文学经典的重构与比较文学的未来——戴维·戴姆罗什访谈录

戴维·戴姆罗什 生安锋

(美国哥伦比亚大学;清华大学,北京,100084)

Sheng: You get both your BA (1975) and PHD (1980) from Yale. But where did you get your master’s degree? I know you have written some stuff on Kenneth Burke. Did Yale School, the Deconstruction thoughts such as J. Hillis Miller and Paul de Man’s ideas have any influence on you? If yes, how?

Damrosch: At Yale, there was not a separate master’s degree program. You just entered directly into the PHD program after the BA. They would only give you a master’s degree if you left early as a kind of consolation prize. So I’ve never got an MA. Just a BA and PHD.

And this was very much the time that Paul de Man was in his prime. I took one course with him and I was very struck by his work. I would say I’ve learned a lot from reading him and studying with him, though he wasn’t one of my closer teachers, because I was always a little put off by his radical skepticism and then his insistence that nothing meant anything and there was no connection with the outside world. I always had a feeling that there should be a social and ethical component to literature.

Sheng: You are the editor of the six-volumeLongmanAnthologyofWorldLiterature(2004).

Damrosch: There are other six volumes of British literature, altogether 12 volumes. Each anthology six thousand pages.

Sheng: Wow, twelve volumes! I also saw some comments about the differences in your selection of literary works and in that of other more established anthologies such as the Norton. So what are your general standards of selecting from the vast seas of literary works in history? How do you choose the best and most representative work from other cultures and other nations?

Damrosch: These are good questions! The first anthology I got closely involved with was the British one, which was in a way easier because it was just one country. There my friends and I with whom I edited the volume were very much interested in trying to connect literature to its society and its times. We felt thatNortonAnthologiesofEnglishLiteraturewas very belle-lettristic, very much a formal literary canon. It was a sort of product of the era of the New Criticism and it was falling behind the times of the growing interest in the social connections of literature. I also felt that as comparativist, looking at the British literature, that it was very limited in the story it was telling about English literature, so it was doing nothing about Ireland or Wales or Scotland, which are all part of British literary culture. So I want to bring some sense of Irish material, bring in some Welsh material even in translation into the anthology. And also to see British literature as kind of literary space where many cultures come together. So it was already sort of comparative kind of anthology of British literature. So that we had for example a great medieval writer named Marie de France, who wrote in French, but her whole career she spent in London. And we put her in our anthology, because we said, well, just like T.S. Eliot, she came to London and made her career there and she became part of this literary environment of the British Isles. In fact, her very name Marie de France means Marie from France. She was called that because she was in England and she wasn’t anymore in France. So the anthology was really an attempt to open up the idea of British literary culture and multi-culture of the British Isles.

When I came to work on theWorldAnthology, I was thinking then even more, that the great challenge there was to create strong connections for students and teachers. The older anthologies in the United States that had been called world literature, used to be European literature, western European literature, literature from a few western European cultures. So when I was starting on theLongmanAnthologyand getting together the group to do it, I was really thinking about how to make connections across cultures and how to make the material teachable for faculty who are not trained in that area. That’s the real problem, not students understanding it so much as getting the teachers to feel comfortable teaching it. I feel that a great work of literature, if it’s well translated, can speak directly to us, but the faculty had to be willing to teach it and have to be shown how to do that. So we put a lot of effort into writing introductions and making selections of very teachable works and then making connections across cultures. We included sections called cross-currents, little clusters of things that will give you a sense of the literary culture that the given work came out of. And I am trying to introduce students and faculty into these distinctive qualities of each major culture we were talking about as well as on the growing process of globalization in more recent centuries.

Sheng: Once the anthology has been published, it will be regarded as a kind of canon, and it will be canonized or anthologized. So how could you maintain the freshness and vitality of the anthology?

Damrosch: Indeed we have just brought out the second edition of theWorldLiteratureAnthology. So after about just five years the third edition just came out ofBritishAnthology. They do get revised every several years and part of the idea is to change along with the changing discipline as new discoveries coming in. And a lot of it is affected by what teachers actually teach. The anthology partly is a created canon, but mostly it is a teaching tool to use in courses. And if we put in selections, if people start using them then we can keep them in. If no one will teach something we put in then maybe we take it out to make room for something else.

Sheng: Do you do questionnaires or some other statistic investigations to...

Damrosch: We do very extensive questionnaires with dozens of people who use our anthologies and also people who use the rival anthologies. We are trying to ask what they are using that we don’t have, what could we do to our anthology to get it used by more people?

Sheng: How could world literature contribute to more cosmopolitan cultures and a more cosmopolitan world?

