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Pauline Yu Comparative literature in question Comparative literature is at once a subject butions to a substantial body of writings of study, a general approach to literature, a on the nature of comparative literature. series of speci½c methods of literary histo- As Weisinger and Joyaux suggest, ry, a return to a medieval way of thought, there has been scant consensus about a methodological credo for the day, an ad- the de½nition and purpose of the ½eld ministrative annoyance, a new wrinkle in from its very inception. Debates have university organization, a recherché aca- been waged about its name and what demic pursuit, a recognition that even to call those who practice it. Disputes the humanities have a role to play in the have swirled about whether or not their affairs of the world, close-held by a cabal, task is one of comparison. Questions invitingly open to all . 1 have been raised about whether or not whatever it is they do constitutes a discipline, producing delight, consternation, o begins the foreword to Herbert S or despair in the hearts of those who Weisinger’s and Georges Joyaux’s trans- care. Like the humanities as a whole, lation of René Etiemble’s The Crisis in comparative literature seems to face one Comparative Literature, published in 1966 ‘challenge’ after another and to exist in a and itself one of many polemical contri- state of perpetual ‘crisis,’ as even a quick glance at the titles of numerous works Pauline Yu, a Fellow of the American Academy on the subject can con½rm. since 1998, is president of the American Council Is it, as one critic describes it, “a house of Learned Societies. She is the author or editor with many mansions,” or should we regard it as “permanently under construc- of ½ve books and dozens of articles on classical 2 Chinese poetry, literary theory, comparative poet- tion”? Perhaps this is why Charles ics, and issues in the humanities. Formerly profes- 1 Herbert Weisinger and Georges Joyaux, fore- sor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and word to their translation of René Etiemble, Dean of Humanities in the College of Letters and The Crisis in Comparative Literature (East Lans- Science at University of California, Los Angeles, ing: Michigan State University Press, 1966), she is currently an adjunct senior research scholar vii–viii. and a visiting professor in East Asian Languages 2 S. S. Prawer, Comparative Literary Studies and Cultures at Columbia University. (London: Dudworth, 1973), 166, and Roland Greene, “American Comparative Literature: © 2006 by the American Academy of Arts Reticence and Articulation,” World Literature & Sciences Today 69 (Spring 1995): 297. 38 Dædalus Spring 2006 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2006.135.2.38 by guest on 26 September 2021 Mills Gayley, a professor of English at the greatest among our poets have bor- Comparative literature Berkeley, writing in 1894, believed that rowed, and borrowed gladly, from values in question the members of his proposed new Soci- given by other lands. In the words of a ety of Comparative Literature “must be witty Frenchman: we all feed on others, hewers of wood and drawers of water. though we must properly digest what we Even though they cannot hope to see the thus receive. Even the lion is nothing but completion of a temple of criticism, they assimilated mutton.”4 may have the joy of construction . ”3 Friederich’s study exempli½es on a Joyful or not, the hewers and drawers grand scale what had become by the have toiled for more than a century, middle of the twentieth century a signa- struggling to de½ne an enterprise that ture method of comparative literature, –at once chameleon and chimera–has the study of literary influence. Viewed de½ed such attempts by mirroring the from such a transnational perspective, shifting political climate and intellectu- literary reputations could shift in inter- al predilections of each successive age. esting ways, with some individuals neg- In comparative literature’s history, then, lected by historians of the national liter- we can witness a series of contests that ature vaulting to surprising prominence have shaped the past two centuries, be- abroad, and some locally eminent lumi- tween nationalism and cosmopolitan- naries ½nding their signi½cance in the ism, scientism and humanism, literature international arena eclipsed. What is and theory, and within the very notion important here is the light Friederich’s of disciplinarity itself. history casts on a fundamental tension within the founding impulse of the dis- In an Outline of Comparative Literature cipline: the relative priority of the trans- from Dante Alighieri to Eugene O’Neill, national versus the national. ½rst published in 1954, the Swiss émigré Cosmopolitanism, comparison, and Werner P. Friederich traced the roots of a transcendence of strictly national in- comparative literature to the influences terests and characteristics presuppose of Mediterranean and Near