Customer Reviews

Death of a Discipline (The Wellek Library Lectures)

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Contrary to what is all too kindly asserted by a few friendly reviewers, obscure rather than brilliant, mannerist and unquotable as its style is, Death of a Discipline makes one thing clear: the author thinks and wants to make us believe that Comparative Literature IS dead (and had been long comatose before she dealt it the last blow). Since she has later confessed or pretended that she refers to a very obsolete type of American Comparative Literature only, being ignorant of other critical sites, this would be no news at all and could not severely hurt our scholarly sensibilities, if Prof. Spivak had some coherent and well informed approach to offer in the stead of this "old Comp. Lit.". But the "New Comparative Literature" she advocates has little to commend it, if we judge by the scientific looseness and wildly eclectic name throwing of her own practice in this book and generally in her critical and theoretical production of the last twenty years.

The discipline Prof. Spivak actually manages to kill with this book is the very "Subaltern Studies" of which she was reportedly the founding Mother. Many academics around the world, including the most knowledgeable in her own country of origin, India, have repeatedly denounced her abuse of deconstructive techniques to justify the erratic fragmentation and savage distorsion of classics and non-canonical texts alike in order to serve a supposedly radical political vision, which I would summarize simply as "multiple jingoism".

The confusingly extremist views developed in this book have nevertheless made a "must read" of it for a couple of years, it has been widely reviewed and debated in many forums, and almost every single paper in the forthcoming ACLA decennial report of 2004 refers to it. I suppose its use, in the long run, will have been to help restore a good measure of intelligent solidarity and sanity (against an identifiable imperialist threat) among the less nihilistic World Literature teachers and researchers across all five continents. It was fortunately the general tonality of the Jubilee Convention of the International Comparative Literature Association (Venice, September 2005) with 170 participants from many areas, including South Asia, East Asia and the two Americas.

Gayatri Spivak's _Death of a Discipline_ does not argue, as the title may suggest, that a discipline--specifically comparative literature-- is "dead" as in it is at (and passed) the end; rather Spivak writes for a future (one that is vastly different than the one it may have if it does not -- in many senses -- "die") of the discipline that is currently called comparative literature. Spivak argues that comparative literature must engage in a "chiasmus" with area and cultural studies, and in this way "die" as a supposidly self-contained discipline.

Along the same lines, Spivak charts, in brillinat detail, the historical and political climates for these aforementioned disciplines, and she calls for a "new" (yet unknown) "comparative literature" -- maybe not even calling it that anymore. Furthermore, she calls for an ethical (without beinng ontological; thus, an ethics without ontology) frame for the approach(ing) to "subaltern" studies and writing. Also, she compassionately and vigorously demands a practice, a new practice, of "cultural translation" that refuses and resists the colonization by any hegemonic power, force, system.

Spikav asks those who work within the hegemonic episteme to imagine how "we" are viewed, understood, known by those for whom literacy (which everyone on Amazon.com takes for granted) remains the primary demand.

Finally, and I MUST admit that there is much more to this engaging text then what I am surfacing now, Spivak plots an alternative ways of reading not only the futures of comperative literary -- or, beter, comperative literatures -- but also its (various) pasts.

I am sure that this brilliant and timely text will be of aid to other disciplines in the Humanities (and Social Sciences) in figuring out, working through, how this or that discipline must "die" in order to become a new -- and at once more open and self-critical.

Cheers to Death!