University of Oklahoma

Comparative Literature and the Genres of Interdisciplinarity

Author(s): Francesco Loriggio
Source: World Literature Today, Vol. 69, No. 2, Comparative Literature: States of the Art
(Spring, 1995), pp. 256-262
Published by: University of Oklahoma
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40151132
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ComparativeLiteratureand the Genresof Interdisciplinarity
By FRANCESCOLORIGGIO During the last
few decadescom-
parative litera-
ture s most pressing impulse seems to have been
territorial or cumulative: annexing material first
overlookedor unexplored,enlargingthe scope, ex-
panding the limits of comparison geographically,
disciplinarily,intellectually.You see this in those
definitionsof the disciplinewhich, on variousocca-
sions, have urged comparatiststo put more trulyin-
terculturaldistancebetweenthe texts they choose to
compare, to transcend Eurocentrismand address
the insights- critical and theoretical- that works
from Asia or Africa or elsewhere outside Europe
might provide.1You see it in the resolutionadopted
by the InternationalComparativeLiteratureAssoci-
ation in the seventieswhich adds theoriesto the ros-
ter of items amenableto comparison (Scholz). Or
you see it in in those definitionswhich, in the early
sixties,broughtwithin the compassof the discipline
"the study of the relationshipbetween literature. . .
and other areasof knowledgeand belief, such as the
arts (e.g., painting, sculpture,architecture,music),
philosophy, history, the social sciences (e.g., poli-
tics, economics, sociology), the sciences, religion,"
or, in brief, "the other spheres of human expres-
sion," to round out and complementthe more tra-
ditional "studyof literaturebeyond the confines of
one country"(Remak,1). And, of course, it is there
in more recent versions, which raise the ante still
further and inscribe the very process of readjust-
ment and accumulationinto their surveyof the dis-
cipline. For the 1993 BernheimerReport to the
American ComparativeLiteratureAssociation, the
"space of comparison"involves not only compar-
isons between "artisticproductionsusually studied
by differentdisciplines"or "Westernculturaltradi-
tions, both high and popular, and those of non-
Westerncultures"or "pre-and postcontactcultural
productionsof colonized peoples" or "gendercon-
structionsdefined as feminine and those defined as
masculine" or "sexual orientations defined as
straight and those defined as gay" or "racialand
Francesco Loriggio teaches Italian and ComparativeLitera-
ture at CarletonUniversityin Ottawa,Ontario.He has published
numerousarticleson literarytheory,the relationsbetweenlitera-
ture and other disciplines,the novel, and varioustwentieth-cen-
tury authors.His translationsfrom the works of Achille Cam-
panile, The Inventor of the Horse and Two Other Short Plays,
appearedin 1995. He is the editor of the essay collectionSocial
Pluralismand LiteraryHistory: The Literatureof the Italian Emigra-
tion(forthcoming).
ethnic modes of signifying"or "hermeneuticarticu-
lations of meaning and materialistanalyses of its
modes of production and circulation" - not only
this, but "much more" (Bernheimer,41-42). You
surmise that tomorrow is another day, with more
new materialto canvassand to agglomerate.
It is difficult to say with how strong a sense of
caution- or of suspicion- such a compulsion
should be faced. The continualupdating,the many
revisionsmay springfrom some anxietyof omission,
some unavowedintellectualhubris,but they are also
a sign that the disciplineparticipatesfully in the dy-
namics of cultural conversation,that it listens to
outside proddingsand keeps in touch with events.
Comparativeliteraturecomparesanythingthe times
confront it with. Certainly,in spite of their elitism
and Eurocentrism,comparativeliteratureprograms
have notbeen the placeswhereinstitutionalpoweris
concentrated,or, for that matter,wherepower-mak-
ing and power-breakingintellectualtrends are initi-
ated or consolidated. As the history of poststruc-
turalism, postcolonialism, and cultural studies
suggests, ideas in North American faculties of art
have to be properlydomesticated,to go throughthe
filter of English departmentsbefore they can aspire
to any measureof academicsuccess.
