Christian Moraru
Promising Theory:
Pedagogical Challenges and Crosscultural Resources
For more than a decade now, comparatists throughout the country have deplored the accelerated shrinking of their field. This trend is certainly real, as the phasing out and downsizing of numerous comparative literature programs prove. Yet there is another way of looking at what’s happening in–or to–the discipline, which may indicate, I think, that the glass is rather half full than half empty. Granted, it’s no longer completely full–not according to how disciplinary plenitude, so to speak, was understood in the golden days of our teachers. Yet there is hope. Further, I would argue that the potentially significant consequences of this realization tie in tightly with issues of pedagogy, indeed, hinge on what I would call professional awareness and activism in the age of multiculturalism and globalization.
Let me try to clarify these buzzwords. I strongly believe that the fate of comparative studies is currently being decided both within the traditional boundaries of the discipline and in English and those areas of the humanities–modern languages, but not only–where students in general and undergraduates in particular are required to take “theory” courses. For some time now, theory, primarily theory as part of the English curriculum, has been seized, by some of us at least, as comparative literature’s mortal foe. Of course, I am not the first one to contend that, given the changing academy and the world at large, this enemy should be perceived rather as an ally. The famous “Bernheimer Report” and the whole debate around it have done that successfully. What I want to further stress, though, is that a quick look at the actual content of theory, multicultural, postmodern, and postcolonial courses taught nationwide and, increasingly, overseas, would indicate that those are comparative literature courses for the most part in that they pursue objectives, employ terminologies, and apply methods comparatists have pursued, employed, and applied all along. Naturally, the identity of scope, vocabulary, and methodology may not be always evident. Nor do, needless to say, the Weltanschauung, the cultural politics, or, tout court, the politics of the newest generation of postcolonialists, pop culture, and queer studies scholars overlap with René Wellek’s. My very basic point is that, within theory and cultural analysis as a subfield of various fields that officially are not identified or recognized as comparative literature, comparatists can achieve their goals if they shape the courses accordingly and make, so to speak, the implicit explicit.
Along these lines, I side with those who believe that, as a subfield and under various labels, the field of comparative literature is currently expanding rather than shrinking–and this is why I said that the glass might be half full than half empty. Beside graduate programs, where theory has been taught systematically and aggressively for two decades now, more and more four-year institutions are requiring English majors to take at least one, theory-based, “Approaches to the Study of Literature” class. This notable trend presents comparatists with a remarkable opportunity since, let me point out the obvious again, any “Literary and Cultural Theory” survey or “Introduction to Literary Interpretation” course not only recalls but actually calls, by definition if not openly, for a comparative and interdisciplinary approach. “Theory” is de facto a comparative topic; as such, it entails a comparative take defined both in terms of material selection and pedagogical methodology.
Since this is more apparent in the graduate seminar than in the undergraduate survey, here I would like to deal with the latter. Specifically, I want to dwell on a particular example, the English 303, “Approaches to the Study of Literature” class I regularly teach at University of North Carolina, Greensboro. What also interests me as a panel co-organizer is to foster, following the presentations, a conversation around the teaching methods comparatists have found successful in the literary and cultural theory class; the strategies they have adopted to turn the emerging multicultural classroom into a theory-friendly environment where students learn how to read and judge literature and culture; the best ways of helping students problematize their own backgrounds and identities to better understand, for instance, the difference between formalist and identity studies-informed paradigms or reading; the decision of using primary sources from different cultures and time periods to illustrate, say, models of reading worked out, for instance, by postcolonial critics; the pedagogically successful methodologies employed to provide students with the background information they need to grasp the role of certain disciplines in the development of modern literary and cultural theory: linguistics, semiotics, anthropology, philosophy, psychology and psychoanalysis, sociology, and the like; the ideological and political problems of theory teaching after the New Historicism and cultural studies; the new, turn-of-the-millennium classroom, the rise of the “critical pedagogy” model and the challenges it mounts to the tradition of comparative literature discourse, and so forth. I also want at least to touch on the available resources, textbooks, handbooks, introductions, electronic tools, and other instruments that further the comparative teaching and learning of theory at all levels–but, again, primarily undergraduate.
I teach, to come back to the example I want to work from, theory as a comparative-literature-for-the-global-age class, and I am more and more convinced that this is the right approach. As is well known, theory has never been an “English” subject proper (or only). In fact, traditional philology and historicism have resisted it fiercely until recently, even though this is truer of the British and American than, say, the German and Italian academy. In any event, the fact is that English departments have lately proved its most hospitable homes. Now, as an English faculty, I am responsible primarily for a) theory and b) modern/postmodern American literature courses at all levels, from the freshman survey to the Ph. D. seminar, and the 300-level course mentioned above is the most relevant to the point I wish to make here. Unlike Carnegie Mellon, for instance, we do not have–and I am not convinced that we should have–a theory-centered undergraduate curriculum. But the English 303 course I am talking about is the template of professional literary studies for our majors. And since I teach it within a comparative framework, our English majors receive a modicum of training in a discipline that technically is not on the books except for certain World Literature or European Classics surveys fulfilling University Division general education requirements.
