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 disci- pline, 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 re- gard 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 . (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.

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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.

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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. Joel Spingarn and reprinted in Schulz and Rhein, eds., 8 Cited in David Damrosch, “Comparative Comparative Literature: The Early Years, 6, 3. Literature?” PMLA 118 (2) (March 2003): 327.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2006.135.2.38 by guest on 26 September 2021 diately forced to concede that the very founders of modern criticism, Sainte- Comparative literature term ‘comparative literature’ has long Beuve, referred to “l’histoire littéraire com- in question been a “source of confusion,” for it parée” and “littérature comparée” in two “af½rms the idea that literature is to be articles on Jean-Jacques Ampère pub- compared, but does not indicate the lished in 1840 and 1868, comparative lit- terms of comparison.”9 What, then, erature appears to have achieved recog- has it meant to different critics? In an nition as both an academic discipline authoritative essay on this question, and a critical system.11 René Wellek has recounted in detail the Wellek and others have noted that history and variety of meanings attached its most important model was likely to a term that may have occurred in En- the new ½eld of comparative anatomy; glish for the ½rst time in a letter written Georges Cuvier’s Anatomie comparée had by Matthew Arnold to his sister in 1848 been published in 1800. As practiced by –though Arnold played no role in the natural scientists like Cuvier and subse- birth of the discipline. Meanwhile, in quently in such disciplines as philology, France, ‘littérature comparée’ had already linguistics, religion, and law, the com- appeared without explanation on the parative method introduced an histori- title page of a series of textbook anthol- cal dimension to the cosmopolitan im- ogies of French, classical, and English pulses that motivated Goethe. Haun literature compiled by Jean-François- Saussy has observed that they “all began Michel Noël and two collaborators in as what one might call tree-shaped dis- 1816. Ten years later Charles Pougens ciplines, organizing historical and typo- lamented the absence of a course on logical diversity into a common histori- the subject, a lacuna that Abel-François cal narrative with many parallel branch- Villemain addressed in a series of lec- es,” but that in most of the human sci- tures at the Sorbonne in 1828–1830 that ences this methodology was dif½cult offered amateurs de la littérature comparée to sustain “without begging too many a comparative analysis of several mod- questions about the universal reach of ern literatures.10 When one of the the categories employed,” and in the case of comparative literature, “the ty- 9 François Jost, Introduction to Comparative pological tree of written culture was Literature (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs- never more than a vestige anyway.”12 Merrill, 1974), 21–22. In a footnote here, Jost Still, the conviction that the existence recounts some of the variations in terminology of a common ground for the major Eu- that have been employed in various languages. In French one ½nds littérature both ‘comparative’ ropean literatures could and should be and ‘comparée’; Germans switched from ‘vergle- demonstrated was shared with propo- ichende Literaturgeschichte’ to ‘vergleichende Liter- nents of the notion of world literature aturwissenschaft,’ and then from ‘Komparativis- and was to inspire the work of many tik’ to ‘Komparatistik.’ In English both ‘com- great comparatists until well into the paratist’ and ‘comparativist’ are used; Jost twentieth century. states that the former has replaced the latter, though the evidence does not support this. He introduces the term “comparatistics” as a sub- tists at Work: Studies in Comparative Literature stitute for terms that have not gained wide ac- (Waltham, Mass.: Blaisdell, 1968), 8–9. ceptance–‘comparatism’ and ‘comparativism.’ 11 Jost, Introduction to Comparative Literature, 10. 10 René Wellek, “The Name and Nature of Comparative Literature,” in Stephen G. Nich- 12 Haun Saussy, “Comparative Literature?” ols, Jr., and Richard B. Vowles, eds., Compara- PMLA 118 (2) (March 2003): 337–338.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2006.135.2.38 by guest on 26 September 2021 Pauline Yu Although Wellek credited Hutcheson unnoticed in favor of Posnett’s more vis- on the humanities Macaulay Posnett, an Irish barrister who ible intervention, both in a book he pub- became a professor of classics in New lished in 1886 and an equally influential Zealand, with the ½rst “decisive” use article published ½fteen years later on of the term ‘comparative literature’ in “The Science of Comparative Litera- English in 1886, it appears to have been ture.” There Posnett made the audacious discussed even earlier by a professor claim “to have ½rst stated and illustrated of English at Cornell, Charles Chaun- the method and principles of the new cey Shackford, who delivered a lecture science.” These principles, according on the subject at the university in 1871. to Posnett, were simply “social evolu- Clearly influenced by Cuvier’s work, tion, individual evolution, and the influ- Shackford argued that the comparative ence of the environment on the social method provides a means of analyzing, and individual life of man.”14 Here Pos- classifying, and relating the numerous nett acknowledged the influence of Fer- facts and details that histories only