eae lal Cob an-19 GMA: Englislr Spates What is Comparative Literature? Comparative Literature as a Discipline: its definitions and scope Preface + Ittcan almost be argued that anyone who has an interest in books embarks on the road towards what might be termed comparative literature: reading Chaucer, we come across Boccaccio; we can trace Shakespeare's source materials through Latin, French Spanish and Italian; we can study the ways in which Romanticism developed across Europe at a similar moment in time, follow the process through which Baudelaire's fascination with Edgar Allan Poe enriched his own writing, consider how many English novelists learned from the great nineteenth-century Russian writers (in translation, of course), compare how James Joyce borrowed from Italo Svevo.+ When we read Clarice Lispector (Brazilian writer) we are reminded of Jean Rhys (Dominican writer), who in turn recalls Djuna Barnes (American writer) and Anais Nin (French writer). There is no limit to the list of examples we could devise. Once we begin to read we move across frontiers, making associations and connections, no longer reading within a single literature but within the great open space of Literature with a capital L. + At this juncture, one could be forgiven for assuming that(comparative literature is nothing more than common sense, an inevitable stage reading, made increasingly easier by international marketing of books and by the availability of translations.+ But if we shift perspective slightly and look again at the term “Comparative literature”, what we find instead is a history of violent debate that goes right back to the earliest usage of the term at the beginning of the nineteenth century and continues still today. «(Critics at the end of the twentieth century, in the ‘age of post-modernism, still wrestle with the same questions that were posed more thana century ago: What is the object of study in comparative literature? How can comparison be the object of anything? If individual literatures have a canon, what might a comparative canon be? How does the comparatist select what to compare? Is comparative literature a discipline? Oris it simply a field of study? 06-Jan-@+ These and a great many other questions refuse to go away, and since the 1950s we have been hearing all too frequently about what René Wellek defined as “the crisis of Comparative Literature.” Comparative literature as a term seems to arouse strong passions, both for and against. As early as 1903, Benedetto Croce argued that comparative literature was a non-subject, contemptuously dismissing the suggestion that it might be seen as a separate discipline.* He discussed the definition of comparative literature as the exploration of “the vicissitudes, alterations, developments and reciprocal differences” of themes and literary ideas across literatures, and concluded that “there is no study more arid than researches. of this sort’. This kind of work, Croce maintained, is to be classified "in the category of erudition purely and simply”. + But other scholars made grandiose claims for comparative literature. Charles Mills Gayley, one of the founders of North American comparative literature, proclaimed that the working premise of the student of comparative literature was: 06. Jan-19* literature as a distinct and integral medium of thought, a common institutional expression of humanity; differentiated, to be sure, by the social conditions of the individual, by racial, historical, cultural and linguistic influences, opportunities, and restrictions, but, irrespective of age or guise, prompted by the common needs and aspiration of man, sprung from common faculties, psychological and physiological, and obeying common laws of material and mode, of the individual and social humanity. Remarkably similar sentiments were expressed in 1974 by Francois Jost, when he claimed that “national literature” cannot constitute an intelligible field of study because of its “arbitrarily limited Perspective”, and that comparative literature: 8* represents more than an academic discipline. It is an overall view of literature, of the world of letters, a humanistic ecology, a literary Weltanschauung , a vision of the cultural universe, inclusive and comprehensive. pe + Jost, like Gayley and others before him, highly valued the role of comparatists. &) They believed that art is an instrument of \ iniversal harmony and the comparatist is one who facilitates the spread of that harmony. y 06. Jan-1°. ‘Moreover, the comparatist must possess special skills.) Wellek and Warren in their Theory of Literature, a book that was enormously significant in comparative literature when it first appeared in 1949, suggest that: Comparative Literature...will make high demands on the linguistic proficiencies of our scholars. It asks for a widening of perspectives, a suppression of local and provincial sentiments, not easy to achieve,’| + The comparatist is here depicted as someone with a vocation, as a kind of international ambassador working in the comparative literatures of united nations. -( Regardless of all these controversies, comparative literature still remains an important academic domain both in China and in the world. It is essential to for us to get a rough idea of what it is and what it studies before we move on to examine in detail its methodologies and new developments. ) 66 Jan 1SComparative literature in terms of national literature * The most popular notion is that comparative literature studies literatures of two or more nations + The term comparative literature is usually understood to mean what it suggests: a mutual, even a systematic, comparison of national literature. + The scope of comparative literature in this sense is often defined in terms of nationality or geographical area. Under this notion, a comparison of Xu Zhimo (#% 35,8) and Hardy is comparative literature; but, regrettably, a comparison of Li Bo (2 A) and Du Fu (#£ #3) is not.Arroagye © hewmen tye ne Mee ener Sra agin WO Hoes AER COMME onoud AL BOND IS Sgmeeli gia + But what is national literature? PH cara ETH Are Ramer Monod F oadlry, Teck] 04 Ame [qorsicatar) a Ratfen PCOr’ Gustac Jung ne Ppsycroanaligy Aeros 6 MAY jSAewSer, Porton A Weston dak ees Macomnous % Be a Wey & sa] catecKien aacheiypes of & Frodtales reborn National literature + A popular and tautological (that is, repetition of same sense in different words) definition: English literature is the literature of England, and Portuguese, of Portugal.| Jn + Ascholarly definition circumscribed by two combined criteria: on the one hand, it consists of works that adhere to identical codes of aesthetics and that are consequently written in the same language; on the other hand, their authors have the same cultural background. It is that body of books generally considered to be the expression of one specific culture, by means of a common vocabulary and a common. syntax. Comparative literature as presented by Wellek and Warren In practice, the term “comparative” literature has covered and still cevers rather distinct fields of study. + It may mean, first, the study of oral literature, especially of folk-tale themes and heir migration; of how and when they have entered “higher,” “artistic” literature.