The Significance of Comparative Literature

“If language is a universal faculty, so too is its expression as art.”

Surviving the “particulatiy of individual passions and sentiments” literature through mimesis
leads us to the “most universal and lasting elements of human experience” and by doing so gives
was to a “cosmopolitan Weltliteratur (world literature)”as Goethe terms it vis-a-vis Littérature
comparée its French ‘counterpart’ in terms of its disciplinary terrains. However, the assumption
of universalism in the German idea of “World Literature” was in itself a “nationalistic
cosmopolitanism” or a “projected form of nationalism” as August Wilhelm Schlegel argues.
Meltzl, therefore, sought to rescue “World Literature” through “an extensive application of the
comparative principle” is also an announcement of the rebirth of comparative literature after it
was declared to be “dead, in one sense” by Bassnett. It further reaffirms the significance of
comparative literature in the current world that is witnessing a global refugee crisis – a
movement between cultures, literatures – worlds.
Transcending the Eurocentrism that was inherent in the European emergence of comparative
literature, comparative literature through the works of writers like Bassnett, Spivak and Mignolo
went through a “delinking” process and has risen as an “imperative comparative literature” that
does not confine itself in the singularity of a text or monolingualism rather extends itself to a
“wider consideration of the literary phenomenon. Because any literature as a literary
phenomenon becomes possible only if it “actively present within a literary system beyond that of
its original culture”. With the advent of Posnett's world-spanning provincialism and Meltzl's
polyglot anticosmopolitanism comparative literature surviving its crises at different times has
found a new significance as the connecting force of humanity in literature resonating
Rbindranath Tagore’s idea of Vishwasahitya: “From narrow provincialism we must free
ourselves, we must strive to see the works of each author as a whole, that whole as a part of
man’s universal creativity, and that universal spirit in its manifestation through world literature.”