Professor Haun Saussy, from the University of Chicago and a leading scholar of Chinese and comparative literature, delivers the fourth and final lecture in the 2014 De Carle Lecture series, Compared to What? The basic argument is that comparative literature grew from interdisciplinarity in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth centuries, struggled to become an autonomous field and in the process lost its interdisciplinary dimensions, then has been recovering them on new bases, but in an academic environment that is slow to reward risk-taking, unlike the moment immediately after the French Revolution when the gesture of sweeping the slate clean and inventing new sciences came naturally to so many of our predecessors. 10 October 2014