Damrosch: If it is taught well it can make very positive contributions. I think if it is taught badly, it does not make any real contribution. And I have a complete example. There is another anthology called theBedfordAnthologyofWorldLiterature. That was edited entirely by five people in an English Department and they didn’t really know much about the cultures and literatures of the world. They meant well but it is very superficial, not effective in introducing the different cultures involved, and the faculty don’t use it very much. I think the fact that the faculty didn’t use it reflects the fact that they are largely giving an American view of the rest of the world. That’s the kind of bad cosmopolitanism, which just really confirms the greatness of your country and your ability to admire the rest. So I think if world literature is taught well and understood well by scholars, it is a tremendously important vehicle for increasing understanding of the world. Of course, literature doesn’t directly reflect any society, but in its transformation it gives kind of window into the soul of society in a way more than a literal mirroring world. As Aristotle said, it is more philosophical than history for this reason and it is a great way for people to encounter another culture in its real depth and complexity. So it can really contribute to a cosmopolitan view of the world and greater understanding of the peoples, not just merging together but really understanding the differences in culture. And also, because literature is so inherently international, every literary tradition has been created in dialogue with several or many other literatures. It’s very important to show that.

Sheng: So you have to a lot of experts who are familiar with different cultures and literatures to get this job done?

Damrosch: It helps, and I also think one thing we need is to train people more to do more collaborative work.

Sheng: Do you also collaborate with the local experts and scholars?

Damrosch: That’s right. They were the area experts who know a great deal about the cultures we were treating. For theWorldLiteratureAnthology, we have 11 co-editors who are experts in different areas and material. I work in a dozen languages myself but there are lot more languages that I don’t work in for a lot of other areas in the world. It’s very important for me to have a really expert sinologist, we had an expert in Japan and an expert in South Asia and expert in Arabic literature, an expert in Latin America, and people in different parts of the European literatures so that we could work together really, work from real knowledge.

Sheng: Do you remember what you have chosen from Chinese literature? Could you say a few words about that?

Damrosch: Yes. It’s interesting that in the west the classical texts are better known than modern texts. So we have a fairly strong representation of a good selection of Tang Dynasty poetry, good selections from Du Fu, Han Yu and Wang Wei. And also from theAnalectsofConfucius(lunyu) and theBookofSongs. We have some really early material fromTheBookofSongsandAnalects, andZhuangziand a section on Daoism and then a good deal of Tang Dynasty poetry and then some selections in later volumes like theJourneytotheWest, we have maybe about seventy five pages. We can’t fit that much in but it’s enough to give a flavor for it. And in the twentieth century, we should have more than we do. We have Zhang Ailing and some other Chinese figures in the 20thcentury. We have Lu Xun of course, and we also have Hu Shi, the “Method of Manifesto on Literary Production.” We started the 20thcentury volume with a whole series of modernist manifestos about what should literature be like. And one of our key texts is from Hu Shi, who is such an interesting figure, himself a figure of cultural translation and transferal, so we have him next to some European and Latin American manifestos. It is very nice to combine that.

Then we also have quite a lot of Japanese material, including from the Kokinshu and Man’yoshu, and good selections ofTheTaleofGenjiandTheTalesoftheHaikai. We include other texts from the Heian women’s court culture along with the great narrative by Murasaki, such as thePillowBookofSeiShonagon; and then going up into later periods, we have the great dramatist Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s play “Love Suicides at Amijima,” and going into the late 19thand early 20thcentury we include the Meiji Period writer Higuchi Ichio, who is a really interesting short story writer, a woman writer, and later on we have Mishima Yukio and several other modern Japanese writers.

One of the things I wanted to do also was to get beyond the focus only on major cultures, which tended to be typical of world literature courses in the United States. So we also have Korean and Vietnamese literature, which I don’t think will often be found in other literature survey courses before in the US.

Sheng: You are considered a new star in the Western academia. You are not as well-known in China as J. Hillis Miller or Frederic Jameson, but they are of the older generation of course. As a representative literary theoretician of the younger generation, what do you think of your theoretical orientation and theirs?

Damrosch: I think that Hillis Miller and Jameson and indeed Gayatri Spivak and a number of others came of age in a period where comparative literature was very much about the elaboration of literary theory. It was a central occupation of comparative literature, in the United States in particular, where all these people trained. The discipline was very much about importing European literary theories into the Untied States and then trying to develop American responses, not so different from what I hear a good deal of in China now, whether there may be a Chinese literary theory or not, a similar process. I myself came to feel over the years that pure theory can become very abstract, so I am much more interested in theoretically informed works that were very closely based on literary analysis of actual literary texts. I tend to derive my own thoughts from thinking hard about literature and then thinking about theoretical implications coming from literature.