What is striking,in the nineties, is the degree to
which, in the variousdefinitionsof comparativelit-
erature,both the principleof coverageand the com-
patibilityof the elementsthe coverageentails,of the
ingredientsthe many correctionssediment on the
rest, are taken for granted. Each of the new items
comes attachedwith a theoreticalor criticalagenda
which has externalrepercussionsas well as its own
internaltensions. Today, the misgivingsabout the
focus of traditionalliterarystudies voiced by the in-
terculturalcomparatistsof one or two decades ago
are similarbut not quite the same as those of post-
colonialist critics. Relocating theories into the
province of comparison aligns comparatistswith
antifoundationalistsfrom a variety of institutional
venues- not an uncontroversialposition. For its
own part- to pass over gender studies, whose actu-
ality and explosiveness,as topics, need not be dwelt
upon- the opening to "the other arts," visual and
plastic, leaves comparativeliteratureat the doorstep
of media and cultural studies, two of its strongest
institutionaland intellectualcompetitors.
Schematized,the strains which the widening of
the perimeters of comparativeliteraturehas been
causing among comparatistsstem, I would submit,
from the centrifugalpull of two basic orientations.

On the one hand, comparatistsmaintain a funda-
mental interest in literarytexts that are markedly
"different."The premium that comparativismhas
put on readinga text in the original,on the knowl-
edge of languages other than the mother tongue,
speaks to this concern. The embarrassmentthat
postcolonialismposes for Westerncomparatistshas
to do, by and large,with the fact that the texts more
readilycirculatingin the West are those written in
English or French or in Spanish, or that when the
texts appearfirst in anotherlanguage,the language
will be accessibleto so small a public as to makethe
reading in translationinevitable.The globalization
the late twentiethcenturyhas witnessed simultane-
ously supersedes colonization and reaffirmsits ef-
fects. On the other hand, comparatistshave been
lookingmore and more to disciplinesand fields be-
yond literature.This too has elicited a number of
worst-casescenarios.The sheerquantityof informa-
tion requiredto concoct a barely adequatepicture
of the goings-on of a disciplineis a sufficientlydis-
couragingobstacle.Able and willing as you may be
about talking the talk, you still worry about your
abilityto walk the walk. Do you reallyknow about
anthropologyif you have no experiencewith what
the people trainedin the disciplinedo, if you have
never done any ethnography?As significantly,the
two orientationscrisscross, commingle. In distin-
guishingbetween two postcolonialliteraturesin En-
glish, you may need to rely on disciplinessuch as
history,sociology,and anthropology.Conversely,in
accostingany of the social sciences, and perhapsthe
sciencesthemselves,you must thinkabout the tradi-
tion you are enlistingin your comparisonor oppos-
ing to literature,whetherit is Germansociology or
Africanphilosophyor British anthropologyyou are
dealingwith. Howeverfrequentlytheoriesmay trav-
el in modernity,languageand intellectualgenealogy
continueto be essentialbaggage.
Inevitably,each of these two penchants of the
disciplineleads back to a reconsiderationof the ad-
jectivecomparative and its statusin present-dayliter-
ary theory. As for myself, in picking up on this,
which is the uninflectedstrandof the debate about
comparativeliterature,I find the discussion about
interdisciplinarycomparisonto be the more conve-
nient point of departure;and it is the solicitationsto
whichit gives rise that I will be probinghere, in par-
ticular the issues emanating from the comparison
with philosophy,the sciences, religion- the "other
spheres of human expression"mentioned so often
in the definitionsof greatestspan.
To arguefor this sort expansionof the disciplineis
now, in the nineties,to confirm,wittinglyor unwit-
tingly, the demise of those attitudes accordingto
which literaturecan be only the object of study of
other disciplines,or of analytictools legitimatedby
other disciplines.Declare the intellectualhorizonto
LORIGGIO 257
be entirelyecumenical,and you automaticallyenvis-
age the possibilitythatliteraturemayreciprocate,may
impingeupon otherdisciplinesno less than otherdis-
ciplineshaveimpingedor impingeupon literature.In-
deed, you providethe premisesfor one of the crucial
developmentsof the latetwentiethcentury.
