Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global

David Damrosch Comparing the Lit er a tures Literary Studies in a Global Age PRINCE TON UNIVERSITY PRESS Prince ton and Oxford Copyright © 2020 by Prince ton University Press Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to permissions@press . princeton . edu Published by Prince ton University Press 41 William Street, Prince ton, New Jersey 08540 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR press . princeton . edu All Rights Reserved ISBN 978-0-691-13499-4 ISBN (e- book) 978-0-691-20128-3 Library of Congress Control Number: 2019956207 British Library Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available Editorial: Anne Savarese and Jenny Tan Production Editorial: Kathleen Ciof Text and Jacket Design: Carmina Alvarez Production: Brigid Ackerman Publicity: Alyssa Sanford and Katie Lewis Copyeditor: Daniel Simon Jacket art: From Discussing the Divine Comedy with Dante, by Dai Dudu, Li Tiezi, and Zhang An (2006). Courtesy of the artists This book has been composed in Charis Printed on acid- free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of Amer i ca 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Contents List of Illustrations vii Acknowl edgments ix Introduction 1 1 Origins 12 2 Emigrations 50 3 Politics 84 4 Theories 122 5 Languages 165 6 Lit er a tures 207 7 Worlds 253 8 Comparisons 303 Conclusion: Rebirth of a Discipline 334 Bibliography 349 Index 375 Illustrations 1. Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum 36 2. Lin Yutang with Lin Tai-yi demonstrating his typewriter 61 3. “ Great Moments in Lit Crit,” Voice Literary Supplement, 1988 123 4. Paul de Man, before and after 1987 132 5. René Étiemble, letter to his mother, 1913 167 6. Seminary Library and National and University Library, Ljubljana 210 7. Bartolomé de Las Casas and John Phillips, Tears of the Indians 217 8. Canonicity as shown by citations in the MLA Bibliography 226 9. Final Fantasy Gilgamesh action fgure 235 10. Electronic Arts edition of Dante’s Inferno 239 11. EK Theater Per for mance of Grand Theft Ovid 243 12. Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Screenshot from “Cunnilingus in North Korea” 250 13. World lit er a ture in the empyrean and down to earth 293 14. Dai Dudu, Li Tiezi, and Zhang An, Discussing the Divine Comedy with Dante 342 Acknowl edgments During the dozen years that this book has been percolating, I have amassed debts whose full acknowl edgment would substantially increase the book’s size. I have tried out these ideas in lectures in some forty countries and have gotten many helpful suggestions in the pro cess. Here I might mention several sets of talks that extended the discussion beyond a single ses- sion, with warm thanks to Suradech Chotiudompant at Chulalongkorn University, Chen Yongguo at Tsing hua, Mads Rosendahl Thomsen and Christian Dahl at Aarhus and the University of Copenhagen, Péter David- házi at Eötvös Loránd and the Hungarian Acad emy of Sciences, Mitsuyo- shi Numano at the University of Tokyo, and Gisèle Sapiro at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Perhaps these names can stand for another two hundred. Versions of sections of these chapters frst appeared in the Saussy and Heise reports for the American Comparative Literature Association, the ADE Bulletin, the Canadian Review of Comparative Lit er a ture, Bermann and Porter’s A Companion to Translation Studies, The Comparatist, Com- parative Critical Studies, Comparative Lit er a ture Studies, Eu ro pean Review, Moser and Simonis’s Figuren des Globalen, MLQ, Modern Philology, Neoheli- con, Hayot and Walkowitz’s A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism, PMLA, The Routledge Companion to World Lit er a ture, and Translation Studies. The following chapters owe much to conversations with my students, with participants and colleagues at the annual sessions of the Institute for World Lit er a ture, and during the meetings of the ACLA. Martin Puchner generously read and commented on the full manuscript, as did Delia Un- gureanu, who also recommended the Chinese painting Discussing the Divine Comedy with Dante as the book’s cover image. I am grateful for sometimes very lively conversations with Emily Apter, Susan Bassnett, Sandra Bermann, Homi Bhabha, the late and deeply lamented Svetlana x • ACKNOWL EDGMENTS Boym, Pheng Cheah, Amanda Claybaugh, my brother Leo Damrosch, Wiebke Denecke, Theo D’haen, John Hamilton, Eric Hayot, Ursula Heise, Djelal Kadir, Franco Moretti, Stephen Owen, Orhan Pamuk, Katharina Piechocki, Sheldon Pollock, Bruce Robbins, Haun Saussy, Gayatri Spivak, Galin Tihanov, Lawrence Venuti, Rebecca Walkowitz, Saul Zaritt, and Zhang Longxi. I am grateful as well to Young- hae Chang and Marc Voge, to Edward Kim, and to Samuel Whitehead for their kind permission to use their images. The saintly patience and sound advice of my editor Anne Savarese have kept this