History of Ideas

It refers to one of the orientations of comparative literature as having first been implemented by Paul Van Tighem since 1931. This field of study gained ground and recognition through the creation of a Journal of the History of Ideas.

This field is at the crossroads of philosophy and history. It is interested in "ideas" in the broadest and the more general sense of the term rather than in its doctrinal sense. Idea designates knowledge, abstract reflexion or intellectual representation. History of ideas thus studies the evolution of human thinking or human mentality through time and space. Humans during Antiquity had a different mindset than humans during the Middle Ages or humans during the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, or the Modernist era. As a matter of instance, behind every change in the history of Europe, there is a current of thought. Intellectual currents represent the motor of society. 

What makes a given society move ahead and head for a specific change is always a specific current of thought. For example, Church indoctrination during the middle ages has been replaced by Humanism during the Renaissance. Humanism as a current of thought favors human thinking over established doctrines and it has lead the way for the era of flourishing and revival that the Renaissance is. 

Often times, this change occurring in society is lead by avant-gardist intellectuals and thinkers. Martin Luther in Germany and John Calvin in Switzerland are perfect examples. Through their intellectual efforts they changed and reformed the map of europe by reforming and liberating the minds from the thoughts dictated by the catholic church (the Vatican as an authority). 

Also, the changes happening in Europe and America during the 18th century owe it all to Enlightenment thinkers. In France, they were called "les philosophes": Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu among others. Their intellectual force influenced intellectuals outside France. As is the case in USA mainly Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. The American revolution, the American Declaration of independence and the Bill of Rights are products of the enlightenment as a current of thought that advocates reason, logic, and scientific thinking instead of tradition. 

History of ideas studies the circulation of thoughts and ideas through time and space. Comparative Literature is interested in that field of study mainly because those intellectual currents are carried by literature and arts. Literature and arts constitute a sort of arteries through which ideas circulate to influence and make changes in societies. Literature and Art also reflect the mentality and the mindset of humans in the time and place where it is produced. During the Age of enlightenment, realism was the literary and artistic tendency. Realism as a literary current helped spreading reason as a mode of thought and by that enabled that current of thought to be transmitted from the minority intellectual elite (avant-guard) and influence the majority (common people). 

Categories of ideas: Ideas can be categorized mainly as follows:

Philosophical Ideas: like Existentialism, Absurdism...

Moral or Ethical Ideas: Moral values... 

Religious or Theological Ideas: Religious values... 

Scientific Ideas: like Freudianism, Darwinism...

Political Ideas: like Capitalism, Communism, Socialism...

Study case:

When we observe the era in which we live, which is characterized by technological and scientific advancement, it is clear that the avant-gardist aspirations in all the fields mostly all head toward a reconciliation with the environment. Economy aspires for sustainable development. Tourism aspires for  green tourism or what is called ecotourism. Car industry aspires for environment friendly cars using green energies. Agricultural production advocates the label "BIO" or "Organic". The same with clothing industry and fashion, there is a coming back to natural raw materials.

If the avant-guard favors ecology it is due to the drastic consequences of massive industry on the environment. The flagrant threat on the environment (and by extension on humans' survival) by industry has led to the elite's concern about ecology.

Literature as a vessel that carries avant-guardist ideas contributes in spreading the ecological concern. Many literary texts and artistic works has dealt with the environment long before current concern about the environment. 

Examples:

• Algerian Chaabi Music mirrors the Algerian culture's interest in and respect for birds. Probably because Algerians' longing for freedom during colonial times made birds stand as a revered symbol for freedom.

• Many post-colonial texts depict the coming of the colonizer by imposing his ways and order as a disturbance to the harmony that the colonized has with his natural environment. Colonialism causes disorder and chaos by affecting the environment. This change in the relationship with the environment affects the colonized cultural ways. 

• The extinction of certain living organisms also lead to the extinction of culture. Certain animals or plants carry a cultural value and their disappearance cause the death of culture. In the same way, change in the environment (geography or climate) alter and distort culture.

