Ray on Cooppan

Cooppan, Vilashini. "Ghosts in the Disciplinary Machine: The Uncanny life of World Literature." Comparative Literature Studies 41.1 (2004): 10-36

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Hi Shashi,

Some thoughts on world literature as Cooppan describes it.

It is striking to hear Cooppan making claims for the key position that "literature" plays within disciplinary battles at a time when many scholars perhaps deem "the literary" to be a category we've left behind, whether for good or ill. Perhaps most helpfully, she frames literature's contribution to the historical question of "what is new that is not also old" (27).

I'm fascinated with Cooppan's claiming of "generalism" as a "timely critical method" (11), which allows the rest of the essay to place pressure on what "timely" means as a claim about reading history's relationship to the present. This claim to a generalism redirects the claim to mastery that underlies syllabus canon-building into a claim about the mechanics of knowledge. This move, like the vampirism she discusses at the end, threatens to spread to other fields and their critics. She shares much with Rey Chow, who makes parallel claims for comparative literature in Age of the World Target. It makes sense, given our current intellectual dispositions, that we think of our fields less as ontologies--world literature less as "a catalogue of what is"---than epistemologies--world literature as "a way of knowing and mode of reading" (29).

I found striking Cooppan's description of Ngugi wa Thiong'o's 1980 novel Devil on the Cross, which was written on prison toilet paper (18). When I brought my students to our State Historical Society, we found a number of essays written by a graduate student activist who was imprisoned during civil rights protests. One of these papers describes how police horses trampled a young African American girl to death. World literature, in this sense, would allow scholars to juxtapose both along the lines of not just so-called historical period and genre, but also medium, since the use of toilet paper signifies the State's dismantling of writing through material restriction and the writing act as engaged with the State.

Freud's uncanny helps us imagine the "simultaneity" of world literature's space-time, the parataxis that radically reorganizes the political divisions (which is not to exempt "politics" from our own knowledge goals) produced in the interests of national state-bureacracy. Is this what Cooppan characterizes as the "Cold War ... bureacratization of literary study" (14)? She leaves ambiguous the terms of this controversy. In any case, the uncanny, which helpfully describes how familiarity and alienation are bound, helpfully crystallizes Dimock's formulation of the "shared denationalization" that accompanies writing across national boundaries and "make[s] each Italian and not Italian, Russian and not Russian" (19).

That globalization is best understood as irreducibly contradictory and double is a commonplace for many critics based in the Humanities and perhaps in other knowledge formations. She works through a model of globalization that thinks "space through time" and emphasizes heterogeneous, disruptive effects (27).

Cooppan emphasizes perhaps heavy-handedly the spectral presence of traditions and contexts--("in a word, haunted" [27]), which is to focus on partial presence or on the present as traces, which is why she adopts the discourse of "haunting" that has been so useful in our current intellectual climate. This vocabulary seems useful for a broad array of humanities scholars discussing the presence of the global in the local.

Cooppan's right to pick up Jameson's point that no third world national culture is "autonomous," which is to say that all are differently bound with first-world cultural imperialism (18). As an aside, I am curious about her characterization of a "universal currency" that can be "pounds sterling or abstract theory" (28). Picking up on the language of "universal currency," my advisor told me that history was the "coin of the realm," specifically in interdisciplinary job interviews. In any case, I would be interested in finding out more about Reingard Nethersole's version of globalization, which demands "theory that focuses on disjunctions in the fold between the plural ways and the dominant way of world making" (22).

One of Cooppan's signature moves in this essay is to use teaching as research: her world literature class serves as a case study for this research article. Since an approach to world literature produces the logic of the course, the course becomes the site of authorial praxis. The article oscillates between conventional scholarly discussion and her class. She begins two paragraphs by anchoring them in class or students in ways that springboard into discussions of intellectual fields (24-25), while other paragraphs turn to "standard" texts. The overall effect is that the classroom becomes one among many texts.

I'm interested in the currency of genre as a keyword in American cultural studies. I keep returning to genre as a preoccupation I thought I left behind early in graduate school when I turned to cultural theory. While genre served as a privileged a primary unit of literary analysis as it did for such so-called old school critics as Northrop Frye, Dimock and Cooppan's focus extends cultural studies. By focusing on genre as a point of intersection between history and the global revitalizes "the literary" as a category at a particular moment when literary studies as a broad category encompasses the critical movements Marjorie Levinson discusses in her PMLA "New Formalism" article. Perhaps the recurrence of genre as a research concern of mine speaks to the very recurrence that Cooppan identifies as central to genre.

Thanks for sending a thought-provoking article. Do send me other articles you're reading these days you'd like me to respond to and I'll do the same. :)

Ray