Eastern cul- an awareness of what the latter in fact tures on ancient Greece and of the latter, might be. Just as contemporary exhor- in turn, on Rome, although for him the tations toward interdisciplinarity re- real activity began during the Renais- quire thriving disciplinary bases, so the sance. His history of the discipline set tracing of relationships across national out to demonstrate “the essential one- traditions depends on a strong sense of ness of Western culture and the stulti- what they separately are. Comparative fying shortsightedness of political or lit- literature’s early forebears were thus as erary nationalism,” a unifying impulse inclined to focus on the local and par- shared by many other scholars writing ticular as they were on moving beyond after the ravages of World War II. All them, but the oscillation between these national literatures, he argued, have in- two alternatives left the question of pre- curred “foreign obligations,” for “even cedence unclear. 3 Charles Mills Gayley, “A Society of Compar- ative Literature,” The Dial, August 1, 1894, 57, 4 Werner P. Friederich, preface to Outline of reprinted in Hans-Joachim Schulz and Phillip Comparative Literature from Dante Alighieri to M. Rhein, eds., Comparative Literature: The Ear- Eugene O’Neill (Chapel Hill: University of ly Years. An Anthology of Essays (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Press, 1954). The “witty University of North Carolina Press, 1973), 85. Frenchman” was Paul Valéry. Dædalus Spring 2006 39 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2006.135.2.38 by guest on 26 September 2021 Pauline Yu Consider two pioneers in comparative Goethe’s views would be echoed at on the humanities literature, Herder and Goethe. Johann various points over the next two cen- Gottfried Herder urged German writers turies as scholars called upon literary to study foreign literatures in order to study–and speci½cally comparative lit- learn how others had succeeded in “ex- erature–to exercise a form of cultural pressing their natural character in liter- diplomacy that would af½rm a shared ary works,” not for the purposes of emu- heritage of aesthetic excellence as an lation but rather to understand their dif- antidote to parochial political animosi- ferences and “develop along their own ties. For some this would be interpreted lines.”5 His research into and revival of as a return to the world of the Middle interest in German folklore was central Ages, “a universal culture expressed in to this process of national identity for- a universal language and comprehended mation, which, he hoped, could help to in a universal mode of thought.”7 For ameliorate the “dismal state of German others, Goethe’s ideal provided rather a literature.” cultural mirror for the anticipated with- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, by con- ering away of capitalism and the nation- trast, shifted the balance toward the cos- state, as Marx and Engels declared in the mopolitan, urging writers to eschew an Communist Manifesto: “National one-sid- easy provincialism and recognize the edness and narrow-mindedness become larger literary community to which they more and more impossible, and from belonged, the home of Weltpoesie (world the numerous national and local litera- poetry), the common property of hu- tures, there arises a world literature.”8 mankind, and of Weltliteratur (world lit- In any event, most scholars agree that erature): “National literature means while Goethe’s notion of world litera- little now, the age of Weltliteratur has ture–a term that would resurface later begun; and everyone should further –was not coterminous with what was its course.” Having learned much from to become comparative literature, we various foreign perspectives on his own can reasonably regard it as compara- writings, Goethe proposed the concept tive literature’s logical prerequisite. As of world literature not as a canon of François Jost observed, one provides the works to be studied and imitated but “raw materials and information” for the rather, anticipating the world of a Da- other, which then groups them “accord- vid Lodge novel, as “the marketplace ing to critical and historical principles. of international literary traf½c: transla- Comparative literature, therefore, may tions, criticism, journals devoted to for- be de½ned as an organic Weltliteratur; it eign literatures, the foreign receptions is an articulated account, historical and of one’s own works, letters, journeys, critical, of the literary phenomenon con- meetings, circles.”6 sidered as a whole.” Having provided this concise de½ni- 5 Robert Mayo, Herder and the Beginnings of tion, however, Jost was almost imme- Comparative Literature (Chapel Hill: Univer- sity of North Carolina Press, 1969), 107. 7 Weisinger and Joyaux, foreword to The Crisis 6 J. P. Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe, in Comparative Literature, xii. January 31, 1827, trans.

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