PUEBLA, MEXICO — "The dreamer who dreams us," William Egginton was saying, "is in constant danger of discovering that he too is living a dream."
It was the kind of statement one might expect to hear at a gathering of literary scholars, especially those whose specialties, like Egginton's, include baroque and neo-baroque aesthetics, a field that fixates on the shifting line between reality and illusion. But the remark by the Johns Hopkins professor of Spanish literature sounded especially apt in this uber-baroque, Spanish Colonial dream of a city, where the American Comparative Literature Assn. was holding its annual meeting last week.
Like Tolstoy's happy families, academic conferences are all alike in some ways. They offer a chance to catch up on gossip, bat around the latest continental theories and, hopefully, cram in a bit of sightseeing while sampling the local cuisine.
But the ACLA, which promotes the study of literature across different languages, cultures and disciplines, hoped that this year's venue choice would prove especially enticing to scholars slogging through another Midwestern or Northeastern winter. "It's a wonderful place to meet," said Margaret R. Higonnet, an English professor at the University of Connecticut and past ACLA president, watching her colleagues sign in at the elegant Hotel Colonial. "It's so wonderful that probably no one will go to the talks."
No danger of that, really. With a scheduled lineup of about 130 seminars, book exhibits and an international forum on "trends in comparative literature outside the U.S.," the three-day conference seemingly aspired to offer something for every stripe of "comparatist," as the scholars call themselves.
Comparative literature is a fairly young discipline, and a demanding one. Comparatists build their research by comparing and contrasting the literature of at least two languages, or of different cultural traditions or nations that share the same language, or between literature and another type of art (film, painting, hip-hop). "Comp lit" studies look beyond the physical borders of nation-states to examine trends and archetypes across many cultures.
In the early 1960s, when the ACLA was founded, the discipline was viewed by some with suspicion, as an odd hybrid. Today the field has established its scholarly bona fides, and from a handful of isolated polymaths the ACLA has grown to 1,200 members, said Lois Parkinson Zamora, a professor in the departments of English, history and art at the University of Houston and a co-chairman of the conference. Twenty-two countries were represented this year, including Australia, Cyprus, Turkey, South Africa and Israel.
