Comparative Literature -- Its Current Situation and Theoretical Perplexities

[Music] welcome to the McMillan report I'm Marilyn wils your host and our guest is Han Sai the bird White House and professor of comparative literature at Yale University Professor Saucy has a range of scholarly interests including Chinese poetry literature Aesthetics and culture his published articles explore a wide range of topics such as Chinese musicology the history of the idea of oral literature Haitian literature health care for the poor and Contemporary Art in his first book the problem of a Chinese aesthetic he applied a new model of comparative literature and in his book Great Walls of discourse and other adventures in cultural China he examines the way that assumptions and consensus within a discipline affect Collective thinking about the object of study today we'll talk with Professor Saucy about comparative literature welcome Professor Saucy thank you let's begin with the basics what is comparative literature how did the field emerge um in contrast to English say or rhetoric sure comparative literature the term emerges around 1820 in the wake of Napoleon's conquest of Europe which as you know was rapidly rolled back uh but uh what what spurred it I think is that people began to talk about cultural and National difference and previously I think the models for culture had all come from ancient Greece and Rome and the idea was that neoclassical art was good enough for everybody and people were trying to catch up with the people who had the neoclassical art which were of course the French but as kind of as a cultural resistance to the Napoleonic conquests people in the conquered areas like Germany Italy and so forth began to discover that they they were not just waiting around to be discovered as dormant Frenchmen but that they they did things differently their linguistic differences their historical differences were important to them and so literature becomes plural after after Napoleon in in Europe anyway hence the the idea of needing to compare and contrast and emphasize the differences so I think comparative literature always grows out of a realization of differences uh in the US it got its big start after the second World War I think because in this country we began to participate on an international stage and that's uh more or less contemporary with the creation of area studies which is why I think it's appropriate for me to be talking about comparative literature in a McMillan Center uh format because as do I area studies is is what we live on here in McMillan and compet would you know in this uh version of things comparative literature would be sort of the the artistic and literary side of this awareness that there are a lot of cultures out there that they don't all reduce down to one model and that what's interesting about them is how they how they differ so how do you make it work then well this is the trick uh because you can you can just say this you know this culture is like that culture this author is like that author this work is like that work but it's not it's not really interesting unless you also take the theoretical step back and say where do I get my judgment of similarity or of difference here what are the historical connections how does my position as an observer affect the things that I'm going to notice and observe so and that for me is where the excitement is I mean of course it's great to to be able to Simply compare but also you want to stand aside from yourself and watch yourself compare that must be hard to do and somewhat subjective I imagine do you have any difficulty along those lines I I've My secret is to make my work out of my difficulty right some a friend of mine likes to say you need to find a job that mirrors your personal pathology this this happens to be the kind of difficulty that interests me the most right you know reflexiveness how how we become something in addition to ourselves by thinking about ourselves and so I hope it's it's a a feature and not a bug in the in the comparative mindset I am curious um in terms of your personal history and how you became um attracted or um how did you find comparative literature what Drew you to it it was it was accidents uh I was a freshman in college trying to write an essay about participles and prepositions there was something that bothered me about both of those things in language I was always drawn to Linguistics and I was a Greek major as an undergraduate so I was just trying to think about how language relates to thought and some people sent me to some books and I read them and I wasn't so sure and I stumbled across this book by the Anthropologist CL Libby stros called The Savage mind okay and it it just completely opened doors for me and and made me think about cultures as as being very tightly organized bodies of knowledge that make sense on their own basis and may not translate into other cultures now later on I thought that was a very incomplete way of thinking about it but you know it's as if I just discovered a whole range of other planets to explore you've written a book called um comparative literature in an era of globalization um what um was the Catalyst to writing the book and tell us a little bit about it sure the Catalyst was was very empirical the American comparative literature Association has uh a mandate in their bylaws that every 10 years somebody has to write a report on the state of comparative literature wow and they asked me to do it I I hesitated because I didn't want to write the report because I didn't I didn't think I was the only person who had something to say so I I divvied up the responsibility and had other people make contributions from their very different points of view and then we had yet other people reflect on the contributions of those