Comparative Literature in the Twenty-First Century: A View from Europe and the UK

13 This issue of Comparative Critical Studies will appear shortly before the publication of the ACLA’s decennial report on the state of the discipline in the United States.1 Haun Saussy’s 2003 draft report opened with the claim that ‘Comparative Literature has, in a sense, won its battles’,2 words that immediately recall, by contrast, Susan Bassnett’s assertion, ten years earlier, that ‘Today, comparative literature in one sense is dead’.3 Although apparently claiming opposite fates for comparative literature, these assertions in fact converge in that ‘one sense’ that qualifies them, and both turn out to suggest something quite different from what they appear to say. Bassnett’s death notice was for a discipline born out of the European nineteenth-century, with its emphasis on national literatures, its redefinition of the notion of literature itself, its focus on a direct relationship between literature and (national) identity, and which now would give way to a new, more open, lively, politically aware understanding of the discipline beyond its Eurocentric historical definition, and its relocation in the wider field of the study of intercultural processes, of which translation studies would furnish the principal model (to the point that comparative literature becomes for Bassnett a sub-section of translation studies).4 Similarly, Saussy’s declaration of victory is followed by considerations on the institutional low status, even anonymity, of comparative literature, whose successes (the development of literary theory, the opening up of the syllabus to books and authors from outside the national canon) have been assimilated by other disciplines and departments; this victory turns out to be, in effect, a kind of death by dispersion, and requires comparative literature to continue to fight for institutional recognition and survival: what risks extinction here is an academic discipline safe