ve just said, new possibilities in criticism.  The thing is that I don’t see why the sense of an ending and the sense of wholeness and unity, and the kinds of things he’s talking about, should be mutually exclusive.  I don’t see why you have to have an either / or situation.  It’s like those optical puzzles you look at, which change their relationship when you’re looking at them.  (CW 24, 756-7)

In a 1986 interview, “On the Media”:

Interviewer: What about McLuhan’s distinction between the visual and aural societies?

Frye: It’s very difficult to avoid metaphors.  If, for example, you’re reading something, you frequently use metaphors of the ear.  And that’s what critics like Jacques Derrida are attacking: the convention that somebody is speaking, But, still, when you’re following a narrative, you are in a sense listening.  And then at the end you get a sort of Gestalt: you “see” what it means.  When somebody tells a joke, he leads in by saying, “Have you heard this one?” and then, if he’s lucky, by the end you see what he means.  But these are just metaphors.  The hearing is something associated with sequence and time; the seeing is something associated with the simultaneous and the spatial.  (CW 24, 768)

In a 1987 interview, “Frye, Literary Critic”:

Innocenti: Some new trends in criticism, such as deconstruction, deny that we can reach the meaning of a literary work or even that there is a meaning.  All efforts to interpret are ways to proliferate structures and senses in an infinite chain of nuances and differences.  In my opinion, this sceptical position reduces all criticism to a solipsistic and narcissistic exercise.  In your opinion, do literature and criticism possess a sense that might be saved from nihilism?

Frye: The deconstructionists will have to speak for themselves, but I think the “anything goes” stage is headed for the dustbin already.  Derrida himself has a “construal” basis of interpretation that he starts from, and I think his followers will soon discover that there is a finite number of “supplements” that can be based on that.  In another decade they should have rediscovered the polysemous scheme of Dante, or something very like it.  (CW 24, 827-8)

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Gifts that Keep on Giving

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This has been a tumultuous Fryeday.  Here then is some welcome news.

First, Ken Paradis of Wilfred Laurier University has posted a paper with us.  Ken’s “Romance Narrative in Conservative Evangelical Homiletic” can be found in the journal here.

Second, The Educated Imagination is now on Facebook.  That’s the link you see at the top of our widgets column to the right.  Just click on it and you’re there.  Give us a little time and we’ll soon be making full use of it as a resource.  By fall we may even be tweeting.

Happy Fryeday, everyone.

Dawn Arnold: Tips on Voting for the Frye Sculpture

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The Festival continues to be ranked 6th in the $25,000 category. We obviously want to win this competition and create a beautiful tribute to Northrop Frye, so every vote is important! You can vote daily here: http://www.refresheverything.ca/fryefestival

Please note that when voting you MUST BE LOGGED IN FIRST for your vote to count. If you simply go to “vote” and then log-in, you have not actually voted. So, log-in first and then vote.

We are also putting together a “voting” team. This is a group of individuals who will be willing to vote daily for anyone who doesn’t have the time or who is away from technology for vacation. Simply send e-mail addresses to me at: dawn@frye.ca and we will take care of the rest!  Thank you!


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.

Northrop Frye: “There are bigger fools in the world”

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Frye and Helen: the expression on his face is sweetly suggestive of his impassioned letters to her during the 1930s

Today is Frye’s birthday (1912-1991) and an opportune moment to hear what Frye has to say about himself.

His intermittent diaries between 1942 and 1955 contain just two birthday entries.

From his 1942 diary:

Thirty today.  Many good resolutions, most broken already.  (CW 8, 6)

From his 1950 diary while staying at Harvard and writing his seminal “Archetypes of Literature“:

Today was my thirty-eighth birthday.  Helen & I went down to the Harvard Co-operative Store (they call & pronounce it the “Harvard Coop”) & got me a summer suit & a lot of miscellaneous things, socks & tie & so on . . . On the way back I stopped at a liquor store & asked if if there were any formalities about purchasing liquor.  He said the formality consisted only in the possession of cash…

It’s important for me to get along on a concentrated job as soon as possible, because travel, which is said to broaden the mind, only flattens mine.  The exposure of my naturally introverted mind to a whole lot of new impressions confuses me, because I’m more at home with ideas, I’m not naturally observant, and what impressions I do get are random & badly selected.  Also they’re compared with the more familiar environment back home and, as I don’t know the new environment, the comparison is all out of focus. (ibid., 406)

We get much more of this sort of autobiographical detail in his letters, written between the ages of 19 and 24, to Helen Kemp.

