American Comparative Literature Greene

8/6/2019 American Comparative Literature Greene

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University of Oklahoma

American Comparative Literature: Reticence and ArticulationAuthor(s): Roland GreeneSource: World Literature Today, Vol. 69, No. 2, Comparative Literature: States of the Art(Spring, 1995), pp. 293-298Published by: University of OklahomaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40151139Accessed: 18/06/2010 07:49

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American Comparative Literature: Reticence and Articulation

By ROLAND GREENE Comparative literatureas an institutionemerged in its World

War II-era identity the one that for better or worsestill determines he practices of the field today asan American phenomenon, closely responsive o theinitiatives of a founding set of scholars, depart-ments, and journals based at Harvard, Yale, JohnsHopkins, and Oregon, among other places. Ofcourse there are many institutional orms of the dis-cipline outside the United States, and some havebeen quite successful; but even then the power andappeal of comparative iterature eem to depend onan outlook toward literature, society, and scholar-ship that is quintessentially mid- to late-twentieth-

century American, ike the Marshall Plan and theFulbright Scholarships: luralist, dealist, positivist,and attracted o a manageable ersion of the foreignas well as the prospect of communication cross cul-tures.

Can the discipline as thus conceived and char-tered maintain ts vitality today? Someone lookingfor an answer to this question as all comparatistsdo from time to time will find much to ponder inthe volume Building a Profession: AutobiographicalPerspectives on the Beginnings of Comparative Litera-ture in the United States, edited by Lionel Gossmanand Mihai I. Spariosu (Albany, State University ofNew York Press, 1994). In it, sixteen contributors,including he two editors, offer memoirs of their ca-reers as scholars of comparative iterature. At a mo-ment in which autobiographical xercises by promi-nent literary scholars are appearing often, thisvolume might seem a promising addition to thetrend of elucidating he social and cultural positionsfrom which critics write. Instead, it is a witness tohow little we as American scholars, n a position ofworldwide authority over the discipline, agree aboutour own field a fascinating collection that willserve as anecdotal material n the reconception ofcomparative iterature hat is now under way. Thisresult might not be what the editors and authors n-tended, but the volume accomplishes what most ofthe explicit documents about the discipline ince the

1960s (and they are surprisingly ew) have omittedto do: disclose how slippery comparative iteraturealways was, how contingent many institutional eali-ties and individual careers have been, and how darkthe corners of our self-understanding till are.1

Elsewhere have proposed a broadly generationalmodel to explain the condition of comparative iter-ature as we now find it.2 Without repeating toomuch, let me say that the discipline we recognize asAmerican comparative iterature was founded justbefore and after World War II by a group of expatri-ate scholars led by Erich Auerbach (1892-1957),Leo Spitzer (1887-1960), and Ernst Robert Curtius(1886-1956). This cohort invented a disciplinethrough ts own scholarly practice, without the ago-nized reflections on method and boundaries thathave accompanied most disciplinary births in thiscentury; ike rriany mmigrant athers n the first halfof the century, heir near-silence about theories andvalues inspired reverential, ften self-conscious mi-tation by their family of disciples born in America.That succeeding generation was paced by scholarssuch as Rene Wellek (b. 1903) and Harry Levin(1912-94), who honored the practical example oftheir forerunners y building departments nd otherinstitutions in which the discipline would behoused. If the founding generation eldom invokedcomparative iterature by name, Levin's generationused the term almost obsessively as part of its schol-arship, displaying he newly self-conscious practiceby its patient application o close readings of texts,studies of multiple authors, and broad speculationson the nature of the literary. n demographic nd in-tellectual erms, furthermore, he Wellek-Levin en-eration was much larger and more far-flung thanthat of Auerbach. It included not only the officialluminaries of the discipline called comparative iter-ature, but a vast network of scholars, mostly situat-ed in national iterature departments, who qualifiedas comparatists n all but name: the linguist RomanJakobson 1896-1982), the Romance scholar HugoFriedrich (b. 1904), the Slavicist Renato Poggioli(1907-63), the polymaths Kenneth Burke (1897-1993) and R. P. Blackmur 1904-65), the critic and

novelist Albert J. Guerard b. 1914), and many oth-ers.The Wellek-Levin generation produced a spawn

of students who have run institutional comparativeliterature n the United States and abroad since themid-1960s, and Building a Profession s their testi-mony. The volume begins, appropriately, with newretrospective ssays by Wellek and Levin. As it hap-

Roland Greene is Professor of Comparative Literature andEnglish and chairs he Program n Comparative iterature t theUniversity of Oregon. He is the author of Post-Petrarchism: ri-gins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence (1991) andcoeditor (with Elizabeth Fowler) of The Project of Prose: Essays inEarly Modern European and New World Writing forthcoming). Heis currently erving as Secretary-Treasurer f the American Com-parative Literature Association.