Ecocritism:

According to Jelica Tošić in her article Ecocriticism - Interdisciplinary Study of Literature and Environment:
The word ecocriticism is a semineologism.2 Eco is short of ecology, which is con- cerned with the relationships between living organisms in their natural environment as well as their relationships with that environment. By analogy, ecocriticism is concerned with the relationships between literature and environment or how man's relationships with his physical environment are reflected in literature. These are obviously interdisciplinary studies, unusual as a combination of a natural science and a humanistic discipline. The domain of ecocriticism is very broad because it is not limited to any literary genre. […] It is appropriate here to stress that it was only in the 1990s that ecocriticism emerged as a separate discipline although it is a fact that the relationship between man and his physical environment had always been interesting to literary critics.3 This interest, both at the basic scientific level and in the metaphorical form in literature, can be explained in two ways: 1. man always exists within some natural environment or, according to Buell, there cannot be is without where,4 and 2. the last decade of the twentieth century was the time when it became obvious that the greatest problem of the twenty-first century would be the survival of the Earth. The first explanation is concerned with man's essential quest for personal identity or with his need and failure to find his roots. That is the reason why he is a life-long wanderer, on the one hand, and why he is always identified with the fa- miliar physical and cultural environment, on the other.5 The latter explanation results from the fact that man feels vitally threatened in the ecologically degraded world. Over- exploitation of natural resources and man's disregard of the air, water and soil that sustain him have given rise to the question of the survival of both man and the planet (Earth). The end of the twentieth century showed clearly that everyone had to do something to help the Earth survive. Ecocriticism is one of the ways in which humanists fight for the world in which they live. The reflection of that difficult struggle in the area of culture and spirit speaks for the urgency of action or the urgent need to do something in this respect. P44

Ecology is the science that studies the relationships between living organisms (biotic component) and their physical environment (abiotic component). In other words, ecology is concerned with the living organisms in their natural environment. Although it is not explicitly stated here, ecology is anthropocentric whereas deep ecology originating from the endeavor to promote life as such is biocentric and stresses the fact that man is only one part in a huge and complex life net in nature in which everything has a certain value. That is why man has to realize that he is not allowed and entitled to reduce the richness and variety of the living world except for the satisfaction of his basic needs. P45

Table 1. Ecological Terms as a Source of Ecocriticism and Language Study

Ecology	Ecocriticism and language study
ecology	deep ecology
physical environment	environmental imagination reimagination
biodiversity	global environmental culture environmental unconscious
endangered species	ecocultural habitat
pollution	toxic discourse literary hazards language pollution

For further understanding of these concepts concepts check the article:

ECOCRITICISM – INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDY OF LITERATURE AND ENVIRONMENT by Jelica Tošić 

     

    

Intertexuality

To understand what intertextuality is, one has to understand what a text is.

Because it has language as its raw material, the text is thus a linguistic product.

Language is a system of signs. This system is primarily conventional and agreed upon by a group. Because language is a social phenomenon, using language implies accepting and reproducing conventional codes as well as adopting established linguistic standards and norms. Language, because of its social nature, cannot be invented out of the blue and cannot exist in a vacuum. Language cannot be isolated from its social context. Language cannot be individual. When we use language we are not imitating or being influenced by anybody in particular. We are simply using a code which is a common property (it does not belong to any particular individual). There is no copyright infringement when using language.   

Has language been independent, individual and isolated, it would fail its communicative function. 

The act of communication as described by Jakobson demonstrate that for the message to be understood and for communication to take place, the code has to be common and shared between both the sender and the receiver. If the code is individual, it would be impossible for the receiver to crack it. The code should be part of the established standards - part of the norms. 

                      Context

                           ^

                           ^

Sender  >>>  Message  >>>  Receiver

                           ^

                           ^

                     Channel

                           ^

                           ^

                       Code

Even new codes, they always build up on already established codes (or else it would be impossible for them to be established in themselves as codes). This means that meaning is never independent.

Text and language can be used interchangeably. What stands for language stands for the text. 

