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American School of Comparative Literature

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 American School of Comparative Literature
By Mustafa Amjed Jasim
Comparative Literature is the examination and analysis of the relationships and similarities of
the literatures of different peoples and nations. Just like languages, literatures have always
been in contact with one another, and as Haun Saussy remarked, even the Ancient Greek critic
Longinus analysed passages of Greek and Hebrew literatures. However, comparative
literature as a discipline is relatively recent and emerged with the rise of the nation-states in
the 19th c. Among the early important figures who contributed to the discipline were Goethe
and his notion of Weltliteratur, and de Stael, whose work De l’Allemagne (1810/1813)
proposed that national differences are reflected through literature.

The main focus of these early approaches was the study of foreign literatures and the
universality of the human experience, the relationship between linguistics and literature, and
an examination of myths and epics in order to trace the perceived origins of a national
literature. Recent critical interventions in cultural and postcolonial studies have allowed
comparative literature scholars to reconsider the traditional Eurocentric focus of the field on
mainly European and American literature, shift the emphasis from national literatures to
world literature, and promote the study of literature along international and cross-cultural
lines. In the postwar years, comparative literature was institutionalized in France, the United
States and other European countries. Different schools, methods, thoughts, and approaches of
comparative literature were adopted. Among them, the American School of Comparative
Literature. The American attitude to the study of comparative literature can be understood
from Henry Remak’s definition. "Comparative Literature, Its Definition and Function," Henry
H. Remak defines comparative literature as:

Comparative literature is the study of literature beyond the confines of one particular
country, and the study of the relationships between literature on the one hand and
other areas of knowledge and belief, such as the arts (e.g., painting, sculpture,a
rchitecturem, usic), philosophy, history, the social sciences (e.g., politics, economics,
sociology), the sciences, religion, etc., on the other. In brief, it is the comparison of
one literature with another or others, and the comparison of literature with other
spheres of human expression (Cited in Block, 78).

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 It is the comparison of one literature with another or others, and the comparison of
literature with other spheres of human expression. This definition stands in opposition to the
French school of comparative literature. The definition has become the manifesto of the
American school of comparative literature. Remak justifies himself by explaining that his
approach is not historic nor generic but descriptive and synchronic. According to Remak, the
French school was too narrow, and relied too heavily on factual evidence. In influence studies
in the French tradition, he argued, were unimaginative, deriving from a positivistic approach.
The French tried to confine the boundaries of comparative literature, limiting what could be
and could not be included in the proper study of the subject, whereas in Remak and the
American school of comparative literature call for anything that can be compared with
anything else, even if it is not literature.

Academic life in the USA has long been marked by a considerable participation of
immigrants and occasional visiting scholars from a host of nations. This cultural resource was
especially important in the discipline of comparative literature following World War II and
continued to play a significant role. Twentieth-century pioneers of the roughly the postwar
generation of scholars such as Austin Warren, Anna Balakian, Harry Levin and René Wellek
were well-versed mainly in European and North American Anglophone cultures. They tended
to promote intellectual and cultural history and pursued formalist and morphological analysis,
the tracing of cross-cultural currents and movements, and literary and art periodization
(Zepetnek, 353).

Crucial to Remak’s argument is the idea that comparative literature should not be
regarded as a separate discipline with its own laws. Rather, it should be seen as a bridge
between subject areas. Remak’s approach focuses on the concept of “process”, while the
French school focuses on the concept of “product”. In North America, the situation was a
little a bit different. For a long time, New Criticism remained a major school in studying
literature, its vitality kept down the growth of the theortical study of literature including the
Deaprtments of Comparative Literature at universities.