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294 WORLD LITERATURE ODAY

pens, these two pieces tell the story of their genera-tion's entrepreneurial uccess in starkly differentways. Wellek's s an anecdotal account, loaded withaccidents and opportunities. It tells how a youngCzech with a new D.Phil, came to Princeton n late1927, negotiated the stultifying curriculum n En-glish literature here, and gradually became a forcein this country's incipient renovation of literarystudies through positions at Smith, Iowa, and finallyYale, where Wellek retired n 1972 as Sterling Pro-fessor of Comparative Literature a position thatscarcely could have existed when he began hisAmerican areer.

By contrast, Levin's essay takes its author's tra-jectory as a given, and chronicles he institution ofcomparative iterature t Harvard as opposed to thediscipline the administrative nstead of the intel-lectual permutations. How did a man with no de-gree beyond the B.A. become one of the most influ-

ential scholars in the field? No one will find outfrom this memoir. Oblivious o the contingencies ofcareers, Levin describes a world in which everyoneis fully formed when they first appear o us usuallywith a fancy title as well ("the present chairman . .a native Australian with a doctorate from the Uni-versity of Minister, s Robert K. and Dale J. WearyProfessor of German and Comparative Litera-ture") and the history of the discipline can be re-lated through a list of monographs n the series Har-vard Studies in Comparative Literature. WhereWellek's one is often conspiratorial, ishing up sur-prise at how this or that person got as far as he did,Levin's resembles that of a politician or captain ofindustry whose power relies mysteriously on cover-ing up its own etiology. At its end Levin's memoircollapses into an inventory of fifty Harvard Ph.D.graduates n comparative iterature, list that is pre-sented as though t will overwhelm he reader but infact throws together an odd collection ranging romtheorists o philologists o practical critics, from vir-tuosi to journeymen o others who might be de-scribed as keeping a low profile, at least where com-parative iterature s concerned. The incoherence ofthis group obviously reflects the same quality n thediscipline, but Levin, an institution-builder o theend (and this essay is one of the last things hewrote), displays no ambivalence or insecurity. In-stead he announces that Harvard conferred 210Ph.D.'s in comparative iterature between 1904 and1991, 191 of those since 1949 in other words, inthe forty or so years since Levin's promotion totenure began his dominion over the field.

The body of Gossman and Spariosu's collection,however, s the memoirs by scholars of the genera-tion that succeeded Wellek, Levin, and VictorLange (b. 1908), whose essay appears third here.To run through he rest of the contributors I sup-ply the dates, places, and institutions is to hear a

roll call of the establishment of the discipline:Thomas M. Greene (b. 1926 in Philadelphia, Ph.D.from Yale in 1955), Thomas Rosenmeyer b. 1920Hamburg, Ph.D. Harvard 1949), W. WolfgangHoldheim (b. 1926 Berlin, Ph.D. Yale 1956), AnnaBalakian b. 1916 Constantinople, Ph.D. Columbia1943), Albert J. Guerard b. 1914 Houston, Ph.D.Stanford 1938), Thomas R. Hart (b. 1925 Raleigh,Ph.D. Yale 1952), Lilian Furst (b. 1931 Vienna,Ph.D. Cambridge 1957), Marjorie Perloff (b. 1931Vienna, Ph.D. Catholic University of America1965), Herbert Lindenberger b. 1929 Los Angeles,Ph.D. Washington 1955), Gerald Gillespie (b. 1933Cleveland, Ph.D. Ohio State 1961), Stanley Corn-gold (b. 1934 Brooklyn, Ph.D. Cornell 1968), andthe editors. It could be observed hat a few of thesepeople are not comparatists n any usual sense, andin fact Lionel Gossman admits n the foreword hathe understood the book at first as collecting the

memoirs not of comparatists but of specialists inforeign literatures. It fits well with the nebulousquality of the discipline that in a volume such asthis, one of the editors and several of the contribu-tors should be quite out of place. Rosenmeyer be-gins his essay this way: "Let's not kid ourselves;am not a comparatist" 49). Still, everyone's esti-mony is taken; in the project of defining this inde-finable practice, almost every opinion is probablyvalid. {Building Profession as seemingly producedwithout fact-checking, copy-editing, or perhapseven proofreading, which makes it even morenakedly a memoir: lapses of detail and contradic-tions between one essay and another are every-where. At one point Fredric Jameson's book is cited

