About
Philosophy and context: literary studies beyond the national boundaries
In the last few years an increasing number of eminent scholars have been drawing attention to the manner in which the institutional division of literatures into an archipelago of disciplines enclosed in national boundaries hampers and even distorts literary studies. The Princeton University Press recently launched a book series (“Translation / Transnation” under the general editorship of Emily Apter) devoted specifically to this issue. Likewise, the Modern Language Association and the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages have been organizing special sessions at their annual conventions to promote discussion on how to move beyond the study of the canonical literature of nations and national traditions in order to enable, as David Damrosch put it in What is World Literature? (2003), a better understanding of “the new relations between Western Europe and the rest of the globe, between antiquity and modernity, between nascent mass culture and elite productions.” In launching the Ph.D. in Literature Program, then, Notre Dame anticipated the way in which literary studies are likely to be—or, one might argue, will have to be—configured in the future.
The purpose of the Ph. D. in Literature Program of the University of Notre Dame is to collaborate on the study of the various displacements which characterize the literary phenomenon in particular, and fiction in general. The changes which affect the “literary phenomenon” after the Empire and in the transnational and postcolonial spheres are a part of an overall movement. This movement imposes a redefinition of the links between what we call literature as a worldwide concept and its boundaries in the frame of the nation-states, of colonies and former colonies, and also within the constraints of economical dominations, political or symbolic oppressions.
The objective of the Program is to encourage and develop research on the place of world literature (from Goethe’s early definition to Auerbach, Damrosch, to the “new comparative literature” elaborated by Emily Apter …) beyond national boundaries and to approach literature as an alternative and/or minority discourse across cultural, political, national, institutional and social limitations. The Program wants to promote scholarly work that interrogates the resistance of literature and its power of invention in history. The Program focuses on a variety of writings, narrations, and literary or fictional creations. It wants to question the ways in which literature confronts the locality, the specificity and the idiomaticity of cultural texts (including literature, film, arts, music…) with the universality of various social contexts in a globalized environment. It focuses in particular on the resistance of literature and on the fact that literature can embody resistance for minorities, oppressed intellectuals or creators.
Research Program, practices and methodology
The Ph. D. in Literature Program has the purpose of working on all aspects of this modernity of the literary movement, beginning with its history, with its legacy, with the long and ancient process of the invention of fiction, and the practical and theoretical aspects of the literary phenomenon in the world as a dimension of the human fabulation’s activity as a key function in modern materialistic economic globalization. As a part of its reflection on “literary movement,” the Program deploys its perspective in several directions: “Global literature” (Fredric Jameson, Masao Miyoshi…), “cosmopolitanism” (Bruce Robbins, Timothy Brennan…), “world literature” (David Damrosch, Franco Moretti…), “literary transnationalism” (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak), comparative postcolonial and diaspora studies (Edward Said, Homi K. Bhabha, Françoise Lionnet, Rey Chow…), “International Republic of Letters” (Pascale Casanova…).
There are many different ways define and structure one’s area of specialization and related fields. These fields of interest may be organized, for example, around historical periods (e.g., late antiquity, medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, fin de siècle, etc.), genres (e.g., epic, tragedy, comedy, the ancient and/or modern novel, etc.), literary movements (e.g., modernism, symbolism, the avant-garde, etc.), literary traditions and languages (e.g., ancient Greek, Irish, Latin, Francophone, Spanish, German, Italian, etc.), geographical areas (e.g., Caribbean, Latin America, Africa), interdisciplinary relations (e.g., philosophy and literature, religion and literature, socio-political aspects of literature, etc.), literary theory and criticism. These are just some rather conventional examples, used here by way of illustration, but there are many other imaginative and creative ways to define one’s interests and their combinations—and the Ph. D. in Literature Program is sufficiently flexible to accommodate a wide range of them.
Methodologically, the Program would like to collaborate in the reformulation of conventional national categories that undergird the disciplinary divisions within the humanities and social sciences. One of the Program’s objectives is to serve as a bridge between languages and literary traditions, to bring together experience and expertise beyond the rigid distinctions among departments traditionally organized according to national languages. “World literature” is not an object, it is a process whose elucidation demands a reconsideration of categories.
