The Foci of Comparative Literature

From the standpoint of traditional academic (read: national) disciplines, the essay I have contributed to this issue of AmeriQuests would perhaps make little sense.As a latter-day Gregory the Great might put it, complete with Latin neologisms, Quid America prae-columbina cum littera europaea?However, from the standpoint of Comparative Literature as it is presently evolving or from that of "Transatlantic Studies" as it is currently constructed, the aims of my article seem quite reasonable and perhaps even a bit conservative -or at least this is what I wish to argue in the paragraphs that follow.A colleague of mine recently suggested to a group of graduate students in Comparative Literature that "The Brown Stocking" in Erich Auerbach's Mimesis (Auerbach 1953) was as much a manifesto for Comparative Literature as a model for it -or at least for a certain, perhaps slightly antiquated, form of Comparative Literature.I countered that if we were going to limit ourselves to Mimesis, "A Knight Sets Forth" and "The World in Pantagruel's Mouth" spoke, in my opinion, the interests of Comparative Literature best in that volume, now as well as in the late 1940s.It may not come as a surprise that my colleague is a modernist, whereas I was trained as a medievalist.Indeed, I could not help but think that each specialist might find in Auerbach's great book a door or passage that would provide him or her with a segue into both the enduring and the evolving interests of Comparative Literature.But if we are to believe the voices that have filled the volumes that the last two reports of the ACLA have produced, Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism (1995) and Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization (Saussy 2006a), then, I wish to suggest, the two chapters from Auerbach that have most marked my thinking are definitely very à propos.We are familiar with the repeated statements that Comparative Literature is "the one area in literary studies that has no object in the sense of a corpus, a set of languages, or a normative method" (Roland Greene 2006a, 214) and that it is "a discipline defined by the search for its proper objects" (Haun Saussy 2006b, 12) or even, as Roland Greene states more generally in his review of Gayatri Spivak's Death of a Discipline, that it is "a discipline always in search of itself " (2006b, 154); to my mind, these comments suggest that as a mode of inquiry Comparative Literature is caught up in a perpetual search, like the quests of Chrétien de Troyes' romances whose knights were gradually led to hunting for, but never quite possessing, the Holy Grail.1Moreover, in its move from the multicultural to the global (or, as Spivak would have it, the "planetary"), Comparative Literature is now looking to stuff the whole world into its mouth à la Rabelais.Indeed, many of the "comparatists" who argue against the Eurocentric stances of comparative literature are, in my experience, often scholars whose linguistic range is limited to the Western languages (I include myself in this group).Only when the major voices of our generation have handed the baton to a new generation of scholars coming out of Africa and Asia will we have researchers who can truly do original-language work on the texts and "networks" (Greene, 2006 [again]) in non-Western languages;2 and likewise only when the indigenous peoples of the Americas, Australia and elsewhere are brought into the academic academy at the highest levels will comparative literature begin to address what Spivak calls the discipline's greatest "scandal" (Spivak 2003, 72).Comparatists, then, need to have the audacity of Rabelais'

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