I also felt that I had a complaint with literary theory of my youth of the 1970s when I was a student, that it was often based on very narrow sampling of literature: so that Paul de Man really worked in European Romanticism and derived his theories out of that; Hillis Miller worked on the Victorian novel and he was interested in French theory but he pretty much applied it to one nation’s novels in one century. So it’s very specific and I think today’s theorists really have a lot to gain by taking a much wider literary base.

Sheng: Thank you. You have also written some articles about Edward Said and you mentioned some of your hesitancy about his theories. So could you elaborate a bit more on postcolonialism in general and Said’s theories in particular?

Damrosch: Well there was a tremendous piece of good luck for me that I was studying at Yale in the era of Paul de Man, and happen to get hired by Columbia just a couple of years after Edward Said had published hisOrientalismand it was getting all this tremendous response. And over these years from 1980 when I started teaching in Columbia through the 80s and 90s, he attracted a tremendous number of excellent students from all over the world to come to work with him. He was for many years the head of the Comparative Literature Program at Columbia and I was the director of graduate studies at that time, so I learned a great deal from Said during that time. It was very exhilarating to see his way of opening up literature to political issues and to social concerns and power issues of that sort. My hesitation is I mean it’s a very complicated legacy that he has. His most creative students have often ended up doing rather different things than he has. And I think the shift from postcolonial emphasis to the study of globalization marks move from a certain kind of direct tie to particular sort of political situation to more general process.

And also I think that when I emphasize collaboration, this differs from Said, who created his own self in a very dramatic and admirable way but was a very independent person. His idea was that the intellectual was a very independent person who almost in principle would not work with other people intellectually, while I am very much interested in collaborative work and really thinking of how we can encompass more of the world than one person alone can know about.

Sheng: Thank you. What are your most concerned issues in your study of literary theories and literature?

Damrosch: I am personally very interested in translation theory these days, which is a very newly prominent topic in comparative literature as we see.

Sheng: Do you mean cultural translation?

Damrosch: Actually linguistic translation, the translation of literary texts, which is now a matter of cultural translation as well as linguistic, the two together, that’s interesting certainly, because we really have to do a lot of work in translation now if we are going to look globally because we can’t know enough languages directly. So I am interested in that very much. I think genre theory is quite interesting, as is comparative poetics as a form of theory. For example, in the Longman anthology we have sections in several places called “What Is Literature,” so in the section of Tang Dynasty, we have a collection of texts on theories of the time about what is literature, and in the South Asian section we have a collection on Sanscrit theory of literature and aesthetics, just for a few pages, 10 to 20 pages for several different things, so that the students could actually see that literature meant something different in each of these societies (and indeed in ancient Greece) from us today and begin to understand that. This is a very interesting theoretical question of how literature is created, partly a matter of reception theory and partly just poetics. So these I think are the theoretical aspects that I am most interested in.

Sheng: Since the last decades of the twentieth century, many scholars in both the East and the West have described their worries about the vitality of literary studies and its right to continue to exist, so we could easily find that many literature research institutions have been changed into cultural studies and comparative literature studies have been changed into comparative cultural studies. So do you think that cultural studies will devour literary studies?

Damrosch: That’s a good question. I don’t think it ought to or needs to. Obviously, the move away from pure Formalism towards the engagement with literature and culture makes possible a vital affirmative connection between literature studies and cultural studies, which I think is beneficial to both. I think literary studies should always retain an important place in the study of culture because literary texts are the most rich and complex and fullest ways to think about culture. At the same time, I also think that it’s good for literary studies be connected to all forms of cultural expression that help us to understand literature better. And pragmatically I think it can also help us lead students to read more literature since they grow up today in a visual culture, often not reading to begin with, so that connecting literature to cultural studies can actually draw them towards literature. So rather than devouring literature, it may really help keep literature from just becoming a very small antiquarian exercise and keep that vitally connected to the current culture.

Sheng: That’s very good perception.

Damrosch: You can see this reflected in the talk I am going to give at Tsinghua about Hip-hop lyrics. When I was at Yale in the 70s, no one would ever have brought a piece of popular music into a seminar of Paul de Man, it would just not be thinkable, all you wanted to talk about was Rousseau or Proust. But I think a vital literary culture would connect to everything going on around it.

Sheng: So what do you think of the future of comparative literature?