col- dinand Brunetière, a powerful and pro- lect, revealing thereby “universal laws of li½c French scholar who had applied mental, social and moral development.” Darwinian theories to the study of lit- Comparative literature, he declared, erature, arguing, for example, that gen- res grew, declined, and evolved into new traces out the analogies that exist between ones just as animal species did. Concepts the literary productions of remotest na- drawn from comparative anatomy and tions, the peculiarities which distinguish evolution were thus instrumental in each as belonging to a particular period shaping the emerging ½eld of compara- of social and mental development, the tive literature, as the nineteenth-centu- variations in type with the causes, thus ry literary comparatists shared the pre- bringing together related points of excel- sumption of both sciences that unitary lence and power, with the exceptional re- principles linked disparate phenomena. sults produced by peculiarities of climate, Other American pioneers followed race, and surrounding institutions. Posnett’s lead in embracing evolution- Working back from individual branches ary principles as models for the practice to a common trunk not only affords a of comparative literature. Charles Mills deeper understanding of each national Gayley, who introduced a course on the literature, he claimed, it also provides a topic into the curriculum at Berkeley, proper understanding of literature “not believed that “trustworthy principles of in the isolated works of different ages, depend upon the sub- but as the production of the same great stantiation of aesthetic theory by scien- laws, and the embodiment of the same ti½c inquiry,” which, given the vastness universal principles in all times.”13 of the subject, requires systematic col- Shackford’s contribution to the litera- laboration within the scholarly commu- ture was never published outside of local nity. He therefore proposed the creation university records and thus went largely of the “Society of Comparative Litera- ture (or of Literary Evolution),” whose 13 Charles Chauncey Shackford, “Comparative Literature,” Proceedings of the University Convo- 14 Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett, “The Science cation (Albany: New York [State] University, of Comparative Literature,” The Contemporary Albany, 1876), reprinted in Schulz and Rhein, Review lxxix (1901): 855–872, reprinted in eds., Comparative Literature: The Early Years, Schulz and Rhein, eds., Comparative Literature: 42, 46. The Early Years, 188.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2006.135.2.38 by guest on 26 September 2021 members would each specialize in the matical infelicity was reason enough Comparative literature study of a given literary type or move- for many to wonder not only what the in question ment, pooling their ½ndings in a system- term meant but also what the activity atic way to achieve “an induction to the it denoted was aiming to achieve. common and therefore essential charac- teristics of the phenomenon, to the laws Undaunted by continuous uncertain- governing its origin, growth, and differ- ty about the name and nature of the entiation.”15 ½eld, universities established professor- Gayley’s contemporary Arthur Rich- ships in comparative literature during mond Marsh, a professor of compara- the second half of the nineteenth cen- tive literature at Harvard, also recog- tury in both Europe and the United nized his discipline’s debt to the com- States. Journals began publishing from parative method in the natural sciences. the 1870s on in Romania and Germany, Rejecting the notion that the point of and from the turn of the century in the comparing literary works is to deter- United States. Louis Paul Betz, a lectur- mine “their relative excellence,” Marsh er at Zurich, published the ½rst compre- argued for a less subjective and more hensive bibliography of the ½eld in 1896; scienti½c goal: “To examine, then, the enlarged in 1904, it contained some six phenomena of literature as a whole, to thousand entries. A sequel published by compare them, to group them, to classi- Fernand Baldensperger and Werner P. fy them, to enquire into the causes of Friederich in 1950 contained over thirty- them, to determine the results of them three thousand items.18 –this is the true task of comparative lit- Betz’s bibliography, in particular, was erature.”16 However, both Posnett and instrumental in stabilizing the use of Gayley acknowledged that the very term the term ‘comparative literature.’ The ‘comparative literature’ did not appear majority of the works he included, and to make grammatical sense, a point that this is even truer of Baldensperger and both critics and adherents would reiter- Friederich’s compilation, reflected the ate. In the 1920s, Lane Cooper of Cor- dominant principle in the ½eld, estab- nell insisted on calling the department lished by French scholars and thus re- he headed “The Comparative Study of ferred to as ‘the French school’: com- Literature.” Otherwise, he pointed out, parison was to engage in analysis of at “You might as well permit yourself to least two national literary and linguis- say ‘comparative potatoes’ or ‘compar- tic traditions between which actual rap- ative husks.’”17 In any case, the gram- ports de faits, i.e., factual relations or his-