New criticism is impregnated by a concept of literature, which allows for total

response of the reader for the text. New criticsm ignored the historicity of a text. In an
imitation to T.S.Eliot, it considers the literary work as a monument that is immediately
accessible and preserves its value for ever. Instead of an assembly of signs that in differing

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conexts can be interpreted differently. The heavy emphasis on uniquenss of a literary work
and the disregard of the historical and social conditions of literary communication were not
favorable to the development of comparative literature in the United States. In the absence of
the theortical framework for the comparative study of a text, there was no basis for
comparison. The second Congress of the international Comparative Literature Association
(ICLA) held in North Carolina in 1958. It greatly stimulated the growth of comparative
literature as an academic discipline in the American universities. The Initative for the
Congress had been taken by Werner Friedrich, professor at the University of North Carolina.
He had published the disputed definition of comparative literature by Jean-Marie Carre in the
issue of his Year book of Comparative and General Literature (1952). (Fokkema, 6).

From the mid-1950s on, the linguistic turn in anthropology initiated by Claude Lévi-
Strauss began to affect comparative literature, and the so-called “structuralist” wave attracted
a large number of literary scholars. Ten years later, a new philosophy began to be felt in
literary scholarship in the increase of so-called “deconstruction”—initiated by Paul de Man
and Jacques Derrida. By the mid-1980s, a large body of scholars in comparative literature
borrowed from the foregoing of notions with which to attack Europe based culture and
elaborated on “cultural studies.” Prominent branches of this newer concentration included
“postcolonial studies” and “ethnic studies” dedicated mainly to investigating the life and
expression of minority segments of the population principally in West European societies.
“Feminist” and “gender” studies also burgeoned in the new climate. These activities were
often drawn together and bundled under the umbrella label “multiculturalism.” (Zepetnek,
354).

There was another line taken by Rene Wellek who attacks the positivistic factualism
aligned with the views of Benedtoo Croce. Wellek considers literary works as 'wholes' in
which raw materials derived form elsewhere cease to be matter and are assimilated into a new
structure. As wholes, Wellek believes that integrity and meaning are violated if we break
them into source and influences. French positivism never attained the level of methodological
reflection and metalingual criticism. New Criticism regarded methodological reflection as
superfluous and the use of a metalanguage as adequate. It is clearly stated in the essay of
Cleanth Brook's 'the heresy of paraphrase.' In his work, Crisis of Comparative Literature,
René Wellek stresses that "the most serious sign of the precarious state of our study was the
fact that it had not been able to establish a distinct subject matter and a specific methodology"

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(Cited in our o). Literariness, aesthetics, and art, Wellek maintains, should be the focus of
the discipline. It sounds that these and other essays in Comparative Literature in the Age of
Multiculturalism reflect a general understanding of the fact that literature is at the center of
our field. The disagreement and the anxiety are not so much about that; rather, it is about
whether the expansion of the field of comparative literature would eventually lead to a
marginalization of literature, and about how to achieve this "pluralized and expanded
contextualization of literary study" (Bernheimer 11).

So, the American School of Comparative Literature started with a literay theory with
all its aspects, and came as a reaction against the French school. It's main aim was
to depoliticize comparative literature by going beyond the political borders of literary texts. It
is mainly based on universalism and interdisciplinarity. It has mainly two fields of study:

A. Parallelism:
It does not give importance to the link of causality. It gives no importance to
influence. There is a possibility of dealing with literary texts not being in contact of
whatsoever kind, but having similar contexts or realities. If influence exists between literary
texts, the importance does not lie in the influence itself but rather in the context. If the context
does not allow for influence to be effective, influence will never take place in the first place.

B. Intertextuality:
It is the reference of a given text to another text. New texts are superposed on old
texts. Literature is a continuous and an ongoing process of reworking and refashioning old
text. Old texts turn into some sort of raw materials used for the creation of new ones.

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 References

Bernheimer, Charles, ed. Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism.

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press , 1995.
Block, Haskell. "Comparative Literature." Comparative Literature Studies. Vol.
1, No. 1 (1964), pp. 78-83.
Fokkema, D.W. Candian Review of Comparative Literature.

our o, anuela. "Comparative Literature in the United States." CLCWeb:

Comparative Literature and Culture . Volume 2 Issue 4 (December
2000).
Zepetnek, Steven and Tutun Mukherjee. Companion to Comparative Literature,
World Literatures, and Comparative Cultural Studies. New Delhi:
Foundation Books, 2013.

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