Death of a Discipline
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
"Death of a Discipline is a visionary text which can be
considered one of the most cutting-edge theoretical works
today."
—Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism
"This thought-provoking slim book is written in an eclectic style . .
. We have been on a planetary tour, which makes us rethink human
collectivity across borders—thanks to Spivak."
—Ferial J. Ghazoul,
H-Gender-Mideast
"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
"Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's Death of a Discipline does not
tell us that Comparative Literature is at an end. On the contrary, it
charts a demanding and urgent future for the field, laying out the
importance of the encounter with area studies and offering a radically
ethical framework for the approach to subaltern writing. Spivak deftly
opposes the 'migrant intellectual'approach to the study of alterity. In
its place, she insists upon a practice of cultural translation that
resists the appropriation by dominant power and engages in the
specificity of writing within subaltern sites in the idiomatic and vexed
relation to the effacements of cultural erasure and cultural
appropriation. She asks those who dwell within the dominant episteme to
imagine how we are imagined by those for whom literacy remains the
primary demand. And she maps a new way of reading not only the future of
literary studies but its past as well. This text is disorienting and
reconstellating, dynamic, lucid, and brilliant in its scope and vision.
Rarely has 'death'offered such inspiration."
—Judith Butler, UC
Berkeley
"In this remarkable series of lectures Gayatri Spivak outlines the
genealogy of Comparative Literature as a discipline, its successive
intellectual affiliations, and the potentialities that an association
with area and cultural studies opens. Through a complex and rigorous
exploration of the various places of enunciation from which a
comparatist perspective can be built up, she traces the contours of a
fascinating intellectual project grounded in a 'planetary' vision as
opposed to 'globalization.' It is essential reading."
—Ernesto
Laclau, professor of comparative literature, SUNY Buffalo
"Death of a Discipline is certainly the most important,
sustained statement about the discipline of Comparative Literature to
have appeared in English since Charles Bernheimer's 1995
report."
—John Mowitt, CLIO
"One of the obligatory books of this decade for comparatists... One
of the most passionate defenses... of Comparative
Literature."
—Roland Greene, SubStance
For almost three decades, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has been ignoring
the standardized "rules" of the academy and trespassing across
disciplinary boundaries. Today she 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 the era of globalization, when mammoth projects of world literature
in translation are being undertaken in the United States, 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. Through close readings of texts not
only in English, French, and German but also in Arabic and Bengali, Spivak
practices what she preaches.
Acclaim for Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and her work:
"[Spivak] pioneered the study in literary theory of non-Western
women."—Edward W. Said
"She has probably done more long-term political good, in pioneering
feminist and post-colonial studies within global academia, than almost any
of her theoretical colleagues." —Terry Eagleton
"A celebrity in academia . . . create[s] a stir wherever she goes."
—The New York Times
Contents
Chapter 1: Crossing
Borders
Chapter 2: Collectivities
Chapter 3: Planetarity
About the Author
Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak is the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at
Columbia University. She is the author of Myself I Must Remake; In
Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics; The Post-Colonial Critic:
Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues; Outside in the Teaching Machine;
and A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the
Vanishing Present. She is the translator of Jacques Derrida’s Of
Grammatology and Mahasweta Devi’sImaginary Maps, Breast Stories,
Old Women, and Chotti Munda and his Arrow.
From the series The Wellek
Library Lectures
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