15 Gayley, “A Society of Comparative Litera- Jr., and Vowles, eds., Comparatists at Work, ture,” in Schulz and Rhein, eds., Comparative 4–5. Literature: The Early Years, 84. 18 See Schulz and Rhein, eds., Comparative 16 Arthur Richmond Marsh, “The Compara- Literature: The Early Years, 133–151; Robert J. tive Study of Literature,” PMLA xi (2) (1896): Clements, Comparative Literature as Academic 151–70, reprinted in Schulz and Rhein, eds., Discipline: A Statement of Principles, Praxis, Comparative Literature: The Early Years, 128. Standards (New York: Modern Language As- sociation, 1978), 4; and David Malone, intro- 17 Lane Cooper, Experiments in Education (Ith- duction to Werner P. Friederich, The Challenge aca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press 1943), 75; of Comparative Literature and Other Addresses cited by René Wellek, “The Name and Na- (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina ture of Comparative Literature,” in Nichols, Press, 1970), xi.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2006.135.2.38 by guest on 26 September 2021 Pauline Yu torical contact, could be demonstrated. the backbone of the universal literary on the humanities One could focus on either terminus of system, and the task of the comparatist the traf½c across national boundaries consisted in examining how and why (Goethe in France, the French impact the English, German, Spanish, Italian, on Goethe) and shift the labeling of and Russian ribs were attached to it.”20 ‘emitter,’ ‘intermediary,’ and ‘receiver’ Whether or not such nationalistic im- accordingly. Influence studies shaded pulses were always discernible, it was naturally into those examining imitation clear by mid-century that the method and reception, and from there it was but had ceased to flourish across the Atlan- a natural step to considering the role tic. In the United States after the war, translations played in literary relations. Werner P. Friederich tried with some In addition to studies of sources and success to revive the ½eld through vari- influence, comparative scholarship up ous institution-building efforts–news- through the middle of the twentieth cen- letters, journals, the creation of a special tury typically examined literature across section for comparative literature in the national frontiers and centuries with a Modern Language Association, etc. But focus on one of three levels: movements it was René Wellek, a Czech émigré and and trends (e.g., romanticism or natural- doyen of literary and critical studies as ism); genres and forms (e.g., the short professor of comparative literature at lyric); and motifs, types, or themes Yale, who diagnosed the malaise and (e.g., the image of the shrew). All these prescribed a cure that took. approaches sought to make the study Wellek attributed what he described of literature more systematic and objec- as a “crisis” in comparative literature tive, achieving for comparative litera- to the baleful positivistic legacy of influ- ture, in Gayley’s words, “the transition ence studies in a calci½ed French school, from stylistic to a science of literature which had which shall still ½nd room for aesthe- saddled comparative literature with an tics, but for aesthetics properly so called, obsolete methodology and have laid on developed, checked, and corrected by it the dead hand of nineteenth-century scienti½c procedure and by history.”19 factualism, scientism, and historical rela- But if by this time a virtual consensus tivism . . . . They believe in causal explana- had been reached regarding the practice tion . . . [and] have accumulated an enor- of comparative literature, its inspira- mous mass of parallels, similarities, and tional power was limited. The ½rst gen- sometimes identities, but they have rare- erations of comparative scholars were ly asked what these relationships are sup- largely European and predominantly posed to show except possibly the fact of French. Indeed, François Jost has sug- one writer’s knowledge and reading of gested that comparative literature in another writer. France was “mainly an ancillary disci- pline within the ½eld of French literary As a consequence, comparative litera- history.” Its major ½gures employed the ture had become but “a stagnant back- historicist and positivist assumptions water.”21 Wellek based his objection and methods of the new ½eld to demon- strate how French literature “formed 20 Jost, Introduction to Comparative Literature, 25.

19 Charles Mill Gayley, “What Is Comparative 21 René Wellek, “The Crisis of Comparative Literature?” in Schulz and Rhein, eds., Compar- Literature,” in Proceedings of the Second Congress ative Literature: The Early Years, 102. of the International Comparative Literature Asso-

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2006.135.2.38 by guest on 26 September 2021 to the obsessive focus on causality not lost sight of fundamental questions of Comparative literature only on his belief that any individual aesthetic value as well. He therefore in question example was at best only plausible and recommended moving beyond all such rarely generalizable, but also on his con- demarcations–of language, country, viction that the entire positivist project history, theory, and methodology– of nineteenth-century scholarship–the to recognize “literary scholarship as a scienti½c model–had been discredited uni½ed discipline.” Moreover, if com- as well. Croce, Dilthey, and others had parative literature had “become an es- challenged it already, but the destabili- tablished term for any study of litera- zation of the political order wrought by ture transcending the limits of one na- World War I had sealed the case: “The tional literature,”23 it was time to ac- world (or rather our world) has been in knowledge that it “can and will flourish a state of permanent crisis since, at least, only if it shakes off arti½cial limitations the year 1914. Literary scholarship, in its and becomes simply the study of litera- less violent, muted ways, has been torn ture.”24 by conflicts of methods since about the Wellek ½red this salvo across the bow same time.” Wellek bemoaned as well of the French school at the second con- the fact that comparative literature gress of the recently established Inter- seemed to have lost its early