Whateverthe eighties and the nineties have been
or are, they are that portion of the centuryin which
notions hitherto identified with literaturehave be-
come suddenly portable, in which sociologists and
anthropologistshave been able to liken society or a
particularstrip of the life they have observedto a
text and cognitivescientistshave been able to spec-
ulate more seriouslythan ever before about the role
of the imaginationin their debateson how the mind
operates. The eighties and the nineties have also
been the period which has seen an impressivenon-
literaryunfurlingof categoriesof literarycriticism,
and the willingnesson the part of membersof other
disciplinesto engage novels and poetry and theater
or the opinions of writersin mulling over a particu-
lar topic. Hayden White describingnineteenth-cen-
tury historiographyin terms of Frye'snotions of ro-
mance, tragedy,comedy, and satire(1973); Richard
Rorty bringing together Heidegger, Kundera, and
Dickens in the same article (1991); Paul Feyer-
abend continuallyexplainingthe progressof science
through long, sustained glosses on Renaissanceart
or Homer or Greek tragedy (1984, 1987); Mark
Turner findingmetaphorsof kinshipat the heart of
logical discourse (1987, 15 ff.)- these have been
among the now typical gesturesof the times. What
is just as important,philosophers,scientists,and so-
ciologists have become more self-conscious about
their writing, at times attemptingcomplicatedex-
periments.The anthropologistCliffordGeertz, the
biologistLewis Thomas, the paleontologistStephen
Jay Gould, the sociobiologistE. O. Wilson are often
cited for their style and could very well figure in
readinglists of classesin Englishcomposition.They
stand to the generalethos of these last few decades
as the transgressivelywriterlyDerrida and Heideg-
ger, whose work is literaryin a still more deliberate
and compulsivefashion,do to the avant-garde.
The result is a kind of supplementarybelletrism,
a yet-to-be-chartedliterarydimensionthat exists in
tandem with and in extension to literatureas it is
commonly known. Rephrasingit differently,in one
of their more specific aspects, the circumstancesof
the late twentieth centuryecho those obtainingbe-
fore disciplines were established and disciplinary
linkagesinstitutionalizedin the patternthey exhibit
today. After all, up until the seventeenth century,
before the humanities and the sciences went their
separate ways, a Machiavelli could write both //
Principeand La Mandragola,both political treatises
and comedies, and a Francis Bacon could write
both Novus Organonand The New Atlantis, both
258 TODAY
WORLDLITERATURE
philosophy of science and novels or novel-like
works,withoutcausingscandal.
It is in this respectthat the abilityto talk the talk,
while not a sufficientbasis on which to pursuecom-
parisonbetween literatureand the "otherforms of
expression,"is nonethelessa necessaryone. In some
of the nonliterarydomains,the fracturebetween the
field- the body of workson which researchers,crit-
ics, and professorsconduct their inquiries- and the
discipline- the worksthat recordthe experiencesof
the individualswho identifywith the domainor with
the rules and regulationsthey have acted upon- is a
ratherdeep one. You are not requiredto have di-
rected full-lengthfilms or to play in a rock band in
order to speak about cinema or about rock music.
You are not obligedto participatein that which you
are writing about if you are an anthropologistor a
sociologist:Sir JamesFrazermade a careerof arm-
chairanthropology.With literarystudiesthe gap is a
much more tenuous one. The essay is a literary
genre (which is why it is easy to confuse "literary
studies"and "literature,"to say one when you actu-
ally mean the other). And the argument,more or
less, holds for the other mainstaysof the humanistic
curriculum,for such disciplines as philosophy and
history, also highly and blatantly verbal. Not by
chance, the inclusion of interdisciplinarycompari-
son within comparative literature's purview oc-
curredonly when it became acceptableto reempha-
size the role of the written,discursivecomponentof
nonliterarydisciplines. Paradoxically,at the same
time that the presence of literature in society is
being eroded by cinema, television, and video
games, literarystudies have never enjoyed greater
interdisciplinary prestige.