Damrosch: This is something I am very interested in and I think it’s a very hopeful time for comparative literature. It is interesting to observe that a generation ago, in the 1970s and even through the 80s, when so many departments were so concerned with literary theory, that study was a very elite study and a very top-down study. It was oriented towards leading schools and then towards graduate students, and a little bit might trickle down to undergraduates, but not necessarily very much. I think that the discipline had the danger of becoming rather ingrown and cut off from the mass of most people interested in literature, and particularly the undergraduates. And I think that the discipline, certainly in the United States, and I suspect also here, will not thrive if it does not have a substantial student base of undergraduate students. And I think now that the emphasis on world literature is a very good thing for comparative literature as a subject matter to study because that really comes from the bottom up, very strong. We see this at least in the US where world literature is becoming very popular partly because there are so many students who are born abroad or whose parents who were born all over the world, and such a strong immigrant population can bring the world into the classroom. And also in our primary schools and high schools, there is less emphasis on, just American literature, British literature, and a lot more getting in contact with the world. There is a certain sense of urgency that a lot of us have in the US in particular, that we can’t afford to be cut off in isolation, just think that we are all that matters, we can’t think of ourselves as our own “middle kingdom” any more, as we briefly could, and there is another sense to connect with other societies. So I think that comparative literature has a major role in helping students see the world through world literature and to do it well.

Maybe just an example of this. Our American Comparative Literature Association has seen its membership at least double in the last decade. And we have more and more people want to come to our annual conference. Ten years ago we might have 250 people coming to the meeting annually, really a very small thing with maybe about 125 papers being given and only about twice as many people coming. This year (2009) at Harvard we’ll have almost 2,000 papers being given. So it’s a big change in the last decade and a lot of these people coming are not themselves based on the comparative literature departments or trained as fulltime comparatists. But they are doing work that brings them into doing comparative studies and then they see our discipline as a place to come and share their work outside the boundaries of national literature. In fact, even in the graduate course I am teaching at Harvard for new graduate students in comparative literature, 2/3 of the students are not in our department at all. They are coming from 6 different departments to learn about how to do comparative study for their own purposes. So we have students from the English, and from African American Studies, from the Divinity School, from East Asian Studies, from the Middle East Studies, all coming to take this course for comparative literature studies. I think this is very helpful, very healthy, and that a comparative literature class should be a place for people to meet from across the particular traditions they are working in.

Sheng: These interdisciplinary seminars can surely benefit the students a lot more than the traditional ones can do. My last question is about your family influence. Your brother Leo Damrosch is also a distinguished scholar in English literature and European philosophy and was recently head of Harvard English Department. So we can’t help asking your family situation. Could you say something about your parents and how they educated you brothers and how they have influenced you?

Damrosch: It’s very interesting. My father was an Anglican missionary who worked and met my mother in the Philippines and both my brothers were born in Philippines in fact. My brother Leo was in fact interned by the Japanese soldiers but also my other brother was born after the war in the Philippines. I think partly from that background, I grow up with a sense of national awareness, even though I have never been to the Philippines myself, but I was well aware of this wider world. And my father’s family had been European Jewish musicians who emigrated to the United States 125 years ago. So I always have a sense of connection both to German culture in particular because these ancestors were very German, very connected with musical scene, they were musicians, and friends of all the major composers in Germany in the 19thcentury. I am about 1/4 Jewish and my great grandparents converted as Christian and my father was actually a priest, and so by heritage I’m partly Jewish but also some European because I feel more German than Jewish in a way. There is much of both. So that background kind of gave me a more international outlook on the one hand towards Europe and on the other hand towards Asia through my parents’ Philippine experiences. My father had been fluent in Igorot and I kind of grew up hearing these phrases still. Igorot is the language of the mountain people in Luzan in Philippines. He had been living with them. So I think that was an influence for me.

My brother Leo was a strong influence because he was so much older, he was 11 years older, so he was already in college and graduate school from when I was fairly young. I saw him studying English literature and I became interested in the idea of an academic life. I was also reading a lot. I realized one could become a professor also. I also sort of guess that as a younger brother I wanted to differentiate myself a little from my older brother, and that’s why I branched out for a different direction, maybe unconsciously. But I always looked up to him very much and admired his ability to really focus deeply on one area. I am a little the opposite as I like to look all around to much different things, but very much he was a model who was a real intellectual and someone who really loves to think about literature. So there are two professors and one priest in my family. My middle brother became a priest like our father. I think for my brother Leo and me, being a professor sort of like having a secular pulpit.

Sheng: So it’s also kind of mission? Literary mission?

Damrosch: Exactly, I have a very evangelical feeling about the importance of literature, I want to convert people to love it and take care of it.

Sheng: Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to interview you!