first contributors but since I got to be the editor I hogged some space and I wrote the first and longest piece where where I just talked about how I thought the the field had been developing in the last really in the last half century but particularly in the last 10 years and one move that I noticed was from an idea of comparative literature as multiculturalism where you know each culture as I was saying just a moment ago right this model of each culture being uh sort of like a planet that spins on its own axis to attention to things that cover a lot of different cultures that you might call globalization right so multiculturalism would tend to make us isolate cultures and think of cultures as having their own constituencies and their own uh ways of being and a force like globalization think of it as economic globalization or the the mobility of labor for example today that we see you in the economic World these are these are like tsunamis they're like big waves that cover everything in their path and there are such such things if you're only interested in the Multicultural angle of difference you might be oblivious to these big Dynamics and yet how does the big Universal Dynamic intersect with the way that we comparative literature people focus on difference and specificity that was what was interesting to me and how does it well um we we exhibit this relation I think in some of the things that we pay attention to uh 15 years ago people were not paying attention to things like world literature which has since grown to be a a big Obsession of many people in the field and what what is world literature it's the the traffic among nations that causes some authors to become prominent on a global scale and of course this has been going on for a long time you almost 200 years ago Gerta named world literature he said the the age of world literature is coming and he could be a good example of it because by the time he died everybody on the planet who read works of literature knew about G right other writers might not have had such a promising beginning but they grow to have worldwide significance you know people like bodair let's say who was censored in his home country but maybe because of that became uh the the dominant poet of the modern world or people like Fernando pesoa uh a Portuguese poet who just to make things more complicated wrote on under several pseudonyms he too enters circulation people trans him he's published in different countries and people respond to him so the people who who work on world literature are interested in these mechanisms of circulation right how does how does a book get an audience Beyond its immediate language or its immediate nation and culture and so they they chart this kind of dynamic you work in the field of comparative literature and um you specialize in Chinese literature how do the two intersect for you uh well with difficulty but as you know I love difficulty the hard part is getting these two things to translate into each other um in when I think about the way literary cultures develop I think China would maybe be the type case of what you could call a normal development that is literature is from very early on sponsored by a strong State apparatus that uses literature and literary culture as a means of recruiting people you everybody knows about the famous Mandarin exams where people thousands of people all over the country would take these standardized exams every three years to compete for a place in the bureaucracy and the way that you showed that you had Talent was by literary writing there were poetry entries for example along with the essay entries on the exams so the ability to wield literary language and to do really intelligent things with with the whole past of Chinese literature became a major qualifier for being an important person in that culture I would not say that that's the way literature works in the United States of America in the year 2010 uh many of the most brilliant rhetoricians I know are unemployed the people who write the best novels often have a very hard time going from month to month so we we're in what from the point of view of traditional China might be an abnormal State the other thing uh that strikes me in Chinese literature is the continuity of it all you know you can if you're literate in Chinese you can pick up a document from the age of Homer and more or less understand what it's about you might need some some help with some of the hard words but there's a lot of continuity you know continuity of language continuity of culture and of meanings uh well try reading a sample of English from just 500 years ago and you know how difficult it can be Europe and European Traditions generally are all about turnover it seems every few hundred years the dominant language in in Europe will switch institutions change you have church and University and state and civil society and the market and all these things each pushing their own modes of communication their own languages their own cannons as we say in the literary field and in China things are much more neatly harmonized around a central core of things that everybody expects to know so if China's normal and Europe's abnormal uh and abnormal doesn't mean bad in my vocabulary okay abnormal abnormal correlates with interesting okay my vocabulary but if if they have such such deeply different ways of organizing the cultural world then the comparison becomes interesting because it can't just be point for point you can't just be comparing the poet Lee shangan with the poet Rambo but it involves the whole structure of culture that they're each part of and how do you do that uh well one trick is to pay a lot of attention to context and then to have to compensate for the fact that since the context is so different you're you're going to be