Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Life on the Second Floor

Life on the Second Floor Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization. Edited by Haun Saussy. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. 280 p. At the start of Death of a Discipline (2003), Gayatri Spivak states that Comparative Literature in the United States underwent a sea change in the two years after she gave the lectures on which the book is based, such that her text should be read as the discipline’s “last gasp” (xii). These remarks prompted an acid response from a French reviewer, Didier Coste, on the literary theory website Fabula. Coste noted that, according to Spivak, “Things change at great speed in Comparative Literature in the USA—as they did, for example, between 2000 and 2002 (the cause of the disruption, it goes without saying, being the 11th of September).” And he went on: “From a less short-sighted, less ahistorical point of view, it would be just as striking that almost nothing has changed in the discipline in France for decades.” I am not convinced that things are as static in France as Coste claims, but Spivak’s way of engaging with the U.S. academic landscape she inhabits may well appear characteristic of that landscape, not least because of her acute http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Comparative Literature Duke University Press

Life on the Second Floor

HARRISON, NICHOLAS
Comparative Literature , Volume 59 (4) – Jan 1, 2007
Download PDF
17 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/duke-university-press/life-on-the-second-floor-ZOI9Lp3h0y
Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright 2007 by University of Oregon
ISSN
0010-4124
eISSN
1945-8517
DOI
10.1215/-59-4-332
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization. Edited by Haun Saussy. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. 280 p. At the start of Death of a Discipline (2003), Gayatri Spivak states that Comparative Literature in the United States underwent a sea change in the two years after she gave the lectures on which the book is based, such that her text should be read as the discipline’s “last gasp” (xii). These remarks prompted an acid response from a French reviewer, Didier Coste, on the literary theory website Fabula. Coste noted that, according to Spivak, “Things change at great speed in Comparative Literature in the USA—as they did, for example, between 2000 and 2002 (the cause of the disruption, it goes without saying, being the 11th of September).” And he went on: “From a less short-sighted, less ahistorical point of view, it would be just as striking that almost nothing has changed in the discipline in France for decades.” I am not convinced that things are as static in France as Coste claims, but Spivak’s way of engaging with the U.S. academic landscape she inhabits may well appear characteristic of that landscape, not least because of her acute

Journal

Comparative Literature – Duke University Press

Published: Jan 1, 2007

There are no references for this article.