To World, To Globalize--Comparative Literature's Crossroads

The onus is on us, the practitioners of comparative literature, to examine the degree to which recurrent patterns of historical coincidence, between what we do and what is happening in the world, might entail a necessary complicity on our part. While we cannot deny that we are in the world, we can and do differ on how we are of it. A continuous self-examination and critical alertness to our place in the world is our only glimpse into our relationship to the world. Such reflection is also what defines what we do and the nature of the consequences of our doing it. Comparative literature is neither a subject, nor an object, nor is it a problem. Comparative literature is a practice. It is what its practitioners do. These practitioners are subjects, they objectify their material, and their practices may well be problematic. But foremost comparative literature is defined not by a corpus, a subject matter, an object, or an immutable set of problems. Rather, comparative literature takes on its significance by what is done in its name and by how those practices become ascertained, instituted, and managed. The verb "to manage" spans a wide register. It reaches from husbanding and cultivation to command and control to maintaining a level of precarious sustainability, especially when uttered in the future tense and in the first person plural, i.e., "we'll manage." There are fields defined by practice and fields defined by the corpus or object on/in which that field s practitioners operate. An example of the first would be the dancer and of the second the physician; dance is defined by the acts of performance, medicine by the body or physic on which the physician works. One could say that literature is a corpus on and in which the comparatisi performs, but literature s cor-