A literary text is the construct of literary systems, codes, and traditions established by previous literary texts. For instance, there is no copyright infringement in using the expression "Once upon a time" at the beginning of a fairy tale or of the act of story telling because the expression has come to be a code as well as a cultural, a literary and a social property. Its use carries literary, cultural and social meanings for the reader. Every text is part of a literary tradition. Even texts reacting against a given literary tradition are compelled to use the existing literary codes to react against that tradition. For instance, James Joyce in his A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man reacts against traditions. However, he starts his novel with "Once upon a time". It is used as a sort of hint to that against which the text reacts.   

In that respect there is no such thing as 'source text' or 'original text'. Every text is an intertext because every text builds up on previous texts. Every text constructs its meaning only in relation to previous texts. No text carries its proper  independent meaning. No text is hermetically closed and self-sufficient. No text exists in a vacuum. No text is isolated. No text is original and unique in itself. 

The text's hermeneutics and its potential meanings can only be discovered by tracing the relations existing between that text and other texts that has gone before it. Meaning exists between a text and all the other texts to which it refers and relates. For such a reason, the meaning of a text can never be exhausted and stabilized. Ceaselessly new textual relations are discovered / created / possible:

According to Roland Barthes literary meaning can never be stabilized by the reader, since the literary work’s intertextual nature always leads reader on to new textual relations. As Barthes reminds us, the very word ‘text’ is, if we remember its original meanings, «a tissue, a woven fabric»: «We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning [...] but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture...» 

Definition from the Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory:

A term coined by Julia Kristeva in 1966 to denote the interdependence of literary texts, the interdependence of any one literary text with all those that have gone before it. Her contention was that a literary text is not an isolated phenomenon but is made up of a mosaic of quotations, and that any text is the 'absorption and transformation of another'. she challenges traditional notions of literary influence, saying that intertextuality denotes a transposition of one or several sign systems into another or others. But this is not connected with the study of sources. 'Transposition' is a Freudian term, and Kristeva is pointing not merely to the way texts echo each other but to the way that discourses or sign systems are transposed into one another - so that meanings in one kind of discourse are overlaid with meanings from another kind of discourse. It is a kind of 'new articulation'. P424

Roland Barthes and the Death of the Author:

There are two axes to intertextuality:

As far as the author is concerned: The author, before being an author, is a reader. He, consciously or unconsciously brings his readings into his writing act. The writer reproduces, rewrites and renews old texts. There is no source text and thus no authorship. 

Any text is a new tissue of past citations. Bits of code, formulae, rhythmic models, fragments of social languages, etc., pass into the text and are redistributed within it, for there is always language before and around the text. Intertextuality, the condition of any text whatsoever, cannot, of course, be reduced to a problem of sources or influences; the intertext is a general field of anonymous formulae whose origin can scarcely ever be located; of unconscious or automatic quotations, given without quotation marks. ("Theory of the Text" 39).

As far as the reader is concerned: The text is what the reader makes it. In his act of reading, the reader establishes links between the text he is reading and other texts he has read in the past to give meaning to that text. The more links are established, the more the text is opened on and related to other texts, the richer in meaning it will be. 

It is not in the hand of the author to control how the reader will perceive his text. What counts is the point of view of the reader. The text belongs to a literary tradition as defined by the reader's reading background. The meanings that the reader will come to are forcefully dictated by his literary culture or his reading network. 

World Literature

World Literature is the circulation of national literatures beyond their national borders. It is the field of study that comparative literature investigates.

This definition makes it clear that World Literature and Comparative Literature are very close in nature. 

In her article "The Uses and Abuses of World Literature", Kate McInturff first defined World Literature by distinguishing it from Comparative Literature: 

This article is part of a current debate about the definitions of and differences between Compara- tive Literature and World Literature. However, the two terms were often used interchangeably in the nineteenth century. Even today, critics in both Comparative Literature and World Literature almost invariably cite Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s concept of Weltliteratur as a common foundation for their fields. A distinction can be made between a sphere of common cultural influence—a literature of the world—and a comparison of distinctive cultural spheres—a comparison of literatures. P225

While Comparative Literature is about the differences, World Literature is about the commonalities between all national literatures. It is concerned with that which is universal and common to all literatures.

