From Here to There: Diversity and Interdisciplinary in the Practice of Comparative Literature

Abstract

"In the following, I would like to offer a series of preliminary thoughts on the phenomenon of diversity and its possible relations with the discipline of Comparative Literature. To do this, I will proceed via a brief account of the origins and contours of diversity in its modern form before advancing to some thoughts on selected linkages between diversity and Comparative Literature. I propose that literature and comparative literary study share with diversity a defining concern for difference, and tha literature and its study may indeed serve the institutional goals of diversity, broadly conceived. More specifically, I will suggest that Comparative Literature intersects with diversity at the institutional level, in terms of the discipline’s positioning as an institution capable of influencing the creation of values and meanings amenable to the aspirations of diversity, and as an approach to the critical understanding of texts, with regard to an interrogation of the ideology of diversity as it finds aesthetic representation in text and image. Despite an apparent facility of alliance between the concept and the discipline, however, and although literature may give fictional form to the ideals of diversity, Comparative Literature will-and must-always remain independent of complete identification with the ideology of diversity as a “normative meta-narrative,” and indeed will necessarily test the aspirations and limitations of diversity as they are depicted in literature and art."