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Comparative Literature and the Question of

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Comparative Literature and the Question of Theory

Touria Nakkouch
Ibn-Zohr university

Abstract:
In the long-standing and divisive debate on Comparative Literature, comparatist scholars from both the Great
European Tradition and the Southern hemisphere agree on the importance of two elements: first , the definition
of Comparative Literature and the historical role it has with regard to the Human Sciences; secondly, the
position of theory in this essentially Eurocentric discipline, and the impact that recent cross-cultural scholarship
on postcolonialism, women studies, translation and cultural studies may have on the project of its reconceptualisation. The present paper deals briefly with the first element, providing elements of focus rather than
a finished portrait; then, it takes up the significant moments of the theoretical debate in Comparative Literature
between Literary Studies on the one hand and Translation & Cultural Studies on the other. Through the
comparative scholarly research extending from the 1990s to through first decade of the 21 st century (George
Steiner, Linda Hutcheon, Suzan Basnett Elaine Martin and Gayatri Spivak), I describe the shifts of focus in
literary studies that emerged in the 1990s, and which resulted in the creation of a new, more politicised Cultural
Studies and new configurations of main vs. subsidiary between CL and the disciplines contiguous to it:
Translation and Cultural studies. With these realignments, I argue, Comparative Literature has been faced with
the challenge to restructure itself and its agenda. In this, I finally maintain, it gives 21st century lessons to the
other Human Sciences on the commensurability of angst, survival and regeneration.

Introduction:
In his 1994 Inaugural Lecture What is Comparative Literature? delivered before the
University of Oxford, George Steiner mentions approvingly the philosophical and political
entailments of the ecumenist sensibility behind Goethes concept of world literature
(Weltliteratur). He himself enrols in a utopian logic when he says that the study of other
languages and literary traditions enriches the condition of the international freemasonry of
enlightened spirits characteristic of the Enlightenment, and that in the life of the mind, as in
that of politics, isolationism and nationalist arrogance are the road to brutal ruin ( Steiner 6).
A century ahead of Goethes concept and fifteen years after Steiners lecture, Gayatri C.
Spivak proposescomparativism in extremis where the fiction and reality of comparison
would make visible the double bind between ethics and politics. She concludes her essay,
however, with a call toward a comparatism rethought in the spirit of Goethe, one which
might restore the metaphor to the white mythology of the fetishist and capitalist illogic of 19th

century positivism. In Goethes spirit, she says, we can interminably prepare ourselves to
work in the hope of a promise of equivalence to subaltern spaces and times, a hope cradled in
despair except when reading flourishes ( Spivak 2009:624). The two above texts mark two
crucial moments in long period of self-assessment that Comparative Literature went through,
and at the end of which it re-emerged with undoubtedly the same intrinsic bond to literary
studies, the same interdisciplinary and polyphonic perspective; but with a different, highly
politicised programme. The many shifts in perspective leading to this renewal did not,
however, dismantle the Enlightenment logic within which they were conceived in the first
place. While this makes of Goethes utopian dream a Romantic constant in a frame of shifting
contemporary variables, it also makes of Comparative Literature the most humanist of all the
human sciences. This paper is concerned with theses shifts on two levels: the historical role of
Comparative Literature and the position of theory in it.

I.

What is Comparative Literature?

