Decolonizing the Discipline

Our class will explore the local and global disciplinary formation of Comparative Literature. Beginning with Foucault’s The Order of Things as our methodological backdrop, we will examine the place of literature alongside developments in the comparative sciences of the nineteenth century (from anthropology to political economy to philology). Over the course of our ten weeks, we will weave together discussions of literature, comparison, and worlds (from figures such as Goethe, Herder, and Marx, to Erich Auerbach, Harry Levin, and René Wellek) and contemporary reflections on the discipline (by scholars such as Rey Chow, Anjali Arondekar, Mary Louise Pratt, Siraj Ahmed, Rebecca Walkowitz, and Joseph Slaughter). Our seminar will be conducted as a workshop with each participant tracking a set of disciplinary conversations from a specific historical and regional site. The final project will culminate in an anthology of source texts for the history of the discipline, inspired by and yet different from The Princeton Sourcebook of Comparative Literature. Our goal will be both to cultivate a reflexive historical method for the study of texts and to enrich our understanding of the formation of literary disciplines across regions and languages.