as The Politically Unconscious.)Unlike those of Wellek and Levin, the third-gen-eration essays are full of longings that seem still un-fulfilled: or "culture" f the authoritative Europeankind, for stable homes and identities n the postwarworld, and most of all for institutional anction andself-recognition as comparatists. The last of theseattainments s the most elusive. Many of this groupcame of age intellectually under the sign of first-and second-generation comparatists: Greene andHart both worked under Auerbach and Wellek atYale, while several others represented here studiedat Harvard, Hopkins, Cornell, or Columbia in theera of comparative iterature's consolidation. Butthe result of this direct tutelage or at least exposureis a curious reticence about the nature and bound-aries of the discipline as though it would be impi-ous or dangerous o call a comfortable horizon ntoquestion or to speculate too far past the limits ofwhat had been made safe by one's teachers. Thispassage s from Hart's essay:

If I had been asked, would have said hat my specialinterest in graduate chool] was iterary heory, whichthen meant almost he exact opposite f what t means


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GREENE 295

today. I learned that there there is a clear distinctionbetween literature and nonliterature. Novels belong toliterature; istory and autobiography o not. As a grad-uate student, I read poems, plays, and novels, and in-terpretations f them, plus a good deal of literary isto-

ry. I did not read Freud or Marx, nor did I learnanything bout philosophy or political cience or sociol-ogy. Although was keenly nterested n linguistics andanthropology, nd audited graduate ourses n both, itnever occurred o me that they had anything o do withmy work as a student of Comparative iterature. 100)

Hart's point is that Wellek and the other institution-builders devised this model of graduate education,so it must be a standard from which we have fallenaway. But the larger questions that come to mindare whether this third generation appreciates how aWellek became such, what the differences must bebetween the esthetic theory propounded in his andAustin Warren's hard- won Theory of Literature

(1942) on the one hand and the actual training ofgraduate students on the other, and in what spiritany scholarly generation ought to view the one thatprecedes it.

Since Wellek's memoir is available in this samebook, a certain generational comparison is in-evitable. When Wellek was in graduate school atPrinceton, he took a course from Charles GrosvenorOsgood in which he was assigned to do a report on"Spenser's Irish Rivers," and another with ThomasMarc Parrott in which the whole business consistedof comparing the quarto and folio editions of Ham-let word by word: "No attempt was made to discussanything about what happened in Hamlet, but mere-

lythe verbal differences between the two versions

were noticed and recorded" (2). The critical doc-trine developed in Theory of Literature and otherspeculative works of Wellek's maturity responds tothe aggressively objective, antiesthetic approach ofhis teachers; it is the intellectual ending-point of atrajectory that begins in youthful reaction against aresidual late-nineteenth-century fact-mongering. Asthe destination of one generation, this standpoint iswhere the next should begin, not end. Scholars ofthe third generation, however, tended to see theirteachers' ends as their own, to treat as dogma thehighly provisional conclusions at which Wellek andLevin and the rest arrived and finally to resist thereconception of the discipline that is the responsibil-ity of every generation of comparatists. The influ-ence of their mentors being too strong and fresh, thescholars of this group saw themselves as conserva-tors, not innovators.

As evidence, these essays contain many tributesto the Wellek and Levin generation by scholarswhose work qualifies them as rightful heirs, nottimid custodians. Greene's account of Wellek isnoteworthy:

[He] was the last in the remarkable leiade I came intocontact with. In my second year of graduate study, Ilistened to him as an auditor read chapters rom hisforthcoming volume on romantic criticism, and in myfinal year he directed my dissertation on the epithala-

mion in the Renaissance. For a decade and a halfWellek directed all comparative dissertations at Yale,regardless f their subject and field, and directed hemwith authority. I suppose that one never quite learnsfrom a professor what he or she expects one to learn;the most important essons are transmitted nvoluntari-ly. What I learned from Wellek intensified an impres-sion gained from Auerbach namely, he inexhaustibil-ity of all that there is to read, along with itsunquestionable ntrinsic nterest. Of course ou want toread everything, because you are curious, because t isthere, because t enriches. 40-41)