Second, McInturff identified the core debate or a core tension in World Literature:

The tension between national and cosmopolitan interests is a common thread in these discussions—one that has its roots in the early formation of the field(s) P225 

World Literature, in its aspiration for universality, is composed of national literatures. This implies that World Literature is composed of two contradictory components, the national and the cosmopolitan (the universal / the international), which causes an inner tension within discussions about World Literature.

Third, McInturff exposed the different definitions that different scholars has attributed to World Literature based on that inner tension between the national and the cosmopolitan. Some scholars maintained a balance in their use of World Literature. Some others did not maintain the balance between the two contradictory components of world literature which caused them to misuse and abuse World Literature. Other scholars tried to restore the balance by correcting the abuse made to World Literature. 

1 Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe:

‘National literature does not mean much at present, it is time for the era of world literature and everybody must endeavor to accelerate this epoch’ P225

‘it is not a matter of nations being obliged to think in unison; rather, they should become aware of and understand each other, and, if love proves impossible, they should at least learn to tolerate one another’ P225

While Goethe emphasizes the productive possibilities of an international community of writers and readers, he does so with the understanding that national identifications are still powerful. It is, in part, as a result of violent conflicts between nations that World Literature becomes possible. P225

Idealistically speaking, Goethe's views demonstrate a balance between the national and the cosmopolitan. While Goethe is the main figure in World Literature, he is not the first to have reflected about World Literature. However, his name is strongly linked to the concept of World Literature because he is the one to have developed it more than any of his predecessors. Even today World Literature is attributed to Goethe. It is Goethe's Weltliteratur. 

2 Frederich Schlegel: (balance)

Schlegel, like Goethe, acknowledges the power of popular investments in national literature. Schlegel’s formulation of literature in the interna- tional realm, in contrast to Goethe’s, emphasizes the status conferred to national literature through its contributions to World Literature. P225 

In Schlegel, World Literature does not lead to a dissolution of national boundaries as much as it leads to better relations at the border. P225

3 Johann Gottfreid Herder: (balance)

‘‘Goethe first described world literature as cross-cultural reception inside an evolving world history, a concept he (and others) found already developed by Johann Gottfreid Herder’’P226 

Herder emphasizes both the unity of humanity and the importance of national ‘‘climate’’ and character. P226

He argues for the fundamental importance of ‘‘climate’’ on the development of the distinctive cultures and languages that define communities as nations (284). Climate, for Herder, is not only literally the weather, but also the geographic terrain and the political and intellectual trends of the period.2 Thus, for Herder, the nation is the product of a chthonic relationship between a people and the climate they inhabit. The nation is also the product of the encounter of one community with others, over time. P226

The nation is both a group united by its relationship to its place, and also a product of heterogeneous influences—of ‘‘circumstances and occasions.’’ As Robert Young puts it, ‘‘Herder therefore speaks with a forked tongue: offering on the one hand rootedness, the organic unity of a people and their local, traditional culture, but also on the other hand the cultural education of the human race whereby the achievements of one culture are grafted on to another’’ P226-7

   

4 Matthew Arnold: (Abuse: world literature is limited to the contribution of western national literatures to the world. Western masterpieces earned the status of universality)

Arnold’s comments draw out a particular critical paradox. This paradox derives from a desire to affirm the value of the nation’s literary contributions in comparison with that of other nations, while maintaining that this affirmation is an objective one. P227

In Arnold, we find again the simultaneous emphasis on the unity of humanity and a recognition of distinctive differences be- tween cultures; contact with other cultures is productive precisely because those cultures are in some way unique. Arnold defines culture as the product of the dialectic of two racial strains: Hellenism and Hebraism. Arnold writes: ‘‘Science has now made visible to everybody the great and pregnant elements of difference which lie in race, and in how signal a manner they make the genius and history of an Indo-European people vary from those of a Semitic people. P227

National contributions to World Literature help to define that nation as civilized. The influence of one nation’s literature on others helps to define the nation’s capacity to civilize. P228

5 Edward Said: (Restoring the balance)

In Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, Said argues that European scholars generated a definition of European identity in relation to an image of an Oriental identity. However, in the arena of Comparative and World Literatures, the self and the other are more often both European. This is not to deny the power and scope of European readings of non-European cultures, but rather to claim that Europe itself was conceived of as a competitive-comparative realm. 

