Living with constant comparisons

“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.

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Cultural context

Still, this was only the third time that the ACLA had held its annual meeting outside the United States. About a decade ago, the group convened in Puerto Vallarta. Another time it met in Montreal. Next April it’s scheduled to hunker down at Cal State Long Beach. This year, Zamora said in an e-mail, “I wanted the international academic community to know about Mexico’s rich history (and not just its beach resorts).”

Founded in 1531 by conquistadors, Puebla is a polyglot metropolis of 1.5 million, known for its handsomely preserved historic center, colorful Talavera Poblana earthenware and piquant mole sauce. It sits in a temperate valley about 1 1/2 hours southeast of Mexico City; on a clear day, three snowcapped volcanoes hover nearby like apparitions above the high plains.

All in all, a suitably dramatic backdrop for a weekend of elevated thinking.

One 9 a.m. session on “Transatlantic Transmissions of the Baroque” couldn’t have found a better setting at the Benemerita Autonomous University of Puebla, which was hosting the conference: a long, high-ceilinged salon painted in mustard yellow and embroidered with concupiscent curls of white flowers and other Rococo motifs. The room bears the name of Ignacio Zaragoza, the army general who led Puebla’s defense against French invaders in 1862, the victory celebrated as Cinco de Mayo.

The labyrinthine layout of several hotels and buildings where the conference was held enhanced the baroque atmosphere. One stray turn in a stairwell and you could find yourself suddenly wandering in a courtyard filled with rose plants and burbling fountains. “Thank you for being here -- and finding the room,” joked estheR Cuesta, who teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, opening a talk on “Contesting Coloniality in the Americas.” The discussion touched on the Zapatista movement, the attempt by indigenous people to gain political power in southern Mexico, and on the myths that fed gold- and silver-mining fever from California to the Andes.

Cross-border themes got a good workout, with papers on topics such as “Preserving Mayan Oral Tradition on the Internet,” “Hollywood Works Its Magic: What Latinas Stand to Gain From the American Dream” and “Both Sides of the Fence: T.C. Boyle’s Tortilla Curtain and the White Liberal Male’s Crash Course in the Humanities.”

Other papers examined writers as far removed from central Mexico as the late German writer W.G. Sebald and Palestinian playwright Imil Habibi. Some seminars cast a wide net over several continents and storytelling traditions. One session looked at how the classic Arabic book of the Thousand and One Nights broke into both the Eastern and Western canons through translation, influencing writers as diverse as Balzac, Salman Rushdie and Naguib Mahfouz.

One big plus for type-A academics: Mexico allows smoking in bars and restaurants. And no one is likely to discourage you from having a second shot of tequila, mescal or whatever else keeps the old mental juices flowing. “I sort of feel like Malcolm Lowry,” joked one female scholar, nursing a margarita and referring to the author of the 1947 novel “Under the Volcano,” about the slow disintegration of a dipsomaniac British counsel in a provincial Mexican city.

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Spanish-language works

Sylvia Spitta, who teaches Spanish and women’s studies at Dartmouth, said that both comparative literature and the ACLA had come a long way since she was a graduate student. At last, she said, U.S. universities have begun to seriously acknowledge their Spanish-speaking neighbors. Meanwhile, more U.S. students are learning Spanish because they think they’ll need it in their careers as doctors, lawyers or whatever. “Americans are realizing the U.S. is not the only part of the Americas,” said Spitta, a native Peruvian.

Despite the assembled brain power, there were just too many crosscurrents to sum up the conference’s purpose in a single, well-turned phrase. But Djelal Kadir, a professor at Pennsylvania State, came close.

Kadir -- who was born in Cyprus, where he grew up speaking Greek, Turkish and English, and educated at a London boarding school and at Yale -- said that what good comparatists need most is openness, self-effacement and a willingness to listen and observe. “When you start working in another language, you find yourself in another person’s home,” he said. “And so you have to be on your best behavior.”

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reed.johnson@latimes.com