* This definition of comparative literature echoes with Posnett's belief that the scope of comparative literature can really start from a clan within a small area or a city commonwealth and then enlarge it through a nation or country towards the whole world. And what Robert J. Clements calls the three major “dimensia American or European Gomparative literary studies — Western Heritage (or Western Literature), East-West, and World Literature — are in fact scopes in the sense. Another sense of “comparative” literature confines it to the study of relationships between two or more literatures. This is the use established by the flourishing school of French comparatists headed by ind Baldensperger_and gathered id the Revue de littéraire comparée ( HEARSE) ). 06-Jan-* The school has especially given attention... to such questions as the reputation and penetration, the influence and fame, of Goethe in France and England, of Ossian and Carlyle and Schiller in France. It has developed a methodology which, going beyond the collection of information concerning reviews, translations, and influences, considers carefully the image, the concept of a particular author at a particular time, such diverse factors of transmission as Periodicals, translators, salons, and travelers, and the sceceiving factors," the special atmosphere and iterary situation into which the foreign author is imported. MF SS Comparative literature in terms of world literature + A third concept identifies comparative literature with the study of literature in its totality, with “world literature,” with “general” or “universal” literature.World Literature * “World literature” was used by Goethe to indicate a time when all literature would become one. Itis the ideal of the unification of alll literatures into one great synthesis, where each nation would play its part in a universal concert. But Goethe himself saw that this is a very distant ideal, that no single nation is willing to Give up its individuality. )Today we are possibly even further removed from such a state of amalgamation,” and we would argue that we cannot even seriously wish that the diversities of national literatures should be obliterated. 4 +" + “World literature” is frequently used ina third sense. It may mean the great treasure house of the classics, such as Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, 7 nd d Goethe, v whose reputation has spread * all over tl over the world and has lasted a considerable time. It thus has become a synonym for “masterpieces,” for a selection from literature which has its critical and pedagogic justification. 6-Jan 19 15General literature + Apossibly preferable substitute for “world literature” is “general literature.” Originally it was used to mean poetics or theory and principles of literature, Paul Van Tieghem has tried to capture it for a special concertion in contrast to “comparative literature.” According to him, “general literature” studies those movements and fashions of literature which transcend national lines, while “comparative literature” studies the interrelationships between two or / more literatures. Other theories concerning comparative literature Some comparatists proclaim that that comparative literature actually does not compare at all. In the “General Introduction” to his Comparative Literature: Matter and Method, A. Owen Aldridge thus begins his second Paragraph:Itis now generally agreed that comparative literature does not compare national literatures in the sense of setting one against another. Instead it provides a method of broadening one’s perspective in the approach to single works of literature — a way of looking beyond the narrow boundaries of national frontiers in order to discern trends and movements in various national cultures and to see the relation between literature and other spheres of human activity Responses to this not comparing methodology In Aldridge's book, five categories of comparative literature are edited: Literary Criticism and Theory, Literary Movemenis, Literary Themes, Literary Forms, and Literary Relations. Is there any one of them, we may ask, that does not compare by setting one literature against another? Is not literary criticism or theory, for instance, the result of reading this author and that author and then comparing them in mind (if not on paper) by setting one against another or against something e!se? 08-Jan-19+ Likewise, how can a literary movement, or theme, or form, or relation be better understood without comparing the elements that make up the movement, theme, form, or relation, or without comparing :his movement with that movement, this theme with that theme, etc.? It is often not necessary, of course, to show one's comparing process (which is essentially a process in mind) on paper or anywhere else. But the task of “setting one thing against another’ is almost indispensable to any serious study of things But, of course, when Aldridge says that “comparative literature does not compare national literatures in the sense of setting one against another,” he is not trying to negate the value of the comparative method, but trying perhaps to discourage a sort of comparative practice: namely, the mere setting one thing against another without further work for a meaningful result.p< A summary Comparative Literature is the discipline of studying literature transnationally, sometimes postnationally--across political boundaries, time periods, languages, genres, and across the lines of demarcation between literature and other cultural productions. Comparative Literature entails not oniy the study of various literatures in a variety of languages, but also the study of the connections (and differences) between different modes of thinking and of representing the world. Thus, a true "comparatist" is interested in the ways in which a variety of concepts, images and histories have enriched or complicated our cultural ideas. 0G dant+ In addition to thinking about the ways in which our literatures relate to each other, we are also concerned with examining the ways in which what we call “literature” is associated with "sister arts", like film or painting, and with mental sciences and frames of knowing, such as those supplied by, e g., anthropology, psychology, and philosophy. Comparative Literature is an entryway to World Literature, a means of exploring what various peoples and individuals have thought about being in the world. In brief, it is the comparison of one literature with another or others, and the comparison of literature with other spheres of human expression. 90 alsrneAQS 20