inspiration national Comparative Literature Asso- as a truly cosmopolitan enterprise. Hav- ciation in 1958. Out of the subsequent ing arisen, often in the hands of worldly brouhaha emerged what became known émigrés, “as a reaction against the nar- as the ‘American school’ of compara- row nationalism of much nineteenth- tists, who were less exclusively positivist century scholarship, as a protest against and historicist in their orientation and the isolationism of many historians of more interested in comparative litera- French, German, Italian, English, etc., ture as a broadly critical and humanistic literature,” it appeared to have been re- enterprise. captured and corrupted by the revival Still, many Americans were less will- of patriotic political sentiments, which ing than Wellek to shed the adjective had “led to a strange system of cultural ‘comparative,’ even as they sought to ex- bookkeeping, a desire to accumulate pand its de½nition. In addition to being credits for one’s nation by proving as less nationalistic (indeed, American lit- many influences as possible on other erature was and is still often not includ- nations or, more subtly, by proving that ed in the discipline’s purview) and more one’s own nation has assimilated and open to a multiplicity of theoretical and ‘understood’ a foreign master more fully methodological models, these scholars than any other.”22 introduced to the ½eld a new term–‘af- If comparative literature had forgotten ½nity’–that did not require any docu- its cosmopolitan roots, in Wellek’s eyes mented historical contact at all. As A. equally serious was the risk that it had Owen Aldridge put it, “Af½nity con- sists in resemblances in style, structure, ciation (Chapel Hill: University of North Caro- mood, or idea between two works which lina Press, 1959), I, reprinted in Wellek, Con- cepts of Criticism, ed. Stephen J. Nichols (New 23 Ibid., 290. Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963), 282, 285, 292. 24 Wellek, “The Name and Nature of Compar- ative Literature,” in Nichols, Jr., and Vowles, 22 Ibid., 282, 287–289. eds., Comparatists at Work, 13.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2006.135.2.38 by guest on 26 September 2021 Pauline Yu have no other connection.” He also ar- While this extension of the domain on the humanities gued strongly for the discipline to move of comparative literature did not meet beyond its European frontiers: rather with universal approbation, some ver- than being “con½ned to the wares of a sion of it gradually worked its way into single nation,” the comparatist “shops most descriptions of comparative litera- in a literary department store,”25 which ture programs in universities today and includes not just the European tradition into unesco’s de½nition of the ½eld as but those of the rest of the world as well. well.27 Equally important in the development However controversial, Remak’s ad- of an American school was an expansion dition to comparative literature’s agen- of the discipline’s de½nition that took da reflected a continuing degree of fluid- comparative literature beyond the ity in articulating its distinctive features. bounds of the strictly literary. Henry Whether positivist or literary-critical H. H. Remak is generally credited with in orientation, some of its practitioners this innovation, evident in the opening worried about how in fact they could be statement of his essay, “Comparative differentiated from scholars working in Literature, Its De½nition and Function”: a single literature who might also be in- terested in exploring larger questions of Comparative literature is the study of lit- genre, theme, motif, and influence. Bean erature beyond the con½nes of one partic- counters wondered whether or not ‘dis- ular country, and the study of the relation- ciplinarily valid’ comparisons could take ships between literature on the one hand place between literatures of two coun- and other areas of knowledge and belief, tries written in the same language, or such as the arts (e.g., painting, sculpture, with examples from a country within architecture, music), philosophy, history, which more than one language was used. the social sciences (e.g., politics, econom- Boundaries began to dissolve, with Ald- ics, sociology), the sciences, religion, etc., ridge writing that “the study of compar- on the other. In brief, it is the comparison ative literature is fundamentally not any of one literature with another or others, different from the study of national lit- and the comparison of literature with oth- eratures except that its subject matter er spheres of human expression.”26 is much vaster, taken as it is from more than one literature and excluding none 25 A. Owen Aldridge, Comparative Literature: which the student has the capacity to Matter and Method (Urbana: University of Illi- 28 nois Press, 1969), 3, 1. At the Sorbonne, René read,” and Remak flatly declaring that Etiemble’s essay, “Littérature comparée ou “geographically speaking, an air-tight comparaison n’est pas raison,” published up- distinction between national literature on his 1958 election to the chair in compara- and comparative literature is sometimes tive literature, also called for a “different con- ception of our discipline,” a truly internation- al comparative literature that would not be de- ton P. Stallknecht and Horst Frenz, eds., Com- pendent on the demonstration of rapports de parative Literature, Method and Perspective (Car- faits, and thereby rattled the positivistic foun- bondale: Southern Illinois University Press, dation of the French school as well. See Etiem- 1971), 3. ble, The Crisis in Comparative Literature, an En- glish translation of a longer version of the essay 27 Clements, Comparative Literature as Academ- published in 1963, 4 and passim. ic Discipline, 8.

