LETTER FROM THE ACLA PRESIDENT, MARGARET HIGONNET

Comparative Literature, Summer 2004 by Higonnet, Margaret

Dear Colleagues,

In this bulletin, we remember several major comparatists who have died in the past year. As Haun Saussy wraps up the next of our ten-year Reports on the Discipline, it is a fitting moment to recognize figures whose contributions have shaped our current work, including Thomas Greene, who wrote one of the early reports, and Haskell Block, one of our early presidents. Haun's report, available on the web ( see the link at www.acla.org), points us toward the future as well. Many have already responded to the posted papers, and one of our panels at the MLA in Philadelphia will offer a forum for further public debate.

Turning toward the future, the ACLA Board decided this year to build up our endowment, in order to ensure our continued support for graduate student travel to the annual conference and for other awards such as the Charles Bernheimer Prize. Elaine Martin and Elizabeth Richmond-Garza have been instrumental in establishing an investment fund, beginning with a memorial contribution from the sister of Charles Bernheimer. To date, we have paid for travel and prizerelated expenses out of the small margin generated by our conferences. This year, for the first time, we made an appeal to present and past members of the board, and we are pleased to report their strong response. We hope the membership will also want to support either travel costs or our prize awards. I will be writing you, cap in hand, welcoming small as well as larger contributions to increase an endowment currently about one-twentieth that of comparable learned societies. As you know, if a majority of us contribute, national foundations are more likely to consider helping us as well.

The success of our annual conferences testifies to the intellectual strength of the organization that these tax-deductible gifts will support. This year's meeting at Ann Arbor on "Global Networks," ably hosted by Tobin Siebers, won uniformly enthusiastic responses to panels on a wide variety of topics such as translation, word and image, meter, Arabic literature, and the material culture of collecting. Excellent participants found the extended workshop format intense and stimulating. Sunny and spring-like, Ann Arbor felt like San Marcos to many of us from the chilly zones-minus the aquatic activities. For the first time in my memory, a reading of poetry held us enthralled at the banquet.

We were pleased that ten percent of the panelists came from abroad, in spite of impediments to travel in recent years. Visa difficulties continue to inhibit participation of colleagues from other nations and complicate the return of international students to their studies at the beginning of term. New legislation hinders editorial work on journals and collaborative books by obstructing or even censoring contributions from countries considered politically sensitive.

As Aijun Appadurai suggested in his plenary speech, "global networks" is a phrase with embedded tensions. It suggests optimism about international collaboration as well as fear of conspiracy. The term may remind us of terrorism, of the power of the internet to voice the concerns of the weak, or of the increasingly pyramidal structures of publishing and other media that have created a crisis for our libraries. Many of these themes cropped up at the conference: the phrase set a general context for thinking across linguistic, national, and disciplinary boundaries. They will undoubtedly continue to find expression in next year's conference, which will take place at Pennsylvania State University College Park, hosted by Carey Eckhardt. Further information about the conference can be found through the link at our website: www.ada.org.

Several ongoing publication projects will, I think, be of interest to the membership. As announced earlier, David Damrosch is editing a volume on "Approaches to Teaching World Literature" for the MLA "Approaches" series. The MLA Publications Committee has also launched a new series, "World Literatures Reimagined," aimed specifically at comparatists. Books in this series will consider particular literatures in an international context, addressing, for example, emergent literatures, less-taught literatures of central and eastern Europe, or literatures of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Guidelines are available at the MLA web site (www.mla.org). We hope that members will seize this opportunity to bring a comparative perspective to the MLA's publication series.

Also of interest to us is the e-book history series published by the American Council of Learned Societies. The electronic medium is a perfect medium for literary histories with an eye to the interrelationships between word and image, such as studies of emblem poetry, the romantic culture of ruins, or the typographical play of avant-garde printing. Although the idea of such comparison goes back to the ancients, the availability of this new medium is encouraging scholars to write new kinds of books.

Finally, a personal word about the politics of language acquisition, whose pertinence to our field is self-evident. A new map showing language distribution in the United States, available at the MLA web site, offers encouraging evidence that many children master two or more languages because their home language is not English. I suggest that we comparatists capitalize on this evidence. Several years ago a colleague gave me a pin resembling a no-smoking sign, with a slash through the word monolingualism. Many of us complain that most college students are monolingual. We could make plurilingualism a national goal of education in America. A holistic perspective readily connects the scholarship and teaching most of us do at the college or university level to the early development of language skills. It is in the early years that languages can most easily be learned, and the mastery of a second language makes that of a third even easier. Furthermore, there is considerable evidence that those taught the grammar of other languages learn better English.