In our time more than ever, comparative literature is to disciplinary classification what genre is to postmodern discourse. Traditional generic constraints and boundaries have crumbled. But have genres disappeared? Of course, not, as Ralph Cohen, among others, have argued. Genre is all over the place, indeed, in places where avant-garde and post-avant-garde generic crisscrossings would make it unlikely to operate, furthermore, control literary and cultural reception. The same holds true, I believe, in the case of comparative literature, as my example indicates. More remarkably still, most, if not all, of the textbooks, anthologies, and critical introductions to the field of criticism and theory, from Donald Keesey’s widely used Contexts for Criticism to Wilfred Guerin’s Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature to Peter Barry’s excellent Beginning Theory, do not mention comparative literature, not even when they inform students of the “traditional,” “humanistic” models of interpretation. On the other hand, their survey of the field is, overall, comparative, and, I for one, draw from this when I shape my theory courses, English 303 included.
Let me try, in the remaining time, to tell you what we actually do and why I believe a comparative approach is best suited to what I want my students to get out of this class. We usually start out with a fairly informal conversation, based on an accessible example, around the distinction between “precritical” and “critical” reading. Now, this discussion can be carried in terms that may not necessarily engage literary and cultural comparison. But I make a point to engage it. Specifically, we place, say, a poem by Eliot or a tale by Hawthorne in the tradition of a genre, of a culture, of history and the history of ideas. Sooner or later, we address issues of literary and cultural intertextuality, which impels us to cross national and temporal boundaries, back and forth. Ultimately, students realize that this move is unavoidable if they are to become able to re-enact on their own the intellectual scenario of “critical reading.” Further, we spend some time organizing the course around the various elements that this type of “deep” and “informed” reading has privileged historically. To do this, we use Roman Jakobson’s well-known article “Linguistics and Poetics” because it offers a comprehensive description of discourse as an act of communication activating certain functions and impinging upon factors such as the “sender” (author), the receiver, the message (or “text”) and so on.
In the past, I have used this moment of our class not only to convince students that the course has a structure, but also to foreground the transhistorical and crosscultural circulation of ideas in the field of literary and cultural analysis. Jakobson is an ideal case, much like other “formalists” (by the way, I always place the term within quotation marks). What we are here dealing with is one of the most influential scholars in our field, profoundly interdisciplinary and whose biography and bibliography tell students that “theory” is a comparative topic that requires a comparable approach. The same holds true with Bakhtin and Wellek, Propp and Lotman. Their contribution to the way we read, write on, and teach literature has been fundamental, and without contextualizing their work, without placing it in a certain intellectual history–literary, artistic, political–it simply cannot be correctly understood.
I cannot get into all the details of the course here, but I want to stress that, by and large, this is the comparative strategy informing our class. Personally, I decline to use the “formalist” moment as a sort of whipping boy to better explain, say, the New Historicist revolution of “thick description.” My work, our work, does not operate by emphasizing ruptures or violent paradigm “shifts.” We do note and discuss these, too, of course. But I also encourage students to pursue filiations, legacies, echoes, continuities and reformulations of critical models across countries, cultures, languages, and ages. Let’s go back to Jakobson for a second: we start with the OPOIAZ group, we follow Jakobson to Prague and just touch on the Prague circle, move on to France to note Jakobson’s impact on Todorov, Genette, Barthes, structuralism, anthropology, and the Poétique circle, and then we cross the Atlantic to discuss the distinctions between Russian “formalism” and the New Criticism. Alternatively, what we could do–and we will do it in the future–would be to tarry with the Prague moment a bit more, present Jan Mukarzhovsky’s work as a means to introduce the marxian-sociological avatar of “formalism” and speed up the transition from text-oriented to reader-response criticism–through a Czech scholar like Mukarzhovsky or a Pole like Ingarden–or to context-oriented approaches to literature. Or, to go back in time and space, we could use the same “formalists” to take other two possible routes, again, essentially comparative. One could entail a more extensive discussion of V. I. Propp’s “morphology of the folk tale” and, based on this, the fate of narrative theory from Propp’s Parisian heirs–again, Todorov, Barthes, Genette, but also Greimas and Claude Bremond–to the “nation and narration” model of Homi Bhabha to Mieke Bal’s “neo-narratological” paradigm where genre and gender are closely linked up. Another could zero in on Bakhtin, the most influential figure in 20th-century critical theory, according to Todorov. Bakhtin’s–as well as formalism’s or post-formalism’s, if you want–posterity may be followed across continents and critical moments from the poetics of the 70’s to the dialogism at play in feminism and postcolonialism to the neo-marxism of cultural studies that claims to carry on Bakhtin’s critique of formalism. To conclude, we take the same comparative approach to trace gender studies, postcolonialism and the more recent paradigm of global studies back to their structuralist and poststructuralist sources. We emphasize such complex figures as Foucault, Kristeva, Spivak, Bhabha, Said, displaced and relocated scholars themselves whose biographies, again, reflect what their bibliographies tell us. Instead of moving from one ingredient to another of the contemporary smorgasbord of theory and criticism, we throw bridges carefully and take those roads where key figures from Ihab Hassan to Slavoj Zizek show the way. The primary or target texts that we use to illustrate various modalities of critical reading are both American (or British and American) and foreign (in translation). But they all indicate, as we read and reread them, that interpretation is a reconstruction of meaning whose end result is bound to overflow the boundaries of one single time, place, and language. I believe this is the right thing to do in an age that calls itself multicultural and prides itself of ushering its diverse body of students and teachers into a globalism that declines, at least in principle, to further former ethnocentric and exclusionary agendas.
(Paper delivered at the 1999 Southern Comparative Literature Association Conference, Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville, Oct. 1999)