6 Richard Moulton: (Abuse)

In Moulton’s work, the national perspective of the critic is not elided. He writes in 1911, ‘‘I take a distinction between Universal Literature and World Literature. Universal Literature can only mean the sum total of all literatures. World Literature, as I use this term, is this Universal Literature seen in perspective from a given point of view, presumably the national standpoint of the observer’’ (Moulton 6). While clearly influenced by Matthew Arnold, Moulton makes a virtue rather than a vice of the national perspective point of the critic. What becomes clearer over the course of Moulton’s writing is that some national perspectives bring greater enlightenment than others. P232  

‘‘World Literature is the Autobiography of Civilisation’’ P232

7 Homi Bhabha: (Restoring the balance)

The study of world literature might be the study of the way in which cultures recognize themselves through their projections of ‘‘otherness.’’ Where the transmission of ‘‘national’’ traditions was once the major theme of a world literature perhaps we can now suggest that transnational histories of migrants, the colonized, or political refu- gees—these border and frontier conditions— may be the terrains of World Literature. The center of such a study would neither be the ‘‘sovereignty’’ of national cultures, nor the ‘‘universalism’’ of human culture, but a focus on those ‘‘freak displacements’’ . . . that have been caused within cultural lives of postcolonial societies. (‘‘The World and the Home’’ 146) P233


Bhabha’s World Literature is rather the defense of the migrant or, as he has written elsewhere, ‘‘culture’s in between,’’ against the nation’s self-declared centers. It is what Djelal Kadir has aptly termed a ‘‘hinternational’’ literature (245). P234

For Homi Bhabha, because the geopolitics of the world is different, so must be the tension or the debate in World Literature. It is not about the national vs. the universal any longer but rather about displaced cultures or cultures in between vs. self declared centers.

  

  

  

Travel Literature

• If World Literature is the movement of literatures across the world, Travel Literature is the body of literature that deals with movement .i.e. travel with every connotation the word entails. 

• Travel Literature is important to comparative literature studies because it is the embodiment of contact between cultures. Travel Writing naturally encompasses the interaction of identity with alterity. It is an interaction that constitutes the core of studies in comparative literature. 

• Travel Writing played an important role in literary history:

- It has contributed to the development of personal writing. (diaries, journals, autobiographies… first person narrative) 

- It has contributed to the rise of the novel in England: Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe is a travel narrative. 

• Texts of travel literature can be both fiction (although fiction is often based and founded on real travels like is the case of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness) or it can also be non-fiction (for instance, the journals held by the pilgrims like William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation or by explorers who traveled to America like the journal of Captain John Smith or the journal of Captain James Cook)

• Oral narratives about distant places are not excluded from the body of Travel Literature. 

• Travel Writing must have existed ever since humans have known travel. However this genre has mainly flourished after the discovery of the Americas. 

• According to Mary Campbell: "It is a genre that confronts at their extreme limits, representational tasks proper to a number of literary kinds: the translation of experience into narrative and description, of the strange into the visible, of observation into the verbal construct of fact; the deployment of personal voice in the service of transmitting information (or of creating devotional texts); the manipulation of rhetorical figures for ends other than ornament."

• Travel Writing describes the encounter with the other, with the strange, with the foreign, with the unknown. It is the textuality of a personal discourse accounting for the experience with otherness.  Travel narratives are thus known to be Narratives of Difference. 

• As Travel narratives work on the basis of an "operation of translation", they are aimed at transforming difference into sameness. They narrate difference and transform it into something intelligible for the self.

• This "operation of translation" causes the othering (marginalization, inferiorization) of difference. 