book on track, and Daniel Simon’s judicious copyediting has improved the resulting manuscript throughout. My wife, Lori Fisler Damrosch, has been stalwart in her loving support throughout the years. This book would not exist without the generosity of my teachers in college and gradu ate school. I have previously dedicated a book to Mi- chael Holquist; here I will mention four other names among many, each representing a dif er ent kind of debt. As an assistant professor with many set responsibilities, Margaret Ferguson made time to do a tutorial on Homer, Virgil, and Milton. Peter Brooks’s classes ofered a compelling blend of theoretical sophistication and close reading, in open- ended but still focused seminar discussions. W. Kelly Simpson made learning Middle Egyptian a chance to encounter a very distant culture from multiple perspectives, from art and archaeology to po liti cal history to exceptionally close read- ings, down to the level of individual hieroglyphs and the likely provenance of a scribe’s handwriting. Fi nally, Nils Alstrup Dahl was a living link to the Enlightenment tradition of biblical scholarship, in which philology and hermeneutics went hand in hand. His characteristic expression of satisfac- tion with a piece of evidence was “It’s clear,” while an ill- founded obser- vation would be met with its opposite: “Well . that’s not so clear.” Clarity has been a prime virtue for me ever since. It seems appropriate that these very dif er ent teachers, incomparable in both senses of the word, should have made me a comparatist. Comparing the Lit er a tures Introduction Late one night, half a century ago, as a gradu ate student in comparative lit er a ture neared the date of his doctoral oral exam, his wife dreamed they were woken up by the sound of a truck and a knock on the door. When her husband went downstairs to answer it, he found a pair of workmen, in overalls, who proved to be two of his examiners, Harry Levin and Re- nato Poggioli. Recounting this dream in 1968 in his presidential address to the American Comparative Lit er a ture Association, Harry Levin reported that “the student reacted with that savoir- faire which is always so happy a feature of dreams. He simply remounted the stairs and reported to his wife, ‘The men are here to compare the lit er a ture’ ” (“Comparing the Lit- er a ture,” 6). This book is intended to answer the question behind the young woman’s dream: Just what was her husband doing with his life? And as for ourselves, how should we go about plying the comparatist’s trade today? How can we best address the many disparate lit er a tures now at play in literary studies, and what do we really mean by “comparing” them? Comparing the Lit er a tures is addressed not only to students and faculty in comparative liter a ture programs, but to anyone interested in incorpo- rating a comparative dimension into their work. Insofar as “comparative liter a ture” signifes working across national bound aries, a growing number of scholars in national liter a ture departments are becoming comparatists to a signifcant degree: a study of Walcott’s Omeros and Joyce’s Ulysses is as much a comparative proj ect as a study of Joyce and Homer. Comparatists have classically crossed linguistic as well as geo graph i cal borders, but studies within individual languages increasingly involve comparative explorations: of va ri e ties of “weird En glish” (Ch’ien), of Fran- cophone transculturations, of standard versus colloquial Arabics. A re- cent anthology of liter a ture in Portuguese includes work from Angola, 2 • INTRODUCTION Cape Verde, East Timor, Goa, Guinea- Bissau, Macau, and Mozambique, as well as Brazil and Portugal. Even to speak of “the Lusophone world” would be an oversimplifcation for the anthology’s editors, who gave it the plural title Mundos em português (Buescu and Mata, 2017). Furthermore, the con- temporary concern with issues of migration and diaspora has heightened attention to the presence of multiple languages within national cultures, which were never as monolingual as the ideology of the “national language” supposed. For many of us today, comparison begins at home. While questions of comparative method and purpose are now broadly shared across literary and cultural studies, the challenges of comparison become particularly acute within the discipline of comparative lit er a ture. As the Dutch comparatist Joep Leerssen has asked, “What is the unit of comparison? Is it the language community or its awkward sister, the race? Is it a given ‘society’ at a given stage of its ‘development’?” He notes that these alternatives were widely debated in the nineteenth century and are still in the air, “as is the almost palpable reluctance to spell out precisely what terms like language or race or a lit er a ture called ‘comparative’ actu- ally, specifcally mean” (“Comparing What, Precisely?” 207).

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