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State of the Discipline: Comparative Arts & Letters

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Photo by Bekah Mecham

A lot changes in a department over time, and that has certainly been true in the Department of Comparative Arts and Letters at BYU. Today, the department includes comparative literature, classics, interdisciplinary humanities, art history, Scandinavian studies, and a master’s degree in comparative studies. To give you a sense of how the department has changed and its vision for the future, I interviewed Kerry Soper and Carl Sederholm, the incoming and outgoing chairs of the department, along with Julie Allen, the department graduate studies coordinator. Their responses are both intriguing and enlightening.

How has the department changed in the last 30 years?

Kerry: The biggest change for the interdisciplinary humanities section of the department has been a gradual shift away from a sort of high culture and civilization approach to our material (the greatest hits of Western culture) to a more expansive treatment of cultures in the plural sense: minority cultures, popular cultures, and non-Western traditions. This is reflected both in the faculty’s eclectic fields of study and in the way we teach our courses (getting away from a “coverage” model of key works of high art and moving towards more in-depth, thematic explorations of all kinds of cultural texts).
Carl: The transition from Humanities, Classics, and Comparative Literature to Comparative Arts and Letters was sparked by the addition of art history, which moved into the department in 2015. To me, that change in name captures the idea that we are trying to become something more focused than just an amalgam of disciplines.
Kerry: Right. You might describe it as cultural studies with a little more sensitivity to issues of class, race, and gender so that it doesn’t ignore the contributions of authors and artists who had been left out—including women, cultural minorities, pop culture, cultural studies, and a more comprehensive critical way of thinking about the cultural work performed by the humanities.

The department includes comparative literature, classics, interdisciplinary humanities, art history, and Scandinavian studies. Why?

Kerry: The department consists of a bunch of little orphan programs that needed a home. None of them was big enough to justify being a department. The college needed a place for these smaller, similar units. They function well as a department within the college.
Julie: It includes everything from Cthulhu (from the stories of H. P. Lovecraft) to Kerry Soper’s work on The Far Side and from Marlene Esplin’s work on LatinX authors to classics and art history. It’s a grab bag, but that’s what makes it so amazing. You have people who know something about just about everything, and you have a really broad representation across eras and languages and genres. So it’s kind of the place if you want to know things, broadly and interconnectedly. If you want to do a deep dive into French, you obviously go to that department. But to see French in conversation with all these other traditions, then you come to ours.
Carl: We’re held together by a common commitment to students, primarily. Secondarily, we’re held together by a commitment to understanding. It sounds simple, but in understanding art or understanding text (or whatever we’re trying to examine), that commitment emerges out of how different we all are. The classicists are committed to students in the same way the art historians are—because of their strong desire to serve students.
Kerry: In another version of the multiverse it could have gone wrong, but because the faculty have that shared commitment and have also emphasized collegiality to a high degree, they make it work.
Carl: It’s remarkable that you can have such a diversity of people just basically showing up and caring about the same things every day. I love that.

Describe what “comparative work” means.

Julie: A lot of people do comparative work without realizing they’re doing it. Take English, for example. They compare poets and compare genres and often read literature in translation and literature originally written in English. But those aspects don’t always get any context. In our department, we look at those textures and compare context.
Here’s another example. I’m teaching a class right now where we compare the origin of dragons. We start in Asian cultures, analyzing what dragons look like, and we look at the reverential mythologies of draconic ancestors. Then we consider Western traditions and biblical references in the Hebrew Bible to jackals and snakes and whales that become dragonin English, then St. George and the Dragon, the Beowulf story, and other ways that dragons are demonized as sort of devilish in Western tradition.
So, we have this basis of these two traditions and within them, multiple national traditions. Then, we look at the way dragons are depicted in 20th- and 21st-century literature across national lines. German, Swedish, British, American, or Australian authors—anyone else we can find.
We do formal analysis, but we also take into account where authors come from, what kind of language barriers they’re working with, and what kind of medium they’re working in. We compare all those things and try to get meaning out of that comparison. We’re trying to make meaning in that juxtaposition of difference.