dealing with a lot of similarity so you tend to have to say things like the way that this poet reacts to that tradition is similar to the way the other poet reacts to the different tradition over on this side so it becomes a a little bit more um rer to use good English it becomes a little bit more twisty and devious but but I think the the comparisons that result are not just ingenious you know a lot of us are good at being ingenious but often they're very meaningful because because I think you can extract from these situations some basic categories like uh resistance uh rethinking rewriting uh the the job of digging up lost ancestors you know people who thought like you from maybe 600 years ago and were ignored at the time and suddenly become vital for your culture at another moment you know these kinds of dynamic I think are are pretty widespread if we know how to look for them and do you think language plays a a large role in comparative literature I mean do you need to be a linguist for instance you you need to be uh unafraid of languages I think uh you have you have to you have to have a realistic standard for your ability to deal with languages because if you're dealing with say six or seven languages which is not an abnormal number for comparative literature you're not going to speak all of them like a native right maybe you can get up to Native level with one language other than your own there are going to be a lot of languages where you're using plenty of duct tape and bailing wire to to get your ideas across nonetheless if you're if you're willing to engage with languages and not be afraid of your tendency to fall over your feet you can you can deal with with them and I think uh here's one region one area where comparative literature I think differs a little bit from the world literature framework because world literature is interested in translation but translation is always the vehicle to get the content moved over to a new place where it can have new readers comparative literature throughout its whole history has been attentive to specific languages in in my advanced classes I want people to read texts in the original and to be able to pay attention to that level of detail where it's word choice it's semantics it's even things like alliteration and rhyme that have a powerful influence on how you're going to receive a text so I think language is are one thing that we absolutely can't throw out the window and still be doing comparative literature seems like it would make it very difficult though um if you have to know several different languages to be to be good at it yeah yeah when when I sent my first book to the press it was just packed with all these quotations in foreign languages because you I was I was a young pipsqueak I was coming up in the world and I thought I have to show these people that I know my stuff and my editor sent back a note and said with every foreign language quotation you lose half of the readership you had up until then so so I did the math and by page eight I was down to a readership of about4 so so with with less than one reader I thought okay got to change this so I made the book more user friendly I translated all the quotations and and went the step that you have to go to to have the reader but nonetheless I think the reason for doing that is to tell people is to show people this is worth doing it is so much more fun if you can read this stuff on your own so accept my offer of Temptation and come into the Palace of comparative literature what do you think the future holds for comparative literature where do you think it's going well uh one thing that happens is that languages that were less studied become more studied right look at the number of people who are studying Chinese and Arabic for example in this country uh I worry that people are studying those languages only up to communicative ability I I hope that people go on in Stu study the classical version of the languages read widely become culturally literate so that it's not just a matter of communicating or you know understanding or sort of the worst case scenario is that people learn just enough language in order to uh read a document for a very defined purpose my mental picture is of people sitting with earphones on their heads in a basement in Langley Virginia Having learned Arabic just in order to do intelligence intercepts I think that would be a waste of of human Talent so if people go on and and study the literature and the culture and become very deeply fluent they can make real contributions to comparative literature and I also think there's an element of that elusive thing that we call International understanding that would be achieved in that way right I admire people who can walk into different cultures and make themselves at home and get across whatever message they have without seeming to do it from a from an alien standpoint where they're imposing their ideas but they're sort of eliciting the latent ideas in that culture that happen to harmonize with the ideas that they had on their own I do admire that as well yes well thank you so much for being here with us today and sharing some of your work thank you Marilyn it's been been a pleasure for more information about Professor Saucy and his work please visit our website at yale.edu McMillan report be sure to join us again for another episode of the McMillan report made possible through funding from the Whitney and Betty McMillan Center for intern National and area studies at [Music] Yale

Channel: Yale University

Views: 33,411

Keywords: Yale, Yale University, The MacMillan Report, The MacMillan Center, Marilyn Wilkes, Haun Saussy, comparative literature, theoretical perplexities

Id: 6Bt51MK3_2g

Length: 18min 17sec (1097 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 23 2011