For all this, the literaryturn in interdisciplinary
commerce is, as I have indicated, a problem for
comparativeliterature.Why?First and foremostbe-
cause it foists on comparativeliteraturevariousam-
bivalences.Any pleadingfor the blurringof borders
runs into the caveatmost succinctlycountenanced,
in recent years, by Stanley Fish: "The announce-
ment of an interdisciplinaryprogram [either]inau-
gurates the effort of some discipline to annex the
territoryof another,or 'interdisciplinary thought' is
the name ... of a new discipline"(19). Intentions
notwithstanding,the dismantlingof a particularver-
sion of interdisciplinaryflow (accordingto which a
discipline would provide the conceptual and
methodologicalwherewithalto other disciplines)al-
waysreproducesthe same conditionsunder a differ-
ent guise. Thus, the newly-regainedprestigeof liter-
ariness is two-edged: from a certain angle, it also
undermines the idea of literature and of literary
studies,withoutwhich comparativeliteraturehas no
raisond'etre.Yes, the last few decadeshave revoked
the once indispensableantinomybetween language
and metalanguage,and yes, in so doing they have
altered the relation between criticism and creative
work, and loosened the grip of other discourses,the
authorityby which philosophy,linguistics,and the
sciences- natural and social- legitimized literary
critics.The troubleis that the abrogationhinges on
notions- ecriture, textuality, figuration - which,
though more appealing to individuals connected to
literary studies, themselves posit one overriding con-
tinuum. And wherethere are not sufficientdisconti-
nuities between the various fields, where works by
novelistsor by philosophersor by anthropologistsor
by sociologistsare availableto scrutinyinasmuchas
they exhibit figuralor rhetoricaltraits,there is only
tropology or discourse analysis; there can be no
room for comparison.
Hence in the nineties the very success of literary
studies forces comparativeliteratureto insist on the
residualasymmetryof literaturevis-a-visotherfields
of inquiryor (disciplinary)discourses.And this not
for any theoreticalconservatism,for any desire to
preservesome long-lostand elusiveintegrityof liter-
ature and/or literarystudies. Simply, literaturecan-
not shed its recent eighteenth-or nineteenth-centu-
ry legacy, which bequeatheddisciplinarityto it, any
more than it can or should forget its Renaissance
past. Either alternative- conceivingitself as the ex-
ercise literacy, writingtoutcourt,or conceiving
of of
itself as the exerciseof one specific and unalterable
mode of literacy- would be an ahistoricalchoice, a
choice that would neglect or forsakesomething.The
emergenceof a cross-disciplinarytextual dimension
with literary-likequalitiesdoesreflectback on litera-
ture; it is a phenomenon that should be meditated
upon by criticismmore than it has been. The ques-
tion is whether literaturehas any furtherresources
at its disposalthat would allowit still to differentiate
itself from other fields, and whetherthe business of
literary studies is not- or should not be- to de-
scribe and assess the give-and-takebetween these
two features.
I suppose what I am implicitlydefendinghere is
the view that comparatistssuch as Yves Chevrel
have advocated:comparativeliteratureas the disci-
pline of the encounter,as a "demarchevers autruiet
etude de la demarchevers autrui"(8), a movement
towardother texts and other culturesand the study
of how other people have confronted the texts of
other cultures and other peoples. This is an ap-
proach to interdisciplinaryrelations Bakhtin also
might have appreciated.In dialogue, the Russian
philosopher-critichas intimated, interlocutorsboth
partakeof sharedcodes and consummate,complete
each other. Once contact is established,a conversa-
tion will not last long if there is no exchangeof in-
formation.And that occurs by virtue of the "extra-
locality" of each of the speakers, because each
speaker is positioned differently, can- even on a
strictly physical level- see aspects of his or her

counterpartthat the counterpartcannot. In orderto
communicate,I must be able to understandyour
language and the norms and values you abide by,
but I can be useful to you only by not being you. In
a similarvein, literaturecan be informativeto other
disciplinesby assumingthe measureof disparitythe
situationaccordsit, by helping other disciplinesbe-
come more aware of their limits (other disciplines
will help it become awareof what it is and of what it
is not).2Again, for there to be comparativestudy of
disciplinaryrelations, interdisciplinaritymust not
dissolve into out-and-out transdisciplinarity,a sort
of supercategoryof which the various disciplines
would be individualembodiments.
Lest such a view appearto consign comparative
literatureto the banalityof "compareand contrast,"
let me recall the processesthat comparisonentails.
In accostingtheir object of study, be it literatureor
interdisciplinaryrelations, comparatists rely on
some theory.But comparativismis not a theory;it is
a practice.The methods and procedureson which
comparativeliteratureis parasiticmay guaranteethe
data and the outcome of the analysis,but they can-
not guaranteethe comparisonitself, since the tools
borrowedtoday can be comparedtomorrow.Which
amounts to saying that any theory worth its salt-
any theory,that is, which does not naturalizeitself-
is so insofar as it permits itself to be compared.