What might be the historical and institutional con-texts of the impressions Greene records here? Cer-tainly the traces of Osgood and Parrott are legible in

the lesson of literature's "unquestionable intrinsicinterest," since that is exactly what they had ques-tioned when Wellek was their student. Moreover,how much was Wellek's supervision of every disser-tation due to his heroic, "Olympian" qualities (41),and how much to the realities of a small, newlyformed department? It is asking too much to saythat Greene - or anyone should have recognizedhow much his teachers had been determined bytheir identities as former students, institution-builders, immigrants, and so forth. But it is fair tocomplain that because of their worshipful view oftheir teachers, many of this third generation lack theconviction that the discipline is theirs. Even withadjustments for historical difference, they refuse to

measure themselves by the same scale as their men-tors and retrospectively, their mentors by the samescale as themselves.

Thus Building a Profession contains many expres-sions of this lack of certainty and identity.

I had to take stock of myself. I felt like that Frenchmanin Montesquieu's Les Lettres Persanes who exclaims,"But how can one be a Persian?" ndeed, how can onebe a Comparatist? 77)Harry Levin, then working to build up ComparativeLiterature, sked me to take over his Proust, Joyce, andMann course. I couldn't face three such difficult mas-ters, not to mention the challenge of following Levin,and proposed nstead Hardy, Conrad, and Gide. (92)I saw the move as a

homecoming,a return o

myalma

mater, and I had every ntention of staying here for therest of my career, doing my best to build a department.Admittedly, after a few days my delight gave way topanic as I realized hat I had no idea what ComparativeLiterature was, and that I was unable to teach morethan a single course n it. (114)

The few of this cohort more or less undistracted bythe previous generation seem to be those who weretrained far from the institutional centers of compar-


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ative iterature; hey were perhaps he most effectiveinstitution-builders f the third generation, he proto-typical case being Herbert Lindenberger's stablish-ment of the field at Stanford. In fact, Lindenberg-er's dialogic essay turns the apologetic tone of therest of the volume nside out.

I was now, from an institutional oint of view, a spe-cialist n EnglishRomanticism, nd various niversitiescalled me to solicit my nterest n positions heyhad ooffer n that area. The idea of spending he rest of mylife widdling roundwith he six poets deemed anoni-cal n those days was more han cared o contemplate,and I reminded ll inquirers hat my training nd myinterests ookme n other directions. 152)

Similarly, Marjorie Perloff's often hilarious essay onher training at the Catholic University of Americatells of looking nto the field from the outside whilehewing to a keen practical sense of what compara-tive literature s supposed o be about.

Whereas nglish it n [the 1950s] was still confined othe study of specific periods and authors, Comp Litwas he discipline hat asked he big questions: hat sliterature nd literariness? hat is the difference e-tween pecific enres nd orms? ow s "image" o bedifferentiated rom "metaphor" nd "symbol"? hat sa "character"? owdo we distinguish free erse" romprose? 128)

In many ways comparative iterature n this countrywould be very different oday if it had been in thehands of these relative outsiders hrough the 1960sand 1970s: perhaps ess international n one waywith fewer openings to the literatures of countriesand regions other than Europe, because they tend to

wear their Eurocentric bias unapologetically butmore international therwise, n that it would con-verse more easily with the scholarship of othercountries, where the magnetism of strictly "literary"questions ike the ones Perloff raises still holds.

As it was, the coming to institutional authority ofthe third generation postponed the rethinking f thefield from what it had been in Wellek's and Levin'stime, and when the sixties and seventies brought aninevitable pressure o open comparative iterature nseveral directions at once toward an autonomous"theory," toward the literature of the developingworld, toward "comparison" ot of languages andliteratures but of disciplines and standpoints thefield exploded in all these ways at once. There wasno core of consensus eft for these revisions o inter-act with; they simply routed what was left of Theoryof Literature nd other documents of the Wellek-Levin era. Of course, it was right that they did. Themovement of the field away from European master-pieces as celebrated in Levin's course "Proust,Joyce, Mann" (which turns up everywhere n Build-ing a Profession s a touchstone of the era) wouldhave been irresistible n any case. But the deadly

reticence of the third generation had profound nsti-tutional consequences with which many of us arestill living; the discipline would feel very differenttoday if it had operated under a strong charter nthe years of the institutional handoff between onegeneration and the next, if Wellek's and Levin's stu-dents had developed a sense of self-definition asstrong as their scholarship. t may seem strange tosome readers, but Building Profession itnesses hefact that first-rate ntellectual work s not always ac-companied by a sure sense of what one is doing, orhow to convey one's assumptions and values to oth-ers. A unique version of this reticence s chronicledin Stanley Corngold's ine, acidic essay on Paul deMan: here was a lack of explicitness hat went as faras lack of candor the morally flawed limit-case ofwhat in the rest of his generation was a collapse ofcertainty, not ethics. A Levin product and probablythe key transitional igure into the next era Corn-

gold's piece on de Man as teacher can be cross-readwith Levin's remembrance of him as graduate stu-dent de Man is the hidden villain among his con-temporaries, his deep relativism and creepy silencemasked by their nnocent versions of the same.