What’s the value of a degree in Comparative Arts and Letters specifically, and in the Humanities in general?

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Carl: The value that I express to students is about what transfers. Reading closely transfers to other realms of life. Writing clearly or persuasively transfers to critical thinking.
Kerry: Those transferable skills will last them a lifetime. They may forget about a particular artist or book. But critical, thoughtful, moral, ethical ways of thinking will impact them deeply and will improve their lives in all realms—from being a parent to an employee to a reader to a citizen. Our college has emphasized Humanities+ aggressively. (Humanities+ is a program that helps students translate the value of their studies into professional contexts.)
And this has been a good thing, because we’re more responsible now to our students in terms of the vocational benefits and strategies for making careers out of their humanities major. Research clearly shows that, especially mid-career and beyond, you will do better than your peers if you have that breadth of knowledge, critical thinking skills, and an ability to write well.
But I think we don’t want to let go of the inherent value of studying the humanities in making us better human beings. More moral people, more critically thinking, ethical people. Better citizens and better members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In addition to critical thinking in an abstract academic sense, you’re talking about empathy and developing social intelligence.
Carl: I agree. We have this sort of relentless need to say how financially successful everything can be, or how much money you’re going to make, or what are you going to do with that. But what are the transferable skills? What can you take from what we study and use in other contexts? I also tend to focus on connection—how all of our study helps us connect with other people. I want to understand why they said what they said, so I can empathize with them, come around to their point of view, or challenge their point of view. I don’t just want to receive it passively. That’s my role as a professor as I see it—helping students navigate meaning.
Julie: We also try to get them to see the humanity and the divinity of other people. Helping them to value that is one of the less tangible skills but probably one of the most important ones that we teach, by exploring the human condition and trying to get people to care.

What is unique about teaching the humanities at BYU?

Kerry: We can teach difficult subject matter in a gospel frame or with the help of the Spirit. We’re similar to any faculty on BYU campus that way. But because BYU is a research institution, we also have the freedom to introduce students to challenging theories, cutting-edge kinds of scholarship, and even difficult texts, and we invite our students to research in a way that’s both challenging and faith affirming.
Julie: When you think about what the humanities means, you come right back to the gospel. We recognize the divine importance of people and their experiences through art, music, literature, poetry, and film. BYU strikes a productive balance between the need to have practical skills for employment and the need to have a holistic understanding of God’s children.
Think about Doctrine and Covenants 88. We’re commanded to know about “things both in heaven and in the earth, and under the earth; things which have been, things which are, things which must shortly come to pass.” We’re supposed to know everything. And I feel like Doctrine and Covenants 88 tells us that everything is connected. It’s all part of this bigger creation. The Department of Comparative Arts and Letters takes that holistic approach.

Any parting thoughts?

Kerry: In terms of all of our interactions with students, we strive for them to be positive, to know that we care about them, that we’re invested in their future, and that they’ve been improved because of their time spent with us.
Carl: When people ask students what they will do with their degree, the answer should be “What am I becoming with my skills?” That’s the most important thing. What are we becoming? What are our students becoming? That’s such a great target that supersedes a lot of the other stuff. I really want the focus to be on that.
Julie: It’s kind of amazing how an interdisciplinary training really makes students better art historians and better classicists and better humanity scholars because they focus on more than their one little thing; they have to see that thing in its context. As faculty, we’re trying to help students develop appreciation for all the work of God’s hands, an appreciation for the value of that work, and the people’s lives that it represents. I would hope they come to recognize how integral the humanities are to the gospel, how integral values like empathy and compassion and love are to the humanities, and how connected those are to the gospel. I think humanities skills are really what will save the world.

This article was included in the Fall 2021 issue of the Humanities alumni magazine.