Defining the role of Comparative Literature entails defining it first. Is Comparative Literature
a science? a subject? a field of study? a method of reading texts and other cultural forms of
knowledge? These are some the epithets that have been devised to designate the field.
Overall, scholars now agree that this human discipline resists systematic definition or
conceptualization. As with Ben Johnsons light, it is easier to say what it is not than to say
what it is; like light, too, it is all pervasive and inhabits all acts of understanding,
interpretation and judgement. It is instrumental to reason, as the French coinage comparaison makes it audible. German comparatist Robert Wenninger defines it tersely, after
much scholarly ado, as the quintessential undidciplined discipline (Wenninger XI).
As to the points of focus that Comparative aligned itself with from the start, there are, to
my mind, five: First, Ever since its inception, in Europe (Goethe, Voltaire) then in the USA
on the margins of threatened departments of modern languages at the hands of a Jewish
intellectual diaspora fleeing the Holocaust; then in Canada and the Far East, Comparative
Literature has always carried within it the virtuosity of the comparatist and a sense of exile,
of an inward diaspora(6), as Steiner puts it. Secondly, by virtue of its initial alignment with
foreign languages and diasporic experiences, Comparative Literature relishes in the diversity
of languages; it raises the hypothesis that all human languages, at various times, constitute
cultural variants of world culture, and that the death of anyone of these languages closes what
Soren Kierkgaard calls the wounds of possibility(10), that on which the survival of
humanity reposes.

Thirdly, Comparative Literature may take one of two different routes: in the first, it
functions in a framework between two or more national literatures; and in the second, it
functions in a framework outside literary boundary between literature and other areas and
disciplines of human expression. Whether it works from within a language, thus exerting its
intrinsic analytic prerogative; or between languages, thus making use of translation to
elucidate the conditions, strategies and limits of mutual understanding between languages, it
is, above all, an art/ act of understanding. As such, it requires creativity and it foregrounds the
role of readers and their participative approach. This act of participative interpretation is
centred in the contingency and limits of translation. Steiner maintains that from word-to-word
correspondence to the freest imitation of metaphor adaptation (11), translation is pivotal to
the comparatist.
Fourth and last, this two-fold principle raises a serious problem of methodology for the CL
student and researcher. Suzan Basnett defines Comparative Literature not as a discipline but
as a method of approaching literature and the arts. As such, the methodological essence of CL
allows it to mesh or touch borders with other methods, as in the combination of literary and
critical theory, or in the mutual exchange and benefit between Comparative Literature and
Translation Studies/ Cultural Studies. In the incommensurability of these combined methods
of analysis, the reader has a crucial role and is required to fulfil her part in the triad frame of
text/context/reader. Comparative Literature thus takes its real value not from a-priori
delimitations of texts or prescriptive methods of analysis, but from the readers sense and use
of that the double bind of form and context , of politics and ethics that Spivak talks about.

A Critical Evaluation of Comparative Literature

Due to its initial alignments, Comparative Literature drew to itself a number of stigmatizing
epithets, the two most serious of which are the euro-centrism of the Great European tradition
of the discipline, and its irrelevance to the multi--cultural reality of present world emergent
cultures on the one hand; and the limitations of the Neo-Latin frame of reference of most
traditional comparative acts of interpretation and aesthetic judgement on the other. Part of the
Euro-centric legacy of Comparative Literature was perceived by Steiner in the 1990s to
manifest in the lack of Islamic and Asian referents. Gayatri Spivak, rereading Edward said,
later on defined the worlding

of Eastern individuals and areas as perhaps the most

destructive and dramatic forms of othering; one where othered natives and territories are
defined in Eurocentric terms, translated through the colonial language and designated as
subject to Euro-imperial authority. As with Orientalism, literary Eurocentrism seems to have

given in, in the second half of the twentieth century, to the more powerful hegemony of the
American postmodern tradition in literature and the arts. This hegemony soon materialised in
a twentieth century form of globalisation which has been affecting an even larger scope of
cultural practices. Of the many definition of the multidimensional concept globalization that
boomed in relation to literature and culture after the 1970s, and have divided academics
since, the least appealing is a sort of Americanized westernization/ modernization of culture
and literature that exhales the suspicious smell of imperialism. In fact, globalisation theory
has focused in the twenty-first century on the fate of local cultures in their struggle against
global consumer culture and on the status of hegemonic languages (mainly English) in the
global arena. In Rethinking Comparativism,

