Ghosts in the Disciplinary Machine: The Uncanny Life of World Literature

Abstract

Six years ago I arrived at Yale with a fresh Ph.D. in comparative literature in one hand and a newborn son in other, to begin my first job. During course of a welcoming lunch my chair asked me what I imagined was a hypothetical question: do you think comparative literature departments should teach world literature? Yes, I replied, not really thinking too much about it. Good, he said. And before I knew it, certainly before I had fully absorbed enormity of task, he and I were designing Yale's first undergraduate survey course in World Literatures. That course, now required for literature and comparative literature majors and part of a larger program of study that includes courses in narratology, literary theory, and World Cinema and encourages interdisciplinary study of literature, is presently in its fourth year. In his fourth year that newborn now a ripe six asked me one day if I knew everything about, in his inimitable phrasing, the whole ball and world of space and You teach in a university, so you must know about universe. Apart from serving as a salutary reminder of how large we loom in eyes of our children and how great our subsequent fall, my sons etymology has something to say about task of criticism at present time. With admirable economy he has identified space-time imperative of contemporary knowledge: namely, you have to know it all and you have to know it now. This boundaryless imperative, very mark of early childhood, is also a good description of world globalization has made. The constitutive flows of goods, persons, capital, ideas, information, and technologies have shrunk our contemporary world, rendering geographic borders less distinct and placing cultures in deeper contact with one another. At same time, very flows that

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