Death of a Discipline

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by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Columbia University Press

Due/Published March 2005, 136 pages, paper

ISBN 0231129459

New in paper (S05)

Today, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak remains one of the foremost figures in the study of world literature and its cultural consequences. In this new book she declares the death of comparative literature as we know it and sounds an urgent call for a "new comparative literature," in which the discipline is given new life--one that is not appropriated and determined by the market.

In this era of globalization, when mammoth projects of world literature in translation are being undertaken in the U.S., how can we protect the multiplicity of languages and literatures at the university? Spivak demonstrates how critics interested in social justice should pay close attention to literary form and offers new interpretations of classics such as Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. The book offers close readings of texts not only in English, French, and German, but also in Arabic and Bengali.

"Death of a Discipline is not a lament but a promise. Professor Spivak invites us to imagine an inclusive Comparative Literature freed from its traditional national anchorings, a border-crossing discipline honed by careful reading that encourages linguistic competence and includes the languages of the Southern Hemisphere 'as active cultural media.' This is a visionary work that charts not only the possibility of a reformed discipline that opens itself to learning from many quarters, but also identifies emergent collectivities."--Jean Franco, Columbia University

Contents

Chapter 1: Crossing Borders
Chapter 2: Collectivities
Chapter 3: Planetarity