Gender, Language, and Performance in 21st Century Comparative Literature

Research Cluster Academic Year
2009
Research Cluster Project Director(s)
Elizabeth Horan, English Department
Isis McElroy, School of International Letters and Cultures
Claudia Sadowski-Smith, English Department
Description

Comparative Literature has undergone radical transformation over the past decade, moving well past its initial formulations in the work of European émigrés in the aftermath of WWII. The foundational commitment to working with multiple languages and across national boundaries has brought in influential theorists from fields such as psychoanalysis, translation studies, and anthropology, providing a location for the rise and flourishing of “theory” in the 1970s and 1980s. Comparative Literature likewise anticipated and favored the development of post-colonial and global studies in the 1990s. This cluster proposes that what “comes next” for Comparative Literature in the twenty-first century involves an attention to the global in the area of literature, language, and performative culture, marked by a focus on the dynamics of gender, class, and ethnicity/race. That new conjunction retains commitment to the transnational, but pays attention to the ever-more urgent need for cross-cultural understanding grounded in the particularities of the national. A certain convergence of ethnic/race work and comparative literature in the United States may already have begun. Even as the national and multiple linguistic formations persist, we wish to consider how the advent of multiple globalized discourses (mass media, electronic technologies, and multinational economies) augur a merging and overlapping of cultural traditions.