Toni Morrison Putting Literature in the Limelight

At Princeton, comparative literature is a modest-sized department – about 100 people, if you combine faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate majors – but for four days during spring recess in March, the University served as the nexus of America’s comparative literature community. About 1,200 scholars filled Princeton’s lecture halls for the American Comparative Literature Association’s annual conference, discussing papers on a wide variety of subjects under the general heading of “The Human and Its Others.”

Conference attendance was double that of other recent ACLA conferences, according to Princeton professor Sandra Bermann, the vice president of the association. The broad theme, which encompassed everything from ancient texts to modern cinema, may have been partly responsible. (The call for papers asked participants to examine how literature draws the boundaries of what it means to be human and creates “others” against whom humans can be measured.)

The involvement of Princeton’s creative writing community attracted considerable interest as well. Keynote speaker Toni Morrison, the Robert Goheen Professor in the Humanities, drew a near-full-house crowd to Richardson Auditorium March 24, and creative writing faculty members C.K. Williams, Joyce Carol Oates, Gabe Hudson, and Susan Wheeler presented readings on March 23, the conference’s opening night.

Morrison’s talk took the form of an interview, with Valerie Smith, the Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature, guiding the discussion. Smith asked Morrison about her current projects, which include a turn as a guest curator at the Louvre, and about general themes, like the role of art in society. “Art summons meaning,’ Morrison remarked, “where other disciplines describe.” When Smith opened the session to questions from the floor, the conference attendees focused on Morrison’s existing works, asking about the title character of her 1973 novel Sula, the role of community in her 1998 novel Paradise, and her impressions of the 1998 film version of Beloved. “there’s never been a successful movie in the United States about slavery from the point of view of the slave,” Morrison said in response to the latter question. “But there is Gone With the Wind, and there is Birth of a Nation… My real satisfaction is that [the film] provoked a lot of people to buy the book.”

For Bermann, the chairwoman of the comparative literature department for the last eight years, the conference was an opportunity to raise the profile of the humanities on campus and display her department’s broad talents. Created in 1975, the department built a reputation for its faculty’s expertise in Western European works; in recent years the department has attracted faculty members whose specialties include Western European, South Asian, and Middle Eastern literatures.

Bermann said comparative literature, which as a major requires fluency in two languages other than English by graduation, attracts analytical students who seek an understanding of several cultures. While some go on to careers in academia, many pursue law, business, or medical school, she said.

At the conference, papers and discussions covered technology, medicine, politics, and social issues – a range of topics consistent with the department’s approach, Bermann said. “Literature,” she said, “enters into all of these domains.”

This was originally published in the April 19, 2005, issue of PAW.