"The New Humanities: The Intercultural, the Comparative, and the Interdisciplinary."

Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek

Abstract: It is no secret that the discipline of comparative literature has fallen on hard times in many places but in particular in the US, the country where this discipline achieved its most wide-spread institutional establishment and recognition. At the same time, also in European countries -- e.g., Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, etc. -- following the situation in the US and owing to the appropriation by departments of English of theory and several other areas of scholarship comparative literature has pioneered, the discipline is undergoing both intellectual and institutional constriction and down-sizing. In countries such as the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, the discipline of comparative literature has not achieved notable prominence but even in these countries the few departments of the discipline are struggling. It is clear that comparatists everywhere -- especially established scholars (i.e., such with full professorship) -- insist on the primary notions of traditional comparative literature and (generally speaking) view the focus on theory when with developments in cultural studies, feminist scholarship, studies in popular culture, etc., with suspicion to outright hostility, a few scholars argue that it would make sense to incorporate new thought in cultural studies into comparative literature intellectually and institutionally, thus capitalizing on established and well-serving principles of comparative literature. The most obvious intellectual as well as institutional-administrative venue to uphold comparative literature as a discipline on the forefront of scholarship in the humanities would be "comparative cultural studies." Tötösy defines this emerging field thus: Comparative cultural studies is a field of study where selected tenets of the discipline of comparative literature are merged with selected tenets of the field of cultural studies meaning that the study of culture and culture products -- including but not restricted to literature, communication, media, art, etc. -- is performed in a contextual and relational construction and with a plurality of methods and approaches, inter-disciplinarity, and, if and when advantageous, including team work. In comparative cultural studies it is the processes of communicative action(s) in culture and the how of these processes that constitute the main objectives of research and study. However, comparative cultural studies does not exclude textual analysis proper or other established fields of study. In comparative cultural studies, ideally, the framework of and methodologies available in the systemic and empirical study of culture are favored. Areas such as comparative media studies, audience studies, popular culture, film and literature, etc. (fields of study within comparative literature a priori and then "discovered" in US-American cultural studies) are also fields of scholarship which would be incorporated into comparative cultural studies. Following an intellectual history based on the notions introduced above, Totosy's paper includes a discussion of the institutional and administrative history of comparative literature and cultural studies in a global context (Europe, North and South America, Asia, Australia, etc.).

Bioprofile:

Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek's <http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/totosycv.html> areas of scholarship are in comparative culture and media studies (theory and application), communication studies, comparative literature, postcolonial and ethnic minority studies, film and literature, audience studies, English, French, German, Central European, US-American, and Canadian cultures and literatures, history, bibliographies, new media and knowledge management, and editing. At the University of Alberta Department of Comparative Literature 1984-2000, since 2000 Tötösy lives in Boston and is, concurrently, professor of comparative media and culture studies at the University of Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. Author of papers and books published on both sides of the Atlantic and in Asia, Totosy is editor (founding) of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/totosycv.html and editor of the monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies <http://www.thepress.purdue.edu/series/compstudies.asp> & <http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/ccs-purdue.html>, both the journal and the series published by Purdue University Press. E-mail: <clcweb@purdue.edu> & <totosy@medienkomm.uni-halle.de>.