When all is boiled down, the dependence binding
comparativeliteratureto theory is a temporalone,
and one that can be constantlydeferred,that expos-
es the precariousnessof theoryno less than the pre-
cariousnessof comparativeliterature.
This is a nodal issue historicallyas well. Although
conservativejournalistskeep singling out compara-
tive literaturedepartments,alongside institutes of
women's studies and ethnic studies, as hotbeds of
theory- and therefore willy-nilly among Western
civilization'sand the humanities' most dangerous
fifth columns- the discipline has for the longest
stretch of years now been a repositoryor a con-
sumer- and not the producer- of the theories the
market has circulated. Even scholars who have
achieved a high profile while teaching comparative
literature- an EdwardSaid, a Paul de Man, a Geof-
frey Hartman, for example- have written and pub-
lished, and write and publish, on behalf of literary
studies or of one particulartheoreticalstance, not
simply as comparatists.To go back a few more
decades, Rene Wellek's Theoryof Literatureis not
entitled Theory of Comparative Literature, The dis-
cretenessof the discipline'spresencein the theoreti-
cal arenahas been lived by comparatistsas a disad-
vantage,as the conceptualequivalentof theirlack of
field (when it comes to materialto cover, too much
is alwaystoo little: there is never enough cohesion,
never enough structure). Clearly, like the spatial
anxiety,the anxietyof omission I referredto above,
LORIGGIO 259
that poverty is instead the strong suit of literary
comparativism.It is the strangeinattentiontoward
the dialectic of practiceand theory, the inabilityto
theorize the temporal circuit, the recursivenessof
the epistemologicalsequence into which they are
caught, that continually deposits comparatistson
the horns of their dilemma. As options go, confla-
tion with poetics would not be such an improve-
ment over its opposite, the risk of a decline into a
strictlyempiricalvocation (wherebycomparativelit-
eraturewould be restrictedto the verificationand/or
applicationof this or that theoreticalventure).In ei-
ther case, comparativeliteraturewould cease to be a
specificbranchof literarystudies.
Returningto the textuality of nonliterarydisci-
plines, a comparativeponderingof the phenomenon
would not necessarilyhave to be confined to the
usual argument,to live or die on the distinctionbe-
tween esthetic and nonesthetic writing or between
fiction and nonfiction. It could search for breaks
and inconsistencies within the textuality itself, or
pluralizeit on purelyliteraryterms.
To this end, an instrumentof great relevanceis,
from the start, the categoryof genre. In the social
sciences or in the humanitiesthe currentrapproche-
ment with literatureis revealinglyepitomized,to my
mind, by the way the emphasison the tropological
or figurationalaspects of the text aids and abets a
parallelemphasis on narrativeand the narrational.
For disciplines that reflect on the literaryprove-
nance of some of the models they deploy, or on how
criteria on loan from literarystudies would affect
their own discourse,a text that is "written"is also,
in the eighties or the nineties, one that is "told."
Narrativehas become a "root metaphor"for psy-
chonanalystsand life-span psychologists (Schafer;
Sarbin). Plot and emplotmentare a recurringcon-
cern of historiography,both with regardto its object
of study, its interpretationof events, and to its own
form (Ricoeur;White). Ethnographiesresemblethe
novel more and more (Marcusand Cushman;Clif-
ford and Marcus), and the narrationof "howthings
hang together"has been consideredby philosophers
such as RichardRorty a sufficientlyappropriatede-
scriptionof philosophy(1991a, 79).
From the comparativestandpoint,this state of af-
fairs is interestingfor its internaldynamics,but es-
pecially because it contrastswith other also easily
noticeable and equally "literary"tendencies. The
same disciplines that are busy underscoringtheir
collusions with narration have often privileged
drama or alternated narrative and dramaturgical
models. The symbolicanthropologychampionedby
Victor Turner derivesits analogiesfrom theater,as
does the microsociologyof Erving Gofrman.And
role,agent,and actorare still key terms of the vocab-
ulary of social scientists of all stripes. Nor is this
variation of the "literary"without theoretical or
260 WORLDLITERATURE
TODAY
metatheoreticalbreath.Just as the attractivenessof
narrative,of discourseas the telling of a plot, is war-
rantedby narratologyand, beyond that, by a lineage
going back, in this century,to Saussureand culmi-
nating in Derrida, an impressivegenealogy stands
behind dramaturgicalperspectives.CharlesPeirce's
admonitionthat the goal of thought ought to be the
eliminationof doubt and the preparationof action,
that the "meaningof a concept expresses itself in
the shape of conduct to be recommended"(272),
resonates through the works of William James,
Dewey, and George Herbert Mead as well as the
philosophyof Austin and the later Wittgenstein.In
literary criticism proper, dramaturgical thought
reachesits apogee in the pivotal figure of Kenneth
Burke.The method Burke devised for the study of
motives, of symbolicaction- his dramatisticpentad
of act, agent,purpose,scene, and agencyand the at-
tendant ratios (xvii-xxv)- takes over the function
narratologistshave in the other camp: it mediates
betweenpragmaticconceptionsof languageor prag-
maticphilosophyand literarytheory.
