Introduction to Comparative Literature and Society

How to think a discipline? How to study “our” discipline? Must we do it from within or from without? Assured of its boundaries or interrogating them? Should we consider the history of the discipline? Its coming into being and its trajectory (or trajectories)? Or should we look at its ends, perhaps at its demise and end, judge it from the perspective of its death, “the death of a discipline”? How about its object? Is it not the givenness, and the comparability, of the disciplinary object — let us say, for example, the literary, or the social and anthropological — a safer and surer ground? Indeed, what of the study of literature, of comparative literature? Are we not running the risk of assuming an isolated (read aesthetic), object? Should we not appeal instead to power in its social and conventional forms, or in its institutional embodiments, perhaps to the law (the rights of the author, for instance)? Could we not turn with equal or even superior benefit to sociology or to politics, to a more general study of ideology or culture? and what of economy, what of the “genres of the credit economy”? Enrollment is limited and the seminar is designed for grad students working toward a degree in Comparative Literature and Society. Students are expected to have a preliminary familiarity with the discipline in which they wish to do their doctoral work. Please note: this Course is required for ICLS graduate students, and priority will be given to these students. Contact the ICLS office for more information at (212)854-4541.