Postmarked 14 June 1932:

The Muse is still stubborn.  I have a good idea but no technique.  I have a conception for a really good poem, I am pretty sure, but what I put down is as flat and dry as the the Great Sahara.  I guess I’m essentially prosaic.  I can work myself up into a state of maudlin sentimentality, put down about ten lines of the most villainous doggerel imaginable, and then kick myself and tear the filthy thing up.  However, I got out the book of twentieth-century American poetry from the library and that cheered me up.  There are bigger fools in the world.  (CW 1, 19-20)

Postmarked 25 August 1932:

What I am worried about is my own personal cowardice.  I am easily disheartened by failure, badly upset by slights, retiring and sensitive — a sissy, in short.  Sissies are very harmless and usually agreeable people, but they are not leaders or fighters.  I would make a very graceful shadow boxer, but little more.  I haven’t the grit to look the Wedding Guest in the eye.  “Put on the armor of God,” said a minister unctuously to me when I told him this.  Good advice, but without wishing to seem flippant, I don’t want armour, divine or otherwise — snails and mud-turtles are encased in armour — what I want is a thick skin.  (ibid., 63)

11 October 1933:

You say I am necessary to your existence.  Does that mean:

a) That I am 135 pounds of mashed turnip; something necessary in the way of companionship — somebody to tell one’s troubles to — somebody who will pet you and spoil you and cuddle up to you when things go wrong?

b) That I am a condiment, bringing a sharp tang and new zest to existence, reminding you of the world, the flesh and the devil, and so humanizing you?

c) That I am a stimulant, helping to correlate your activities, encouraging your talents and spanking you for your weaknesses?

d) Or, that I am a narcotic, a drug, very powerful, to be taken, as you say, in small doses, temporarily relieving you, like a headache powder, from your ethereal worries by plunging you into an orgy of physical excitement which leaves you exhausted and silenced?

e) Or that I am an insufferable bore who stays too late?

f) Or a combination of the above?

You see, being a man, I’m so densely stupid.  I haven’t any sort of intuitive tact.  I am your typical male — whenever you get depressed I don’t know anything except what I personally want to do — that is, take you in my arms and strike solicitous and protective attitudes.  If there’s any crying to be done, I want it done on my shoulder.  I want to be present and look helpful whenever you are in difficulties.  (ibid., 90)

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Centre for Comparative Literature: Letter to the President

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Below is a letter I sent yesterday to University of Toronto President Naylor, with copies to both Dean Gertler and the provost, regarding the proposed closing of the Centre for Comparative Literature.

Dear President Naylor,

The discussion about the fate of comparative literature at the U of T might gain some measure of clarity from what Northrop Frye always emphasized, that cultural movements flourish when they are decentralized, unlike political and economic movements, which tend to centralize.  When the study of culture is centralized, such as will occur if comparative literature is amalgamated into a unite‑and‑conquer proposal that brings the study of all languages and literatures together under one administrative umbrella, uniformity replaces unity and bondage supplants freedom.  While the centralizing tendency may work in such social sciences as, say, Geography & Planning, it never works in the humanities.  The centralizing movement erases identity.  Dean Gertler has written about how the centralizing movement we call globalization should not trump the decentralized nation­‑state, which remains a key space for organized labor (“Labour in ‘Lean’ Times: Geography, Scale, and National Trajectories of Workplace Change”).   While the parallels between internationalism and an amorphous department of languages and literature, on the one hand, and local autonomy and a separate identity of comparative literature, on the other, are not exact, to pay tribute to the former in what Gertler calls “lean” economic times is surely short‑sighted.

As Frye has written, “to distinguish what is creative in a minority from what attempts to dominate, we have to distinguish between cultural issues, which are inherently decentralizing ones, and political and economic issues, which tend to centralization and hierarchy” (“National Consciousness and Canadian Culture”).

This past year I was an external reviewer for a dissertation by a Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature at the U of T.   It was an exceptional piece of work, combining a number of disciplines––language, game theory, mathematics, critical theory, music, painting––into a genuine contribution to humanistic learning.  It will be a depressing state of affairs if such extraordinary and mature scholarship is no longer permitted to flourish at the U of T.  Everyone in the field, even those of us at a distance, knows what a distinguished program Comparative Literature at the U of T is.  To consign to the dustbin an exemplary program founded by Canada’s greatest man of letters would be a travesty of the highest order, and it would cause those of us who see the U of T as a flagship university in both Canada and the rest of the world to lose faith.

Yours truly,

Robert Denham

John P. Fishwick Professor of English, Emeritus, Roanoke College