Jack of All Trades, Master of None!

Ali Behdad, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA and Class of 1932 Short-Term Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of Comparative Literature presents “Jack of All Trades, Master of None!” This talk addresses the value of engaging in a form of literary comparison that embraces intellectual mobility, if not freedom, and shuns specialization. Such a practice of comparison aims to claim the figure of the amateur as a model to counter the cult of expertise and academic professionalism. Drawing on Edward Said’s brief discussion of the notion of “amateurism” in his 1993 Reith Lectures as an antidote to the challenges of professionalism that undermine “the intellectual’s ingenuity and will,” the talk first offers a brief history of the standardization of comparative literature as a discipline in postwar America, underscoring its disciplinary anxiety and obsession with a professional identity. It then elaborates how such an attitude, reasonable though it may seem, given the existential threats to the humanities in the academy since the emergence of Reaganomics and neoliberalism, has had its pitfalls, including what David Damrosch has astutely described as the predicaments of “scholarly tourism” and “literary jet-setting.”