Interaction

May 17, 2006

The world and its texts

Modern Thought and Literature is a program for which texts are much more than what appears on the surface; they are a central way of reading and interpreting society.

The graduate program's new director, Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi, of the Department of French and Italian, earned her degrees and has held appointments in Congo (her birthplace), France, Belgium, Portugal, Italy and the United States. For her, MTL

L. A. Cicero

Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi, director of the Modern Thought and Literature Program, is a scholar of the literature of the Francophone world.

offers students the opportunity for almost limitless exploration of language, meaning and cultures. (http://www.stanford.edu/dept/MTL/)

Her own interests to some degree illustrate the potentially vast breadth and depth of the endeavor. In April she was one of the organizers of a conference called "Empire Lost: France and Its Other Worlds," on Francophone Studies. (http://www.stanford.edu/dept/fren-ital/francophonie/pages/index.html)

In the same vein, last fall she appeared on a KZSU radio show hosted by her department chair, Robert Harrison. (http://www.stanford.edu/dept/fren-ital/opinions/). The two critics discussed a topic that in many ways distills MTL's concerns: the work and lives of three black poets -Aimé Césaire of Martinique, Léon Gontran Damas of French Guyana and Léopold Senghor of Senegal. The trio met in Paris and in the 1930s founded the Negritude Movement, a sort of literary forerunner of black pride. Acquired languages, both in the linguistic and the political sense, marked their politics and their poetry, Boyi noted. Using radical images both "primitive" and liberating, they made language and anti-colonialism inseparable parts of a single struggle.

This blending of literature, imagery, politics and history, the cornerstone of the MTL program, has inspired some singularly original interdisciplinary work by graduate students.

One, for example, used anthropological and literary methods to study how occupiers of territories end up claiming the symbols of the natives they are displacing. Think Spaniards who appropriated Aztec icons, think European settlers in North America who fancied themselves Indians, or think the Middle East, which happens to be where this student was from. In all these cases, texts, languages and symbols end up contributing to the structures of a new society that at the same time creates new definitions for itself and for the very texts that are its foundation.

"We've been interdisciplinary for 30 years," said David Palumbo-Liu last summer, as he prepared to step down as director, and indeed MTL is a veteran of the interdisciplinary world.

Its first students were enrolled in 1971, when many universities were challenging traditional departmental arrangements; MTL's closest relative, the History of Consciousness program at UC-Santa Cruz, was founded at around the same time. The program's early leaders were Ian Watt, who also was founding director of the Stanford Humanities Center and who died in 1999, and Albert Guerard, who died in 2000. Their original motivation was to move literary studies at Stanford toward the modern and away from the formalism that characterized the English Department at the time, Palumbo-Liu said. More sociology, philosophy and history, in other words, and less close textual analysis.

"Basically, you were just adding one discipline to another," said Palumbo-Liu, a member of the Comparative Literature department. "But today, our approach is about complementarity, static, dissonance, agency, choices and different sets of understanding.

"Productive dissonance can displace people from their prejudices." It creates something new, in other words. It's more than the sum of its parts.

The program, though venerable, has not gone unchallenged. In early 2004 it was authorized to stay in business for five more years; the previous time it came up for review, however, it got only a two-year renewal, a decision that was challenged and later overturned. Boyi credits her predecessor with having saved the program.

"He explained to the administration the specificity of the program. He showed them that a student in MTL couldn't just move to another language department," she said.

Palumbo-Liu, looking back, remarked that critics "think English, Comp Lit and Modern Thought and Literature are all the same because they all deal with texts. We all read Faulkner, we all share the same object, it's true. But each of our experiences with that text is different. We're not literary-centered, though we use literature."

"We're not fuzzy," he went on. Ultimately, he said, students' topics "all have to do with community. We're asking how texts change claims to community, how they change links to family."

The program is both highly selective and highly rigorous, and graduates do very well, Boyi noted. They go on to teach in departments of English, film studies, area studies, feminist studies or anthropology. While they are here, they work as teaching assistants in a wide range of fields; the Feminist Studies program, in its statement for renewal in 2003, specifically noted that Modern Thought and Literature "is a source of extraordinary TAs."

The program gets around 130 applications a year. Boyi said three applicants have been admitted for fall 2006. "If they're truly interested in interdisciplinary work, I'm confident they'll come," she said. Their project proposals include a study of historical memory and one on law, literature and intellectual property.

At present there are around 30 students; their interests range geographically from South Asia to the Middle East to Latin America, thematically from families to imperialism to tourism, and materially from novels to photography to philosophy.

The program's leadership and faculty members, who all belong to departments, are emphatic that a disciplinary foundation is essential for good interdisciplinary work. A three-quarter core sequence introduces students to a wide range of theoretical tools, both classical and contemporary. As the program's mission statement makes clear, "as serious interdisciplinary study is impossible without a firm understanding of the disciplines under consideration, each student is expected to master the methods of one discipline to gain a firm foundation in a second field."

As evidence of its twin commitment to rigor and breadth, last year the program sponsored a conference on "Rational Choice Theory and the Humanities." The line-up included such heavy-hitters as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, and Stanford's own Nobel laureate and economist Kenneth Arrow, along with professors of business, philosophy, psychology, English and political science.

One of those participants was David Kreps, an associate dean at the Graduate School of Business, whose work on choice behavior has garnered him an international reputation. Kreps was the respondent at a session featuring a philosopher who teaches in French and political science departments, a philosopher of science who spoke about genomes and a literary scholar who spoke on "Rational Choice in Love." Looking back a few months later, he said the experience had been "fascinating but frustrating." The humanists and the social scientists were using the same words, he said, but to entirely different ends.

"It's going to take a lot of hard work" to bridge the distance, he said in an e-mail. "At this stage, I see no signs of a common tool. Common terms, describing radically different things, perhaps. But no common tool."

Hard work: that is precisely what interdisciplinarity is all about, in the view of Helen Brooks, associate director of the Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities (ISH) honors program, which more or less offers undergraduates what MTL gives graduate students. (ISH also sponsors joint Ph.D.s, which Brooks, who earned one, said are particularly demanding.) The two programs share an administrator, Monica Moore, universally praised by everyone interviewed for this article.

Brooks remembered that an emeritus professor of German studies and a longtime figure in ISH, Kurt Mueller-Vollmer, used to insist, "interdisciplinarity is a discipline."

Or, as Boyi and others say, there's something specific about the interdisciplinary possibilities of a program like MTL.

Modern Thought and Literature "must be kept alive," Boyi said. "It's an exceptional program. It attracts wonderful students who bring something to the university. They need the program, and we need to create a space for them to exercise and nurture their intellect."