Reenvisioningthe literaryturn of interdisciplinar-
ity in this mannerreinstatesliteraturemore directly
within intellectualhistory. What sort of theoretical
stakes lurk in the narrative/dramadichotomy has
been illustratedduringthe last two decades by the
polemic between Derrida and Searle and between
deconstructionistsand speech-acttheoristsin gener-
al.3But proceedingin the otherdirectionilluminates
the polemic, and probably,in retrospect,changesits
tenor. Austin's conditions of felicity for performa-
tives include requirementsthat to literarycriticsare
palpably generic, i.e. "theatrical":the right back-
drop, proper recitation of the formula, and, most
overtly, "audienceuptake" of the speaker'swords
(115-16). As such, these requirementsattest to the
persistence and impact of literary reminiscences
(you could read Austin's How to Do Thingswith
Wordsas an instanceof the theatrummundimotif) in
or upon the culturalmemoryof philosophy:theater
precisely representsthe tension between language
and nonlanguage,the inescapableand alwaysresur-
facing proximityof doing to words that Austin is
trying to capture, and it is fitting that the analogy
shouldinfiltratehis book so spontaneously.
That in the course of the polemic Derridarejects
the cogency of context (of setting, or "scene,"as a
Kenneth Burkewould say) for the determinationof
meaning, that he should shift the focus back onto
the verbalnatureof discourse,on the "telling,"trig-
gers othermusingson genre. Philosophy'sor the so-
cial sciences' fascination with narrativemodels is
historicallyquite in sync: the rise and institutional
siting of the various disciplines, their sensitivity
toward languageand language-centeredissues, co-
incides with the rise of the novel, the modern genre
par excellence,the only genreto achievecriticaland
popular success after Gutenbergand the advent of
silent reading. Literaryhistory throws one swerve
into this coherence.It has often been called upon to
registerthe resistanceof dramaand dramaticmod-
els to the heavy modernpurchaseof the novel. You
have to wonderwhy in some of the momentsof self-
consciousness of the genre- during the late nine-
teenth centuryor the earlytwentiethcentury,when
its poetics was being constructed- some of the
more compelling critical preoccupationsabout the
novel were best reflectedby statementsabout the-
ater. "Le poete est dans le dramecomme Dieu dans
la creation.. . . Le poete dramaturgeest le grandin-
visible," declaresAuguste Vacquerie,a minor con-
temporary of Flaubert, anticipating perhaps too
summarilythe dispute about impersonalismin the
novel (4-5). And the passage in which Joyce's
Stephen Dedalus recapitulatesthe twentieth-centu-
ry version of the concept and conjureshis image of
the artist as one who "likethe God of creation,re-
mains within or behind or above his handiwork,in-
visible, refined out of existence, indifferent,paring
his fingernails"is a passageabout drama(214).
Admittedly,Vacquerie'sand Joyce's pronounce-
ments echo the Platonic separationof genres, ac-
cordingto which the distributionof voice is the dis-
criminatingfactor: in drama only the characters
speak;in narrativeboth the authorand the charac-
ters do so. And with this paradigm,difficultiescan
be smoothed over. The dramaticspeech situationis
built-in to narration.Some of Pirandello'splays de-
liberatelyset out to prove that the entire narrative
cohort, authornot excluded, can be dramatized.I,
on the contrary,have been harpingon the concept
of action, which in genre theory is an Aristotelian
criterion.My answer is that, in spite of the diver-
gences betweenthe two classicalinheritancesof crit-
icism, the largercriticaland historicaldriftof my re-
marks applies to action too. Where priority lies,
whetherit is meaningfulaction that should be con-
sideredas a text or whetherit is the meaningfultext
that should be considered as action, is ultimately
moot. What can be said- and all that probably
should be said- is that the two genres do translate,
do convertone into the other. Novelists (a Beckett,
a Camus, a Sartre)have doubled as playwrightsor,
at times, have adaptedtheir own narrativetexts for
the stage (as Pirandellofamouslydid withhis stories).