Among other things, a more deliberate discussionabout the future of the field in the sixties and earlyseventies would have minimized he perception hatat least two entire generations of practitioners werecut adrift when American comparative iterature e-came a vehicle for literary heory after about 1975.Building a Profession s an anthology of complaintsabout how disempowered and betrayed several ofthese scholars elt when the field came to accommo-date poststructuralist heoretical work as its primaryactivity. (The most striking exception here is W.Wolfgang Holdheim, whose reflections on the usesand abuses of "theory" 70-71] are irreverently er-ceptive without crossing he line into defensiveness.)One wonders: how could a set of established chol-ars at the top of the field for their positions andawards accumulate n these pages in a striking dis-play of self-congratulation be overthrown soquickly? How could their practice have been held solightly by their younger colleagues, their students,and those in adjacent ields? Whatever he reasonand I believe it was in what they did not do, namelyarticulate a fresh rationale or comparative iteraturein their time of ascendancy the result is that al-most

every department nowadaysncludes scholars

of different generations who scarcely ee one anoth-er as pursuing the same discipline. American com-parative iterature oday feels disjunct within tself; tlooks in the mirror and sees an unfamiliar ace. Peo-ple join departments f comparative iterature n theUnited States without participating n the disci-pline as in the ubiquitous case of a senior appoint-ment in a national iterature department demandinga courtesy itle as "Professor f Comparative Litera-


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GREENE 297

ture" while some of the most active practitionersof the discipline of all generations are institutionallyestranged rom their local "comp lit" departments.One American university ecently had the presidentsof both the American

ComparativeLiterature Asso-

ciation and the International Comparative Litera-ture Association on its faculty, but neither of themwas a member of its Department of ComparativeLiterature. n the memoirs of Building a Professionone finds an eyewitness, almost blow-by-blow ac-count of how we arrived at this point. It is the auto-biography f a field that has been unable to know it-self.

To widen the scope of the collection, Gossmanand Spariosu would have done well to includememoirs by the group of scholars whose careerswere made successful, not obsolete, by the theoryboom of the seventies and eighties. Many of thesewere immigrants o the United States, and quite afew were educated far from the institutional entersof the discipline. Their professional histories wouldtell us a great deal about the recent expansion ofcomparative iterature way from its customary op-ics, issues, and values; and the book would probablystand to lose the tone of irritable defensiveness hatis sounded in many of the essays-a noise that is allthe harder to hear sympathetically because thememoirists are all prosperous and successful, andhave become more so during recent years in whichwhich many Ph.D.'s in comparative iterature havegone unemployed, underemployed, or out of theprofession entirely. Having some younger contribu-tors would also raise the level of disciplinary og-

nizance n Building Profession, ecause few scholarssince the seventies have found jobs in Americancomparative iterature without knowing how to de-scribe the discipline, even if only as a set of inter-locking problems. The rise of an explicitly heoreti-cal discourse in the field had some drawbacks, ofcourse, although hese were outweighed by the ren-ovative charge given to a moribund field; but whatgoes almost unremarked n this volume perhapsbecause it is the alteration hat many of these essay-ists really deplore is that since the sixties and sev-enties it has become ever more difficult o think ofcomparative iterature as a set of intellectual prac-tices and academic customs as opposed to a disci-pline, but at the same time the identity of the disci-pline is not much easier to define except asproblematic. A certain atmospheric pressure o the-orize comparative iterature has been exerted overthe last twenty-five years or so, but without conclu-sive or even widely validated results; he only thinggone for sure is the clubby sense that because this iswhat our teachers and we do, it must be all right. Itwould be instructive o hear from some of the peo-ple whose careers ame to fruition ince that time.