Spivak defines a new programme for

Comparative Literature wherein the Human Sciences can supplement globalisation by

providing a world: The key features of this programme are:
1. Treating languages as being equivalent, not hierarchical, not in terms of self/other.
2. Forwarding language learning as a simulacrum of lingual memory; Spivak here revises
Homi Bhabahs hybridity as a space of translation. She insists that, in the context of
Comparative Literature, what we translate is not the content of one language vis--vis
another, but the very moves of languaging in a sort of translation before
translation (612). She further maintains that what is really at issue is the metapsychological valuing, happiness with ones native language; a valuing which will
resist hybridity and develop a sense of equivalence among ones native language and
foreign languages. Spivak means by this sense of equivalence the sense of the capacity
of ones native language to inscribe lingual memory, which Spivak distinguishes from
linguistic memory.
3.

Using translation as an active rather than a prosthetic practice.

4. Continually undoing nationalist language-based reading, thereby undoing the

historical injustice toward languages associated with people not falling within the
sphere of Eurocentrism or global capital.
As a reaction to the narrow traditional frame of reference of Comparative Literature, it was
deemed that the inter-influences between a literary text and an ensemble of artistic variants
which this text inspires across time and genres would pave the way for a more open, crosscultural poetics. A case in point of this new comparative poetics is Spivaks comparative
reading of Okinawan literature (i.e. Medoruma Shuns short story Hope) by placing it, in
what she considers a level playing field, within a range of four other variants:
- Her essay Can the Subaltern Speak?

- Suicide bombing in Palestine.

- Viken Berberians The Bicyclist
- Santosh Sivans film the Terrorist
Suzan Basnett proposes the Lisbon Conference held in 2005, in commemoration of the 250th
anniversary of the earthquake that destroyed the city in mid 18th century, as another case in
point of a new comparative literature; the latter becoming a plurivocal act of understanding,
where voices from the visual arts, literature, technology and the sciences are assembled
around one particular historical moment or situation.

I.

The Historical Role of Comparative Literature with regard to the Human

Sciences:

Linda Hucheon points to the dissenting 1990s view which suggest that CLs day has passed
and the time is come for Postcolonial Studies to replace mainstream comparative studies and
take over CLs historical role. This view is grounded in the belief that Postcolonial Studies is
capable of meeting the challenge of investigating cultural identity while attending to relations
between that identity and language. This view obviously rejects the utopian and ecumenical
theses held previously, in favour of confrontational models which put First and Third world
literatures to test against one another. A radical example of this confrontation in favour of
third world cultures is evoked by the cannibalistic theory of Brazilian writers and theorists,
namely Oswald de Andrades Manifesto, which calls for the co-existence of modernity and
pre-historicity within the same national boundaries, in an effort to re-evalutae Brazils
relationship with Europe. In De Andrades theory of cannibalism, the relationship of a writer
to a western source is compared to that of a cannibal about to devour only the noblest and
most highly prized captives in order to inject some of the knowledge and virtues those
victims are deemed to possess (Basnett 2006: 4).
In a similar vein, Suzan Basnett in 1993 declares the agony of the Comparative Literature
and suggests realignment with Translation Studies. She blames the crisis of the former
discipline on the legacy of 19th century positivism, a pro-imperialist current of thought which
fails to consider the political implications of intercultural transfer (Basnett 1993:6). Basnett
urges then that Comparative Literature realign itself as a subsidiary subject with Translation
Studies. In 2006, she reconsiders her argument as being flawed, withdraws it and defines
Comparative Literature and Translation Studies as self-independent ways of reading that are
mutually beneficial. Taking as an example Ezra pounds Cathay Poems in translation, Basnett
recommends from her more recent position that the boundary between Comparative Literature

and Translation Studies be opened and that translation intercede in the comparative reading as
a force for literary innovation and renewal ( 8). The new agenda that Basnett recommends for
Comparative Literature, one basically derived from Spivak, puts additional focus on the
importance of the work of Southern hemisphere scholars and creative writers, the importance
of translation as a necessary part of the reading process, and the role of CL in remapping the
history of writing and reading across cultural and temporal boundaries.

II.