26 Henry H. H. Remak, “Comparative Liter- 28 Stallknecht and Frenz, eds., Comparative ature, Its De½nition and Function,” in New- Literature, Method and Perspective, 1.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2006.135.2.38 by guest on 26 September 2021 dif½cult,” and “there is no fundamental half of comparative literature’s name Comparative literature difference between methods of research were not enough, questions about its in question in national literature and comparative second half have also been raised in literature.”29 recent decades as programs previous- Attempting to shore up some vanish- ly dedicated to the study of literature ing distinctions, others asked whether have opened their doors to theory and a comparison should require examples to postcolonial and cultural studies. from more than two different traditions: Following the establishment of a ½rst should a ‘rule of three’ be invoked? beachhead in a 1966 conference at Johns Haun Saussy recalled that when he be- Hopkins on “The Languages of Criti- gan graduate studies in the 1970s, cism and the Sciences of Man,” succes- sive waves of new approaches to literary The three-language rule identi½ed the dis- texts, informed by methods and argu- cipline as something apart from English, ments developed outside the domain national-language studies, or studies of of literature in ½elds like anthropology, literature in translation; it set up a criteri- linguistics, and philosophy, began to on of eligibility for new entrants, thus lay- wash across the shores of American uni- ing a basis for the discipline’s continued versities from the early 1970s on. They social reproduction; but it did not always found their most hospitable moorings specify the three languages or dictate the in comparative literature departments substance of what was to be done in them. and programs, both because the foun- As he went on to note, the point of the dational texts of these approaches were “magical third element” was “elusive,” still being translated from French and and it “de½ned the social membership German, and also because comparative of comparative literature better than it literature’s methodology inclined it, did the object of study.”30 however variously, to transnational and often ahistorical conceptualizations of In 2002, when stepping down as presi- the literary, in contrast to the chronolog- dent of the International Comparative ical march through the centuries typical- Literature Association, Jean Bessière ly mandated by English and foreign lan- con½ded to his constituents that he guage curricula. was “in the process of abandoning the Some departments–like those of Yale, idea of comparison.”31 Many of his col- Cornell, Hopkins, Irvine, and Emory– leagues over the years had already re- embraced European theory with special marked upon the paucity of actual com- fervor, but across the country students parisons undertaken by scholars in the began to sort themselves out, choosing ½eld, some with alarm, but others with between the study of a national litera- approbation. As if bracketing the ½rst ture and comparative literature often in relation to their degree of interest in 29 Remak, “Comparative Literature, Its De½ni- theoretical approaches. Some national tion and Function,” in Stallknecht and Frenz, literature departments quite happily eds., Comparative Literature, Method and Perspec- ceded responsibility for teaching theo- tive, 10–11. ry to their comparative literature col- leagues; others began to note with some 30 Saussy, “Comparative Literature?” 336. alarm that the best graduate students 31 Jean Bessière, “Retiring President’s Ad- then seemed to be applying to those very dress,” ICLA Bulletin xxi (1) (2002): 11. neighbors. Comparative literature’s fas-

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2006.135.2.38 by guest on 26 September 2021 Pauline Yu cination with theory thus exacerbated ½ne the ½eld’s “professional standards” on the humanities the longstanding tension between the in 1965 and 1975, with the second gener- national and the transnational as insti- ally upholding the recommendation of tutionalized in university departmen- the ½rst to sustain rigorous, “arduous,” tal structures. It also, in some eyes, ob- even “elitist” expectations for work in scured what some thought was their rea- multiple languages. In 1985 enough dis- son for being. Should students care more sension and dissatisfaction had evident- about what de Man thought about Der- ly developed that the committee’s chair rida’s reading of Rousseau than about never submitted its ½ndings. The 1993 reading Rousseau himself? Theorists effort, consisting of a committee report would quickly respond, of course, that proposing a signi½cant reorientation one needed to ask their questions to un- of comparative literature away from its derstand both the conditions and the traditional roots in studies of European possibility of such a reading, but those literature and toward multiculturalism, nostalgic for a more humanistic and postcolonialism, and cultural studies, less jargon-clogged past began to won- provoked enough commentary–three der where the literature had gone. ‘responses’ and eleven ‘position papers’ This question became even more sa- –to ½ll a volume. Some disgruntled lient as the interdisciplinarity that Re- scholars resigned their memberships mak and others had proclaimed as in- in the American Comparative Litera- trinsic to comparative literature’s mis- ture Association in protest. Small won- sion also made it a congenial home for der, then, that the committee’s chair, cultural studies approaches that rejected Charles Bernheimer, characterized the literature’s privileged position as a win- discipline as “anxiogenic” and titled his dow on the human condition. The call introduction to the volume “The Anxi- for comparisons of literature to other eties of Comparison.”32 In his 2003 re- ‘spheres of human expression’ has, in port, Haun Saussy sought to invoke the extending the critical purview to ½lm, “power and attractiveness of a concept media, and other forms of popular cul- of ‘literariness,’ however variously put ture studies, often succeeded in pushing to work, for comparative literature,” literature off the stage entirely. And as but flanked his arguments with thirteen postcolonial studies have found a home other opinions from the members of his in comparative literature departments committee.33 as well, the geographical ½eld has ex- panded and, in many departments, mar- ginalized its old-world center. The per- ceived monolingualism of these emerg- 32 Charles Bernheimer, ed., Comparative Liter- ing ½elds also eroded, in some eyes, the ature in the Age of Multiculturalism (Baltimore: discipline’s time-honored expectation Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 1. Bern- that students would study several litera- heimer recounts the history of the earlier com- missions in his preface, ix, and includes the tures in the original languages. ½rst two reports of the commissions, chaired The gradual extension and revision by Harry Levin and Thomas Greene, respective- of comparative literature’s territory did ly, in the volume. not, therefore, come without controver- ACLA sy. Commission reports mandated by 33 Haun Saussy, Report 2003 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming), the by-laws of the American Compara- 14. I am grateful to Haun for sharing the manu- tive Literature Association sought to de- scripts with me.