Peirce, the pragmatists,Burke,Austinproposeno
less at the philosophicallevel:languagecan translate
into conduct, actions can permeatewords, as words
action. And how to construe the cogitationsof the
psychologistswho, in commentingon the value of
the "narratoryprinciple"for their discipline,write,
"The specialfeaturesof any 'other'can be identified
only if it is knownin what drama,in what story,the
actor is participating"(Sarbin, 15); or "The uttered
pronoun,/, stands for the author,me stands for the

actor, the characterin the drama,the narrativefig-
ure" (Sarbin,18); or "In the same way that theatri-
cal productionsvary in their capacityto arouse and
compel an audience, so may the narrativeforms of
daily life and of science vary in their dramaticim-
pact" (Gergenand Gergen,28)? How else to under-
stand the allusions to drama that crop up almost
unawaresin these passages,if not as a symptom of
the perduranceof older, literary-criticaltopoi into
the newerdiscoursesof the social sciences?
Having finally evoked the ancientness of the
problems which comparative literature brings to
bear in its attemptto rendercomparativethe study
of the relationswith philosophyor the sciences or
the social sciences, I should perhaps, in closing,
point out that genres are the ground where all the
types of comparison, all the interdisciplinaritiesI
mentioned earliercross paths. Much of the debate
about the relation between comparativeliterature
and the other arts or the other, nonverbalforms of
expressionis actuallyabout the place of genre-based
metaphorsand models in theory and criticism.The
proponentsof culturalstudies have radicalizedtheir
differenceby underscoringthe multicodednatureof
some of the materialthey deal with. Simple reality,
the geometricmultiplicationof texts by new media,
a diffusion that abolishes the usual pigeonholes of
high-low,popular-serious,will compel literarycriti-
cism and theory- some have maintained(Easthope,
1991)- to transmuteinto a more capacious disci-
pline which has cultureas its object of inquiry.Cu-
riously,the ubiquityof media, at least, has revived
ratherthan reduced or annulledthe allure of tradi-
tional literarygenres. In bypassingthe age of print,
cinema, television,videos, and virtualrealityrejoin
the other temporal extreme, the art of the village.
The spectacularizationthey have instituted into
everydaylife is dramato the wthpower, dramasub-
limated, etherealized, simulacrized by machinery
and gadgetry undreamed of; but it is drama, or
somethingsufficientlylike it.
And this introducesin the discourseswhich name
media-objectsthe tensions inherent to other disci-
plines. Drama or spectaclecan be a model or a tool
of analysisfor criticsdoing culturalstudies (intend-
ed in its difference,as the study of verbaland non-
verbalformsof expression),not theirmeans of com-
munication,which remainswriting,the medium of
print. Even though there exists within the essay the
subtraditionof the dialogue, even though the in-
creasingfrequency,in criticism, of the recourse to
the interviewis a phenomenonto watch, as writing
the discourseof culturalstudieswill be missing,like
the discourse of strictly literarystudies when it
dwells on theater, the combination of sensorial
(audio plus visual) and representational-epistemo-
logical (languageplus action) elements that charac-
terizethe textualfield which it is negotiating.