Example of the native Americans:

• The video shows how that which is completely unknown (native americans) is defined in terms of that which is known (indians). Imposing that faulty definition on the native americans attests how the new comers sought only to consolidate their old knowledge as they thought of it as absolute and unquestionable. Their old knowledge is superior and it is imposed on the natives though it is false. By that the natives are othered. 

• Columbus is not discovering the Americas per se but comforting his biblical vision of the world. He is seeing in the "new world" what he already knew.

• There is a possibility of narrating difference without othering it. When looking at difference from its inside not its outside. Narrating through the perspective of alterity and otherness by making a detachment from identity and selfhood. It is possible by questioning old personal knowledge and being open for new visions seen through the eyes of the other. For instance Mircea Eliade's The sacred and The Profane looks at the cannibalistic other without value judgement i.e. without any othering "process of transformation".    

• In this respect, travel is not only about the encounter with the Other but also about the encounter with the Self. It is an inner movement from ignorance (innocence) to knowledge through experience. It is a growing up process instead of "transformation process" mainly because it allows for new knowledge to be acquired.

  

Schools of Comparative Literature

The French School:

The French school sets conditions on both the studied literary texts on the one hand as well as on the relationship of influence between them on the other hand. It is also obsessed with terminology and makes distinction between influence, reception, borrowing and imitation. Comparatists of the French School also distinguish between direct / indirect influence, literary / non-literary influence, positive / negative influence. 

All the conditions set by the French school has led the discipline of comparative literature to a dead end. 

Because it obsessed itself with the link of causality, more investigations were made outside the texts instead of dealing with the texts themselves. The discipline lost its track and failed to meet the purposes it has set for itself at the beginning mainly when it comes to defeating nationalism. Instead of eliminating it, it has accentuated it. 

The fields of study of comparative literature according to the French school:

1/ Literary Schools and Genres

2/ Ideological Echoes

3/ Image Echoes

4/ Verbal Echoes

5/ Human Models and Heroes   

The American School:

The American school 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 is has mainly two fields of study:

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.

Intertextuality: 

It is the reference of a given text to another text.

New texts are superposed on old texts.

New texts (Hypertexts) are always read under the light of old texts (Hypotexts).

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. 

Reading materials:

[PDF] Theories of Comparative Literature - South Valley University

Origins and Development of Comparative Literature

First Appearance of the Term:

Susan Bassnett in her Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction states:

There is General agreement that comparative literature acquired its name from a series French anthologies used for the teaching of literature, published in 1816 and entitled Cours de littérature comparée. In an essay discussing the origins of the term, René Wellek notes that this title was 'unused and unexplained' but he also shows how the term seems to have crept into use through 1820s and 1830s in France. He suggests that the German version of the term, 'vergleichende Literaturgeschichte', first appeared in a book by Moriz Carrière in 1854, while the earliest English usage is attributed to Matthew Arnold, who referred to 'comparative literatures' in the plural in a letter of 1848. (page 12)

Why the use of the adjective "comparative"?

At the time, the scientific boom has led to the rise of comparatism as a method or an approach in the philosophy of science where a given thing is not judged to be true or false in itself but as related to something else. Comparatism was the spirit of the age. Comparatism was the methodology employed in most disciplines and literature was no exception. 

The Historical Context Undermining the Birth of Comparative Literature:   

According to Susan Basnnett, "The term 'comparative literature' appeared in an age of transition. In Europe, as nations struggled for independence - from the Ottoman Empire, from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, from France, from Russia - and new nation states came into being, national identity (whatever that was) was inextricably bound up with national culture (however that was defined)." (page 20)

The Mechanisms Undermining the Birth of Comparative Literature:  

What becomes apparent when we look at the origins of comparative literature is that the term predated the subject. People used the phrase 'comparative literature' without having clear ideas about what it was. With the advantages of retrospection, we can see that 'comparative' was set against 'national', and whilst the study of 'national' literatures risked accusations of partisanship, the study of 'comparative' literature carried with it a sense of transcendence of the narrowly nationalistic. In other words, the term was used loosely but was associated with the desire for peace in Europe and for harmony between nations. Central to this idealism was also the belief that comparison could be undertaken on mutual basis. (Susan Basnnett, P21).

