The history of disciplinarity may be seen as a history of anxiety: anxiety about the division and prerogative of knowledge fields, about the transparency and internal coherence of any disciplinary construction, and about the relation between labor and its intellectual embodiments. Recent years are perhaps especially anxious times: a number of prominent scholars, journals, and organizations have speculated on the future of various disciplines. Such reflections may examine a discipline's institutional status or methodological practices. They may assess the relevance of disciplines to larger scholarly aims or political contexts. Often, they offer a possible synthesis of these seemingly disparate areas of concern. A generation after Foucault's archaeological analysis of "discourse formations," academic fields continue to realign their institutional and methodological parameters for producing and transmitting knowledge-often in a highly self-conscious way.  For example, recent calls for a return  to "specificity" in literary and cultural studies signal anxiety about the very institutional success of critical theory as a common discourse.   A related instance might be Anthropology, which has undergone successive reformulations over the past century. Such instances of disciplinary self-critique – and the sometimes hostile, sometimes utopian rhetoric that characterizes them – provide occasions to read the assumptions, implications, and concerns that underpin intellectual inquiry.

With this conference, we highlight Comparative Literature as a discipline whose flexibility has allowed it to serve as a laboratory for interaction between historically distinct theoretical or disciplinary discourses. From this starting point, we propose to launch a large-scale discussion of those reflexive moments in which any discipline reconsiders its organization or identity. Bringing together different methodological, historical, and disciplinary perspectives, we will begin by addressing some of the following questions:

• What are the causes, effects, and stakes of periodic reimaginings of disciplinary histories? For example, how do disciplines as complexly constituted as Comparative Literature and Anthropology understand their origins and make claims to their pasts?

• How might we historicize disciplinary self-doubt and self-reformulation from the premodern to the postmodern?

• How can we characterize the relationship between shifts in academic discipline and shifts in the way societies and cultures are organized?

• How are disciplinary self-interrogations tied to or intersected by institutional, political, and ethical responsibilities?

This symposium does not aim at a triumphalist projection of the "future of Comparative Literature," nor is it designed simply to "take the pulse"of our discipline.  Rather, it aims to consider the largest concerns of disciplinary construction and regulation.  We welcome papers that would reflect any of these concerns or related questions, from particular or general disciplinary perspectives, and across a range of historical periods.