LORIGGIO 261
By contrast,it is importantto recognizethe addi-
tive effect of current,historical,and largelymedia-
induced spectacularityon literatureof any kind, fic-
tional and nonfictional.The themes with which the
cultural conversationof the last two decades has
grappled- identity,the cultureof complaint,the vo-
cabulary of victimization, community, ethics, the
strained allegiances of individual to nation and
state- are very familiarto anyone acquaintedwith
the historyof tragedy,from the Greeksonward.Ex-
cept that in the contemporaryworld this material
has acquired strong over- or undertones. Nancy
Miller has describedthe recent performativephase
of feminist criticism, which has produced works
often narrativeor autobiographicalor confessional
in form, and lectures by speakerswho literallyre-
cite, act out their text, by stating that it is writing
that displaysthe person, writingabout "the specta-
cle of gender"(22). The phraseis a happyone, but
it can be amplified:gendered or not gendered, all
writing that draws attention to itself "creates a
scene," makes "a spectacle of itself." Revisited in
the parlanceof eitherdramatismor culturalstudies,
the century's earliest intimations of literariness -
those sponsored by the Russian Formalist theo-
rists- are about the speech act that literarylanguage
becomes when it deviates from its conventions or
stressesits own procedures.In the currentage, the
worksof women who personalizetheirwriting,or of
philosopherscarefulabout their style, or of ethnog-
raphers who narrate their encounters with infor-
mants, or of sociologists who define themselvesas
"ironists,"realize in print and within the academic
environment, for a professional public- hence in
small scale- some of the premisesand the promises
of mass media. They construct,if not their own no-
toriety, their own exposure.In Russian Formalist
thought, techniquedeautomatizesperceptions,frees
the individualfrom the deja-vusyndrome,reestab-
lishes the visibility of whateverit represents.That
function in late modernityis carriedout within the
intricateweb of relationsthat comes with the exis-
tence of other modes of expression. Style, self-re-
flexivity, performance are dramatic several times
over:they are to the extent that they are social, his-
torical gestures with ethical or political ramifica-
tions, and to the extent that they are social and his-
torical in a fashion determinedby the adjacencyof
mass media (for which the "showability"of the
"telling,"so to say, is a mandatoryprerequisite).
As for the interculturaldimensionof interdiscipli-
narity,genre would obviouslyhave to figurepromi-
nently in any account of its vicissitudes.Here in the
West, literarycriticismhas traditionallyclassifiedlit-
erature under three headings, with lyric poetry
flankingnarrativeand drama.To my knowledge,of
other disciplinesonly philosophy(in redressperhaps
of its Platonicpast?- the quarrelwith literaturethat
262 TODAY
WORLDLITERATURE
The Republicinstigated is still labeled the quarrel
with poetry)has from time to time manifestedsome
partialityfor this thirdgenre;the lyricis the emblem
of art for Gadamerand of antimetaphysicalthinking
for Heidegger,whose laterwritingsstriveto be poet-
ic in the literal meaning of the word. Generalizing
somewhat,it would be possible to blame the lack of
appeal of poetry on the subject matter of the
younger,more moderndisciplinarydiscourses.Nat-
ural or social, the sciences are realisticenterprises:
they ministerto the prose of everydaylife, typical,
routinebusiness, not the privateindividualismsuch
as lyric poetry might depict and celebrate.But the
isolation of that particulargenre is also due to the
overwhelmingpredominanceof drama and narra-
tive, which have been foundationalrespectivelyin
classical and modern literarycriticism. And these
are arenot prerogativesthat everycultureaccordsto
them. Elsewhere the catalogue of genres may be
more complex- more supple or more variedor dif-
ferentlyorganized.To listen to literarytheorists,in
Asia the founding genre is the lyric. Comparatists
wishingto get a clearergrasp of the literaryturn of
nonliterarydisciplines- or of modernculturalhisto-
ry- will have to look into the relationsthis has occa-
sioned. It would be of considerableinstructionto
know if in Asian or Africanor other traditionspoet-
ic models fare better with the social sciences than
they have in the West, or, conversely,if any change
in the critical-theoreticalfortunes of narrationties
in, as it does in the West, with the irruptionon the
intellectual scene of sociology, anthropology,psy-
chology,and so forth.
CarletonUniversity
11 am
thinking here primarily of Etiemble (1974) and Miner
(1990), but the theme has been a recurring one in the discipline.
Bakhtin states this most directly: "In order to understand, it is
immensely important for the person who understands to be heated
outsidethe object of his or her understanding- in time, in space, in
culture. For one cannot even see one's exterior and comprehend it
as a whole, and no mirrorsor photographs can help; our real exteri-
or can be seen and understood only by other people, because they
are located outside us in space and because they are others"(7).
3The texts in which Derrida and Searle
played out their ver-
sion of the polemic are, for the former, 1972 and, for the latter,
1977. But my contention is that the polemic has many versions,
one of which is represented by genres.
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