Anna Balakian writes near the end of her essaythat "innovations re what keeps a discipline vigor-ous and dynamic but each generation cannot rein-vent Comparative Literature from scratch" (84).With this second clause I disagree. believe that oneof the virtues of the recent cycles of reinvention sthe arresting demonstration hat comparative itera-ture is change; he jolts of the last twenty years havereminded everyone that the field is permanentlyunder construction, and that ironically n view ofthe third generation's exaggerated regard for itsforerunners this is how the Auerbachs and Spitzerswould have wanted it. (Recent years have seen agrowing interest in Auerbach and his contempo-raries as objects of scholarship, as the field's fourthand fifth generations nsist on relearning he historyof comparative iterature or themselves; and withthat interest has come, I think, a new awareness ofhow radical he founders often were.)3 Comparative

literature is properly obsessed with borders, butmore than merely national and linguistic ones.Rather, the field is enacted wherever iterary tudyfinds its own borderlands: n the east of philologyand the west of cultural studies, the north of theoryand the south of historiography. t is the continualexamination arried out by literary tudy on itself; tis the paradiscipline hat reinvests meaning andvalue in the discipline of literature. The oversight ofthe third generation was in treating the particularconstruction they inherited as a given, not a con-catenation of interests hat reflected he training andbiases of their forerunners. nstead of realizing hatWellek, Levin, and the rest had staked out a posi-tion literally and productively ccentric o the rest ofliterary tudies and perhaps beguiled by the condi-tion of institutional solidity in which they receivedthat position into their care the third generationimagined hat place as a livable home.

The memoirists n Building Profession ften por-tray themselves as "born" nto comparative itera-ture a telling expression of their refusal o confrontthe meaning and contingency of the discipline ex-plicitly, as though it is literally part of their identity,like nationality or religion. Is one a comparatist e-cause one has more than one national allegiance?Because one grows up with two languages? Ofcourse not, no more than one is born into the pro-fessional study of physics because one is subject togravity. But notions like these point up the skew be-tween those scholars who think of the space of com-parison as a safe place of high culture the choice ofwhich reflects favorably on them and those whotreat it as a disciplinary ackstreet, hose who claimthat it feels natural and those who find it fiercely un-natural. The latter, I think, have a better grip on thecondition of comparative iterature, which properlycalls into question all comparison, including itsown. Perhaps his book will finally close the postwar


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chapter of the field's history a glorious period ofexpansion and consolidation, but also an object les-son in how problematically isciplines mature. Thenext American omparatists, ncluding my students,are more widely spaced from one another ntellectu-ally than any previous group in the history of thefield: it is the vanguardist ondition of comparativeliterature hat as each generation tests the bound-aries t receives, t pushes away the outlines of whatconstitutes he field ever farther, and the clearing atthe center becomes larger, not to mention safer forhabitation by noncomparatists. But these newercomparatists re, I notice, much better convinced ofthe purpose and value of the discipline han any re-cent generation. A multifarious ield does not haveto be a disintegrated ne. Without all the trappingsof common experience, uch as the training n a fewcentral places or the 1958 bus ride to the first meet-ing of the International Comparative Literature As-sociation in

ChapelHill that

Balakianchronicles

here, new scholars of comparative iterature maywell be finding the articulate dentity that eludestheir predecessors n Building Profession. s a con-

fessional monument to an era of inarticulateness,the book will have a curious but indispensable lacein the historiography f American comparative iter-ature.

University of Oregon

1A rare example of positivist self-reflection by and about thefield of the 1960s - though late in its appearance is Robert J.Clements, Comparative Literature as Academic Discipline: A State-ment of Principles, Praxis, Standards, New York, Modern Lan-guage Association of America, 1978. In fact, the book describeda field that was swiftly vanishing at the same time. A recent, rear-guard action is Claudio Guillen, The Challenge of ComparativeLiterature, r. Cola Franzen, Cambridge, Ma., Harvard Universi-ty Press, 1993.2Roland Greene, "Their Generation," in Comparative Litera-ture in the Age of Multiculturalism, d. Charles Bernheimer, Balti-more, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, pp. 143-54.3A prefiguration of this interest was Paul Bove, Intellectuals nPower: A Genealogy of Critical Humanism, New York, ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1986. More recent is Michael Holquist, "TheLast European: Erich Auerbach as Precursor in the History ofCultural Criticism," Modern Language Quarterly, 54 (1993), pp.371-91. A conference on Auerbach's legacy was held at StanfordUniversity in 1992-93; its proceedings are in press.

"Biti ^

American Comparative Literature Greene

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