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2006.135.2.38 by guest on 26 September 2021 hatever the anxieties and disagree- When I applied to graduate school in Comparative W literature ments, comparative literature has man- 1971, Harry Levin regarded the notion in question aged to maintain a modest but surpris- of doing a comparative literature degree ingly stable pro½le in the landscape of using French, German, and Chinese American higher education. What does a with considerable skepticism. While comparatist look like? Chances are that he admitted me to Harvard’s program, she will have begun her formal study in I not unsurprisingly decided to go where comparative literature as a graduate stu- people thought it was, in fact, a good dent rather than as an undergraduate. idea. The other departments to which While some eight hundred B.A.s were I applied were also willing to give me awarded in the ½eld last year, the rela- a chance, but only the newly minted tive proportion of Ph.D.s to B.A.s is six program at Stanford expressed enthu- times greater in comparative literature siasm about the prospect. Now, some than in other humanities disciplines.34 three decades later, such a combination In many institutions, the undergradu- would be unexceptional, along with ate degree in the ½eld is a relatively re- enagement in what Wlad Godzich has cent innovation, owing to the typically referred to as “emergent literatures,” demanding language requirements. which “cannot be readily comprehended Chances are about equal that an inter- with the hegemonic view of literature departmental program rather than a that has been dominant in our disci- department will have offered her course pline.”35 of study, a fact that has been both de- Yet some scholars remain concerned fended for its flexibility and contended about the implications of such an expan- for its instability. Whatever the case, she sion. In his 2001 presidential address to has been part of a relatively flourishing the American Comparative Literature cohort within the humanities: under- Association, for example, Jonathan Cul- graduate degrees have increased modest- ler observed that “comparative literature ly over the past three decades, with doc- seems always to have been a discipline toral degrees awarded rising by approxi- in crisis, but simultaneously going glo- mately 50 percent. Chances are that she bal and going cultural, as we have been will have done coursework in at least doing, has created special problems. one written tradition comprehensively We don’t know what we are supposed and intensively enough to be located, at to teach.” Although Culler went on to least for some portion of her profession- attribute this uncertainty to the facul- al appointment, in a national language ty’s inability to assume that students and literature department, even though can work in original languages,36 others she will probably also work with materi- have argued that language competence als from other languages. Chances are remains remarkably strong, in no small that she will have studied works of liter- ature, while acquiring as well a substan- 35 Wlad Godzich, “Emergent Literature and tial background in literary and cultural Comparative Literature,” in Clayton Koelb theory. It is less likely than was the case and Susan Noakes, eds., The Comparative Per- a few decades ago that her focus will be spective on Literature: Approaches to Theory and exclusively European. Practice (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), 35. 34 Data in this section provided by Benjamin Schmidt of the American Academy of Arts & 36 Jonathan Culler, “Comparing Poetry,” Com- Sciences. parative Literature 53 (3) (Summer 2001): xvi.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2006.135.2.38 by guest on 26 September 2021 Pauline Yu measure owing to a more richly multi- parative literature’s origins coincided on the humanities lingual immigrant population in the with the rise of European nationalism, United States and to the high numbers which, on the one hand, it presupposed of foreign students in American gradu- and to which, on the other, it also repre- ate programs. Jean Bessière’s presiden- sented an oppositional response, an tial remarks to the International Com- attempt to reunify a Europe divided by parative Literature Association in 2002 the Napoleonic wars through the salu- situated this transformation in a differ- tary consideration of native traditions ent and broader context, the “crisis in a larger and cosmopolitan context. of the humanities,” which is “nothing More than one historian has noted that other than the progressive erasure of subsequent revivals of interest in the the model of literary study established discipline have occurred at similar mo- during the nineteenth century in Eu- ments in world history, and we might rope. This model was symbolically and then consider the ½eld as part of a larg- ideologically a mixture of tradition, er and periodically renewed effort to universalism, nation, and positivism.” emphasize humankind’s possible com- Comparative literature participates in monalities. As Werner Friederich com- the crisis, but it is also, he hoped, “the mented, step beyond all of that.”37 It is one of the ironies and the tragedies of Comparative Literature that it seems Where that step might take us should to flourish only after the catastrophes of be reviewed in the context of the path World Wars, when men are suf½ciently taken thus far. As Claudio Guillén ob- aroused to denounce the folly of political