The Position of Theory in Comparative Literature:

Comparatists have always been divided in this respect. There are those who believe theory is
the lingua franca of Comparative Literature, and those who maintain that theory in neither
intrinsic nor empowering to the discipline. It was deemed that the crisis in Comparative
Literature in the last decade of the 20th century was in part owing to the use of theory:
excessive prescriptivism combined with culturally specific methodologies could not be
universally applicable and were, therefore, either incapable of coping with emergent cultures
or exclusive of them.
But as theories of textuality thrive in the age of multiculturalism and deconstruction,
and as a major interest in the context of a text was added by recent cross-cultural scholarship
(i.e. Feminist theory and its attendance to gender and identity politics; Poststructuralist
theorys concern with textuality; not to forget the work of Post-colonial, New-historicist and
even Gay studies), Comparative Literature has had to stand to the challenge of restructuring
itself. This imperative became all the more urgent under the threat of an engulfment of CL by
Cultural or Translation Studies. Ren Welleks 1958 essay the Crisis of Comparative
Literature already gave an avant-gout to the anxiogenic state that Comparative Literature
would suffer from in the 1990s. While the Austrian scholar expressed concern over the lack
of subject and methodology characterizing the discipline, Canadian scholar Linda Hutcheon
contests the 1993 ACLAs Report as being too cautious, too compromising in its advocacy of
a broadening of the field of inquiry in Comparative Literature, even as Bernheimer nuances
his position by maintaining that it does not mean that comparative study should abandon
the close analysis of rhetorical, prosodic and other formal features; but that textually precise
readings should take account as well of the ideological, cultural, and institutional contexts in
which their meanings are produced ( Bernheimer 43).

Hutcheon finds the report too

apologetic in tone; one which entails the risk of interdisciplinary amateurism (Peter Brooks)
and slack form of pluralism (Stuart Hall) for an already very hospitable field.

By and large, debate on the position of theory in CL centres on the question of whether por
not literature, an easy prey to commodification at present, has lost the transcendental aura of
artistic imagination, and whether or not the interweaving of the poetic and of theoretical
concepts has enriched both theory and literary practice. Work in this respect has given
impetus, and so far profited Comparative Literature, to a complex and fruitful discussion of
the conception and theoretical understanding of hybrid discursive possibilities. Robert
Wenninger, in a reaction to the still unpublished 2004 ACLA report, opts for an optimistic
tone, in spite of the Phyrric victory of Comparative Literature. He also re-situates the field
with regard to the other human sciences, the arts and the sciences. In his evaluative analysis,
Comparative Literature is an undisciplined discipline which is at a crossroads, not between
Translation, Cultural or Area Studies, seen alternately as the lifeline or the blood-suckers of
this ailing discipline; but between the humanities, the arts and the sciences. As to the
supposed ailment, Wenninger sees it as the source for new antidotes for our many
disciplinary disorders (xi-xix).
The discussion has also helped Comparative Literature cope, in a dynamic and elastic
may, with the various titles / labels that are used to describe it, especially with regard to the
troublesome word literature: From Comparative Literature, to comparative studies of
literature down to comparativism: the history of these titles reflects the fields readiness to
renew and restructure itself with the newness coming with every shift in perspective in theory
and in creative writing. The field has also considerably benefited from the perspectives of
Southern hemisphere scholars, and thereby fructified the dialogue with Cultural Studies. In
the Framing of Comparative Literature, or, Is Comparative to Literature as Cultural is to
Studies?, American comparatist scholar Elaine Martin redefines the relation between
Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies in terms of the analogical triad of picture, wall
and mediating frame; she thus shifts the point of focus in comparative literary studies from
two things put together into a meaningful relation to each other, to a triad relation between
the art work ( literary text), the framer ( now less assumed and more stated, so having more
visibility) and the wall ( culture). Michael Holquist defines this shift as a shift in the space
of interpretation. Elaine Martin defines the program of Comparative Literature in terms of
the comparatist research results attained in the 1990s. The salient elements of this
programme are:
-The vital necessity of the literary text (the difference between a text and a literary text; the
anecdote of Shakespeare and the Manhattan phone book is repeated to show the difference)
- The necessity to give equal value to text and context.