Comparative literature was a reaction to nationalism in Europe.   

The Crisis of Comparative Literature:

Comparative literature as a term seems to arouse strong passions, both for and against.

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 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'. Instead of something called comparative literature, he suggested that the proper object of study should be literary history. (Basnnett, P03)

For:

• {…} François Jost claimed that 'national literature' cannot constitute an intelligible field of study because of its arbitrarily limited perspective', and that comparative literature: "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 if the cultural universe, inclusive and comprehensive.

• 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 (Wellek & Warren)

While opponents of comparative literature suggested that comparative literature is nothing but another name for literary history; proponents of comparative literature argued that it is much wider in scope and that it provides us with the bigger picture instead of the narrow perspective of literary history.

The Dead End of Comparative Literature:

'We spend far too much of our energy talking … about Comparative Literature and not enough of it comparing the literature,' complained Harry Levin in 1969, urging more practical work and less agonizing about the theory. But Levin's proposal was already out of date; by the late 1970s a new generation of high-flying graduate students in the West had turned to Literary Theory, Women Studies, Semiotics, Film and Media Studies and Cultural Studies as the radical subject choices, abandoning Comparative Literature to what were increasingly seen as dinosaurs from a liberal - humanist prehistory. (Basnnett, P05)

Development of Comparative Litetrature Outside Europe:

• Yet even as that process was underway in the West, comparative literature began to gain ground in the rest of the world. New programmes in comparative literature began to emerge in China, in Taiwan, in Japan and other Asian countries, based, however, not on any ideal of universalism but on the very aspect of literary study that many western comparatists had sought to deny: the specificity of national literatures. (Basnnett, P05)

• Ganesh Devy goes further, and suggests that comparative literature in India is directly linked to the rise of modern Indian nationalism, nothing that comparative literature has been 'used to to assert the national cultural identity'. There is no sense here of national literature and comparative literature being incompatible. (Basnnett, P05)

• The work of Indian Comparatists is characterized by a shift of perspective. For decades, comparative literature started with western literature and looked outwards; now what is happening is that the West is being scrutinized from without. (Basnnett, P06)

• The growth of national consciousness and awareness of the need to move beyond the colonial legacy has led significantly to the development of comparative literature in many parts of the world, even as the subject enters a period of crisis and decay in the West. The way in which comparative literature is used, in places such as China, Brazil, India or many African nations, is constructive in that it is employed to explore both indigenous traditions and imported (or imposed) traditions, throwing open the whole vexed problem of the canon. There is no sense of crisis in this form of comparative literature, no quibbling about the terms from which to start comparing, because those terms are already laid down. What is being studied is the way in which national culture has been affected by importation, and the focus is that national culture. Ganesh Devy's argument that comparative literature in India coincides with the rise of modern Indian nationalism is important, because it serves to remind us of the origins of the term 'Comparative Literature' in Europe, a term that first appeared in an age of national struggles, when new boundaries were being erected and the whole question of national culture and national identity was under discussion throughout Europe and the expanding United States of America. (Basnnett, P08-09)

• The new comparative literature is calling into question the canon of great European masters. (Basnnett, P09)

• The opening statements of The Empire Writes Back (Subtitled: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures) include the following phrases: "the term 'post-colonial' … is most appropriate as the term for the new cross-cultural criticism which merged in recent years and for the discourse which this is constituted." What is this but comparative literature under another name?  (Basnnett, P10)

The New Crises in Comparative Literature: 

• The Issue of Translation Studies: Comparative literature has traditionally claimed translation as a sub-category, but this assumption is now being questioned. (Basnnett, P10)

• The Issue of Eurocentrism: See the following article by Susan Basnnett

Reflections on Comparative Literature in the Twenty-First Century

Susan Basnnett

From: Comparative Critical Studies 

Volume 3, Issue 1-2, 2006 

pp. 3-11 | 10.1353/ccs.2006.0002