served, in what should now be a very or cultural chauvinism and to advocate a familiar refrain, “a peculiar trait of far more tolerant program of literary in- comparativism, for good or for ill, is ternationalism instead.39 the problematical awareness of its own identity, and the resulting inclination to A twenty-½rst-century version of this rely on its own history.”38 phenomenon, Vilashini Cooppan has Two aspects of this history are parti- suggested, is the linkage of comparative cularly worth recalling as we consider literature with globalization. Arguing the situation of comparative literature that “globalization is by no means re- today. First, if we have called into ques- ducible to the universal reign of com- tion the universalism that inspired modi½cation” and is, rather, “an inher- Goethe’s promulgation of the notion ently mixed phenomenon, a process that of world literature because of the Euro- encompasses both sameness and differ- pean hegemonic presumptions that it ence, compression and expansion, con- could all too easily conceal, it is also the vergence and divergence, nationalism case that some arguably less sinister im- and internationalism, universalism and pulses have motivated this obsession particularism,” Cooppan declared that with universals. As has been noted, com- “the history of comparative literature is also to some degree the history of glob-

37 Bessière, “Retiring President’s Address,” 17. 39 Werner P. Friederich, “The First Ten Years 38 Claudio Guillén, The Challenge of Compara- of Our Comparative Literature Section in the tive Literature, trans. Cola Franzen (Cambridge, mla,” in Friederich, The Challenge of Compara- Mass.: Press, 1993), 93. tive Literature and Other Addresses, 11.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2006.135.2.38 by guest on 26 September 2021 alization.” While cautioning against This reference to deterritorialization Comparative literature “reanimating” Goethe as a “globaliza- brings us to a second distinctive feature in question tion theorist before his time,” Cooppan of comparative literature’s disciplina- nonetheless credited him with “the un- ry history, its association with scholars mistakable shattering of the national who share a personal history of emi- paradigm that is one of the hallmarks gration, if not exile, associated with of our own moment” and comparative war. If, as Cooppan suggested, Leo Spit- literature’s “foundational aspirations to zer and Erich Auerbach are to be count- a broadly imagined, incipiently global ed among the “patron saints” of the dis- knowledge of literature.”40 cipline, the path to canonization was So Goethe’s ideal of Weltliteratur has laid for both scholars during their es- returned, having traveled many paths cape from Nazi depredations to Istan- over the years. Most recently associated bul. As Emily Apter put it, comparative with survey courses on great books in literature “is unthinkable without the translation, it has resurfaced in connec- historical circumstances of exile,”43 tion with examples of comparative liter- and she has traced in fascinating detail ature at its most ambitious, resolutely the ways in which a seminar Spitzer multilateral, nonhegemonic, and non- offered while in Istanbul that granted hierarchical. Some recent proponents equal time to the study of Turkish litera- of a new world literature, like Franco ture “furnished the blueprint” for post- Moretti, have argued that only “distant war departments of comparative litera- reading” works in this cosmopolitan ture. These continue to bear the “traces literary universe, whereas others, like of the city in which it took disciplinary David Damrosch, have insisted on the form–a place where East-West bound- continuing validity of close readings aries were culturally blurry and where that move dynamically across contexts layers of colonial history obfuscated and translations.41 Whatever the case, the outlines of indigenous cultures.”44 world literature embraces a body of Among those instrumental in building texts “that, even as they represent par- the ½eld in the United States, both Wel- ticular national spirits . . . , also manage lek and Friederich, as already noted, to traverse, even to transcend, their na- were European émigrés, along with Re- tional, linguistic, and temporal origins, nato Poggioli and Claudio Guillén, and effectively deterritorializing them- the list goes on. Indeed, two-thirds of selves.”42 the contributors to a recent collection of essays chronicling the beginnings of the ½eld in the United States are immi- 40 Vilashini Cooppan, “Ghosts in the Discipli- grants, including the volume’s editors, nary Machine: The Uncanny Life of World who observed that “an experience of Literature,” Comparative Literature Studies 41 (1) uprootedness and exile occasioned by (2004): 12–16.

41 See Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World 43 Emily Apter, “Comparative Exile: Compet- Literature,” New Left Review 1 (January-February ing Margins in the History of Comparative 2000): 54–68, and David Damrosch, What Is Literature,” in Bernheimer, ed., Comparative World Literature? (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, 86. University Press, 2003). 44 Emily Apter, “Global Translation: The ‘In- 42 Cooppan, “Ghosts in the Disciplinary Ma- vention’ of Comparative Literature, Istanbul, chine,” 13–14. 1933,” Critical Inquiry 29 (Winter 2003): 271.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2006.135.2.38 by guest on 26 September 2021 Pauline Yu war lies at the basis of the very being of its borders in a new alliance with cultur- on the 45 47 humanities many of the contributors.” Remark- al studies. ably apt in this context, therefore, is As others have observed, such a glob- Claudio Guillén’s invocation of a pas- alizing perspective also offers a salutary sage from Hugh of St. Victor’s twelfth- counter to the tendency of many area century educational program, the Didas- studies specialists to limit access to and calicon, in his conclusion to a history of interpretations–beyond the biographi- comparative literature: “That mind is cal and philological–of materials they still tender for whom the homeland is control by virtue of special linguistic sweet, but brave for whom the whole expertise.48 By the same token, it must world is a homeland, and truly mature constantly take care to ensure that a new for whom the entire world is a place of cosmopolitanism does not disguise a exile.”46 much older form of metropolitan think- If