- The importance of the question of translation vs. original in dealing with the literary text.; an
importance that takes us back to Steiners definition of the inquiry into the reception and
influence of texts,

as a main point of focus in Comparative Literature. Translation,

however, is seen by twenty-first century comparatists as a second focus, one among others,
in the comparative readings potential for centrifugal radiation ( Culler 244); this second
focus may or may not be , depending on further factors related to text and context. A
multicultural or a multilingual text situation, for instance, would make the use of
translation more imperative than a text with clear-cut national borders.
- Keeping in view the pedagogical distinctions between Comparative Literature and Cultural
Studies; a workable formula is: All CL is CS, but not all CS is CL; and those between
paradisciplinary methodologies and comparative ones. Paul Hernaldi advises that
Comparative Literature need not be limited to literary subject matter anymore than it is
limited to strictly comparative methodology ( Hernaldi 1986); while Roland Greene
maintains that no one is always doing

paradisciplinary work, but many of us [

comparatists] do it at one time or another( Greene 153).

I end this section with a comparison that poet as well as a comparatist Boris A. Novak uses in
examining the work of French poet Paul Valry. In this comparison, inspired by a fable from
the Enlightenment, Novak views the relation between literature and theory in terms of that
between a tree and a vine growing around it. Novak expresses the need to fight against selfsufficient literary theory and the marginalization of poetry, and he sees Valry as a perfect
personification of the synthesis between poetic creation and Cartesian ratio.

Conclusion:

I find no better way of concluding this paper to Elaine Martins verdict on CL as a human
discipline whose torments and regeneration can be very inspiring to the Humanities:
The dynamic nature of this discipline a discipline that importantly rejects
the division of knowledge into "disciplines" has contributed to its continued
vitality and its ability to metamorphose, along with the larger culture within
which it exists, into new and provocative forms...Comparative literature has a
potentially unique role to play in the humanities as a natural locus for new,
restructured paradigms of knowledge... The fact that this field's very identity
has been contested since its inception has produced a lively and ongoing debate
about the role of literature in cultural production more broadly... the elasticity

of self-definition inherent to this field has moved beyond the possibility of a

unified perspective. The range of topics, from feminism and postcolonialism to
terrorism and the visual arts also suggests that, comparatively speaking, this
field embraces the juxtaposition of widely different scholarly concerns for the
purpose of mutual enrichment and the generation of broader contextual
frameworks (Martin 2005).

Works Cited
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Basnett, Suzan. Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction.
Oxford: Blackwell.1993.
Basnett, Suzan. Reflection on Comparative Literature in the Twenty-first Century.
Comparative Cultural Studies.3.1-2 (2006): 3-11.
Culler, Jonathan. Comparative Literature,at Last. Charles Bernheimer ed. Comparative
Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1995.
Greene, Roland. Their Generation. Bernheimer. 143-154.
Hernaldi, Paul. What isnt Comparative Literature?Profession 86 (1986):
22-24.
Holquist, Michael. A New Tour of Babel: recent trends Linking Comparative literature
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Special Issue, Foreign languages, International Studies, and interdisciplinarity. 27.1
(1995):25-27.
Hutcheon, Linda. Comparative Literatures Anxiogenic State. Canadian Review of
Comparative Literature (March 1996): 35-41.
Martin, Elaine. The Framing of Comparative Literature, or, Is Comparative to Literature
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Martin, Elaine. Ways of knowing: Comparative Literature and the Future of the
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Spivak C. Gayatri Rethinking Comparativism. New literary History.2009.40:3. 609-626.
Steiner, George. What is Comparative Literature? Oxford: Clarendon press,1995.
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Cultural Studies. Vol 3, 1.2. pp xi-xix.