{"id":14643,"date":"2010-08-04T08:00:34","date_gmt":"2010-08-04T12:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca\/?p=14643"},"modified":"2010-08-04T08:00:34","modified_gmt":"2010-08-04T12:00:34","slug":"centre-for-comparative-literature-why-the-centre-matters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/08\/04\/centre-for-comparative-literature-why-the-centre-matters\/","title":{"rendered":"Centre for Comparative Literature: Why the Centre Matters"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"col\"<\/a>
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

It seems that hardly a moment goes by when I am not thinking about the Centre, as we often call it.\u00a0 The Centre is in many ways a home away from home.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 This is the wonderful paradox of the Centre.<\/p>\n

I am reminded of Proust who so eloquently speaks of \u201cinversion\u201d in Sodom and Gomorrah<\/em> to explain sexuality.\u00a0 The Centre is, in many ways, an inverted discipline that looks into itself and from that inward perspective turns outward.\u00a0 I think I can confidently say that there is no one at the Centre with whom my academic interests overlap.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But the overlap is only insofar as we may have read the same theorist, and we often read texts in the same languages.\u00a0 That is about as far as our shared experience ever goes.\u00a0 We do not have students studying \u201cShakespeare,\u201d as might be the case in the national literatures.\u00a0 When we study \u201cpostcolonial literature,\u201d it is not limited to one \u201clinguistic\u201d commonality; instead, readers are asking how \u201cpostcoloniality\u201d compares across the spectrum.<\/p>\n

In a recently offered course at the Centre, simply called \u201cProust,\u201d we read In Search of Lost Time<\/em>.\u00a0 That was the extent of our shared expectations.\u00a0 The students and the professor read the same text.\u00a0 We all had different goals, readings, critical approaches, and, indeed, because of the experimental pedagogy, we all had very different assignments.\u00a0 But what was remarkable about this course was that it was a collection of students from very different backgrounds and disciplines.\u00a0 And this is what really illustrates the point of the Centre.<\/p>\n

This course, like any other course, the Dean would have us believe, can be taught in any \u201cnational\u201d literature program.\u00a0 This may, indeed, be the case.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But — and this is my point — the people who take the course will be very different.\u00a0 I have never been in a course at the Centre where the entire course was comprised of comparatists.\u00a0 This is why the Centre matters.\u00a0 It allows for the undisciplined and the disciplined to come together and consider a single text or a single problem from multiple perspectives.\u00a0 The Dean and the Strategic Planning Committee may insist that courses can be taught in their \u201chome\u201d 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 \u201chome\u201d departments.\u00a0 This is one of the problems that the Dean and the SPC have yet to resolve, and one that they seem unwilling to address.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It seems that hardly a moment goes by when I am not thinking about the Centre, as we often call it.\u00a0 The Centre is in many ways a home away from home.\u00a0 It is the home for misfits, or undisciplined disciples, and yet it is a home also for those disciples of the undisciplined discipline, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-centre-for-comparative-literature"],"yoast_head":"\nCentre for Comparative Literature: Why the Centre Matters - The Educated Imagination<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/08\/04\/centre-for-comparative-literature-why-the-centre-matters\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Centre for Comparative Literature: Why the Centre Matters - 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