most historians of the discipline ing. For instance, when the ½eld of have, as Guillén believes, tended ‘prob- ‘East-West comparative literature’ ½rst lematically’ to rely on its history, others opened up to introduce consideration have chosen to advocate that the past of Asian examples, comparisons were be rewritten, if not interred. In her obit- inevitably one-sided or unwittingly in- uary for the discipline, for example, Gay- vidious: similarities or ‘af½nities’ could atri Chakravorty Spivak seeks to “undo” be demonstrated if something Chinese comparative literature’s own version was just like something European. Dis- of its European provenance to reveal an cussions comparing Chinese to Western “unacknowledged prehistory” in a Mus- poets on an individual basis proliferated, lim Europe and Arabic-Persian cosmo- uncovering the proleptically ‘romantic’ politanism familiar to scholars of Mid- or ‘symbolist’ practices of the former, or dle Eastern studies and history, if not discovering that ’s her- to comparatists. And she urges us to alds were fourth-century b.c.e. Daoists. “redo Comparative Literature” as a tru- If differences existed, it was to the detri- ly “planetary” discipline that will “col- ment of the Chinese example ( laborate with and transform Area Stud- ‘lacked’ epic and tragedy, for example, ies,” sharing with it a respect for serious or its ½ction suffered from the ‘limita- study of languages but moving beyond tions’ of a strong didactic impulse). En- tire richly varied traditions became ho- mogenized as unquali½ed monoliths 45 Lionel Gossman and Mihai I. Spariosu, fore- word to Gossman and Spariosu, eds., Building in the face-off of East and West, with a a Profession: Autobiographical Perspectives on the selected group of Asian texts and ½gures Beginnings of Comparative Literature in the United charged with the burden of being ‘repre- States (Albany: State University of New York sentative,’ reduced to distillations of an Press, 1994), ix. already essentialized culture, and subject 46 Book Three, Chapter 19, cited in Guillén, to the measure of literary ‘universals’ The Challenge of Comparative Literature, 334. Guillén’s reference (erroneously to iii.20) is 47 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Dis- from Erich Auerbach, “Philologie der Welt- cipline (New York: Columbia University Press, literatur,” in Weltliteratur: Festgabe für Fritz 2003), 87, 19, 5. Strich zum 70. Geburtstag (Bern: Francke, 1952), 49. See The Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor, 48 See, for example, Jale Parla, “The Object of trans. Jerome Taylor (New York: Columbia Comparison,” Comparative Literature Studies 41 University Press, 1991), 101. (1) (2004): 118.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2006.135.2.38 by guest on 26 September 2021 that turned out, to no one’s surprise, to flects a hard-fought understanding that Comparative 49 literature be Western ones. Such early discus- the commitment to language study does in question sions only con½rm a point Natalie Melas not require a narrow nationalism and has made, that comparison “is a highly that a hegemonic comparative literature normative procedure” that “seems al- swallowing up foreign language depart- ways constrained by an invisible bina- ments would soon risk starvation. Its ry bind in which comparison must end turmoils have been those of the humani- either by accentuating differences or by ties writ large. The upheavals wrought subsuming them under some overarch- by a theoretical climate of suspicion that ing unity.”50 It is perhaps a good thing, questioned the coherence and credibility therefore, that unabashed comparison of both the literary work and its critic; is rarely a feature of comparative litera- the increasingly eager unwillingness of ture these days and that the discipline, some, and reluctant inability of others, as Haun Saussy put it, “has failed to live to continue to disregard the presence of up to its name.”51 new or hitherto unrecognized players on the literary scene; the destabilization In the end, however, for all its hand and decentering of a largely European, wringing and self-questioning, its fret- ‘elitist’ canon of study; the changing de- ting about names, standards, and iden- mographics of the American scholarly tities, comparative literature has man- and student community; and the inher- aged to do quite a lot over the past two ent impulse of the humanities in general centuries. If its methods and focus have to question their very premises–are all continually shifted, it is to a large extent shared to some extent by comparative owing to the ways in which, like a cha- literature with its sister disciplines. meleon, it has absorbed powerful con- In his contribution to the 2003 acla temporary influences, be they the dy- draft report, David Ferris suggested that namic tension between nationalism and there is a “logic that drives Comparative transnationalism, the appeal of a scien- Literature to question continually what ti½c method to humanistic study, the re- constitutes it as a discipline,” a will to assertion of humanistic values, or the what he called “indiscipline” that en- impulse to challenge the boundaries sures that “the answer to what Compar- of disciplinarity. Its current practice re- ative Literature is should always fail in order to preserve the question.” And in- 49 For a recent discussion of some of these deed, precisely because of its incessant issues, see James St. André, “Whither East- anxieties and continuing flirtation with West Comparative Literature? Two Recent crisis, its habits of engaging in “a cri- Answers from the U.S.,” Zhongguo wenzhe yan- tique that seeks to sustain the limits jiu jikan 20 (March 2003): 291–302. within which it operates,” comparative literature has become “a theoretical 50 Natalie Melas, “Versions of Incommensu- 52 rability,” World Literature Today (Spring 1995): account of the humanities in general.” 275. Melas refers to the ½rst case as “contrastive In that relentless questioning of aims literature,” a term employed two years earlier and contexts resides, after all, one of the as the title of an article by Michael Palencia- most important strengths of all the hu- Roth in the Bulletin of the American Comparative manistic disciplines. Literature Association xxiv (2) (Spring/Summer, 1993): 47–60. 52 David Ferris, “Indiscipline,” 2003 acla 51 Saussy, “Comparative Literature?” 338. draft report manuscript, 2, 11.

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