Nabokov and World Literature
Year: 2006

In his paper "Nabokov and World Literature" Charles Stanley Ross thinks through the relationship between comparative literature and cultural studies by considering the absence of Nabokov's work in The Norton Anthology of World Literature. The problem seems to be that Nabokov's works are not susceptible to the kind of varying interpretations favored by the Norton's editors, although in practice, Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, for example, shows that even Nabokov's tightly controlled fiction can generate diverse responses. The more complex modes of reading that form the basis of David Damrosch's What is World Literature? are used to interrogate just how certain texts enter the canon of world literature. According to Ross, a survey of websites suggests that cultural studies is almost anything at all while at the same time there is general agreement, which perhaps needs challenging, that what defines the field is that it expands the horizon of academic analysis beyond high culture. In sum, Ross argues that were cultural studies enriched with some of the established practices of comparative literature, cultural studies would indeed develop into a formidable discipline. Charles Stanley Ross, "Nabokov and World Literature" page 2 of 10 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 8.2 (2006) Charles Stanley ROSS Nabokov and World Literature The question at a recent panel on Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies, and Comparative Cultural Studies organized by Steven Totosy de Zepetnek at the 2005 ACLA: American Comparative Literature Association meeting at Pennsylvania State University was whether it would make sense to combine comparative literature, which is allegedly under intellectual as well as institutional pressure, with the field of cultural studies, which flourishes. I have proposed to answer this question not so much from my own perspective as a Renaissance comparatist but as the current chair of the Program in Comparative Literature at Purdue University and, more immediately, as a result of my experience team teaching a graduate seminar titled "Twentieth Century World Fiction" during the fall semester of 2004. I am particularly interested in where Vladimir Nabokov would fit in a program in comparative literature and culture. Although too often overlooked, Nabokov fits very well, and we do not need to go very much further than Azar Nafisi's best seller Reading Lolita in Tehran to see that Steven Totosy's conjunction of comparative literature with cultural studies is right on the mark. But to understand why and to understand the institutional problems with such a conjunction we need to start with some basic definitions. A survey of websites suggests that cultural studies is almost anything at all, but I think there is general agreement, which perhaps needs challenging, that what defines the field is that it expands the horizon of academic analysis beyond high culture. It flattens out all texts, refusing to discriminate high from low. It also treats the world as a text. By that I mean something akin to what Phyllis Rose calls the razzle dazzle of clever readings. Whether by New Critics like Reuben Brower in Fields of Light or skilled deconstructionists two schools that move from opposite premises, that the text does or does not exist razzledazzle readings begin with a superficial understanding of a text and then magically make it say whatever the critic wants, usually the opposite of what the text seems to say. I admire the old razzle dazzle as much as anyone, in part because I am not very good at it myself, but also because it is part of an old hermeneutical and allegorical tradition. If, as Plato thought, the copulation of Jupiter and Hera on a mountain top was not fit for youth to read, why not explain away their misbehavior as a cosmological allegory representing the meteorological formation of a thunderstorm (Murrin 9) Cannot make any sense out of the six days of creation at the beginning of the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh? Then do what the Oxford reformers did in late fifteenth century England and explain that Moses, the supposed author of Genesis, had to tailor his words to fit the understanding of the unlettered Hebrew shepherds and ex slaves who comprised his audience. Attached to literature in this way, cultural studies, by which I now mean "coming at" a literary text from every possible contextual direction, makes sense, if not perfect sense. One only has to look at the work of Fredric Jameson to see how well the conjunction can work. Nonetheless, some objections have been raised. One is that although theoretically open to all cultures, cultural studies practitioners remain resolutely confined to English (on this and other objections to cultural studies, see, e.g. Hartley 1 5; Lee In part this is, I think, because so many cultural studies people are involved in English composition programs. A combination of comparative literature and cultural studies would seem to be a natural corrective, but without a serious change in academic climate, it is hard to see teachers of English composition trading in their theories of audience for work in a foreign language. They should, since arguably the best way to understand English is to compare it to another language double translation was the main tool of composition practice in the Renaissance (see Ascham) but they will not. Another objection is that cultural studies focus exclusively on discussions of race, class, and gender: issues of power. Many in humanities programs today see discussions of power as the provenance of Women's Studies programs, an area of interest for many comparatists too. The issue of power raises an objection that has been leveled against New Historicism, that analyses of medical discourse or cereal boxes or political systems do not provide convincing analogies to what is happening in literary texts. David Quint argues eloquently that although theoretically, in this kind of structuralist anthropology, a "literary text is one of an array of cultural prodCharles Stanley Ross, "Nabokov and World Literature" page 3 of 10 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 8.2 (2006) ucts that share a single deep structure or mentality," in practice the "text is juxtaposed with some other manifestation text, object, or event of the culture, often from its popular or exotic margins, in order to disclose through their homology a common habit of mind" (Epic and Empire 14) What Quint calls the element of surprise of this kind of analysis, what Rose called the razzledazzle, loses force because any text can be connected to any event: "there appears to be no control to determine the juxtaposition." Genre conventions are often conservative and therefore not faithful records of contemporary conditions. Quint therefore prefers to look not at analogies but at allusions in the epics he analyses, because allusions are evidence of a "literary and cultural memory" (14) I would add that seemingly contemporary political concerns in literary works are often out of date too. Nabokov points out that the social conditions Dickens railed against in Bleak House were thirty years out of date when he wrote the novel (Lectures on Literature 64) and critics today have realized that despite Tony Kushner's insistence on the political relevance of art, Angels in America was, politically, ten years out of date when it appeared in the 1990s as an attack on Reagan's policies of the 1980s. Kushner's 2001 work on Kabul suffered a different fate when its polemical attack on the West for allowing Afghanistan society to veil its women was eviscerated by the US American invasion of Afghanistan, an event promoted by none other than Kushner's bete noire, George Bush. The play is currently in rewriting, one hears, even as Kushner has made a welcome contribution (if I read the script correctly) to Steven Spielberg's work in his recent film Munich. So what is comparative literature? Quint's objections point us to the great redefinition of comparative literature in the last thirty years, away from Rene Wellek and Austin Warren's institutional defense of European civilization in their Theory of Literature to the more global reach that may be summed up by the title of David Damrosch's book What is World Literature? That redefinition finds an institutional home, at least at Purdue, in a comparative literature program that institutionalizes interdisciplinary connections between a catch all Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures and the Department of English. Many students use English as a second language to study twentieth century poetry or fiction and then look for a job teaching their native language. The program was originally set up to provide visibility and prestige to Margaret Church, who founded the journal Modern Fiction Studies and specialized in the Continental novel. Her last book before she died in an accident had chapters on Don Quixote, Tom Jones, The Sorrows of Young Werther, Madame Bovary, The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, Kafka's The Trial, Ulysses, and Mrs. Dalloway. In the early 1990s literary fields were expanded and formalized but then pretty much went out the window, and students began to take prelims on almost any branch of theory or form of art. Today we stress breadth at the M.A. level, based on the six volume Norton Anthology of World Literature, which is still the basis of undergraduate world literature courses at the smaller schools that typically hire our students. At the Ph.D. level we direct students to what looks important, whether theory or cultural studies. Some current students are writing what can only be called cultural studies dissertations, since they are not based on the work of major authors. At the same time, there is renewed interest in literature per se, and not just among the cohort of highly educated students from China at Purdue who are writing comparative dissertations on Chinese and US American authors of the tw