A Critical Introduction
Susan Bassett
Introduction:What is Comparative Literature Today?
There have been various definitions of comparative literature, which greatly varies from one scholar to another, but they all agree that it is one of the most modern literary sciences. Throughout the past two decades, new critical theories, such as gender-based criticism, translation studies, deconstruction and Orientalism, have changed approaches to literature and accordingly have had a profound impact on the work of the comparatists. Sooner or later, anyone who claims to be working in comparative literature has to try and answer theinevitable question: What is it? The simplest answer is that comparative literature involves the study of texts across cultures, that it is interdisciplinary and that it is concerned with patterns of connection in literature across both time and space. Everywhere there is connection, everywhere there is illustration, as Matthew Arnold puts it. According to Susan Bassnett, everybody who is interested in books is on the path to comparative literature.A comparative analysis you should have already read for different prominent writer for instance Chaucer,Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Poe, Joyce.
Key points
Susan Bassnett says in her Introduction of book Comparative Literature that most people do not start with comparative literature, they end up with it in some way or other, travelling towards it from different points of departure. Sometimes the journey begins with a desire to move beyond the boundaries of a single subject area that might appear to be too constraining, at other times a reader may be impelled to follow up what appear to be similarities between texts or authors from different cultural contexts. And some readers may simply be following the view propounded by Matthew Arnold in his Inaugural Lecture at Oxford in 1857 when he said:
"Everywhere there is connection, everywhere there is illustration. No- single event, no single literature is adequately comprehended except in relation to other events, to other literatures."
At this juncture, one could be forgiven for assuming that com- parative literature is nothing more than common sense, an inevitable stage in reading, made increasingly easier by international market- ing of books and by the availability of translations. But if we shift perspective slightly and look again at the term 'Comparative Literature', what we find instead is a history of violent debate that goes right back to the earliest usage of the term at the beginning of the nineteenth century and continues still today.
What is the object of study in comparative literature? How can comparison be the object of anything? If individual literatures have a canon, what might a comparative canon be? How does the comparatist select what to compare? Is comparative literature a discipline? Or is it simply a field of study?
René Wellek defined as 'the crisis of Comparative Literature.' In 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 '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'.
Croce said instead of something called comparative literature, he suggested that the proper object of study should be literary history:the comparative history of literature is history understood in its true sense as a complete explanation of the literary work, en- compassed in all its relationships, disposed in the composite whole of universal literary history (where else could it ever be placed?), seen in those connections and preparations that are its raison to be.
Croce claimed he could not distinguish between literary history pure and simple and comparative literary history. The term, 'comparative literature', he maintained, had no substance to it.
Charles Mills Gayley, one of the founders of North American comparative literature, proclaimed in the same year as Croce's attack that the working premise of the student of comparative literature was:"literature as a distinct and integral medium of thought, a common institutional expression of humanity;differentiated, to be sure, by the social conditions of the individual, by racial, historical, cul- tural and linguistic influences, opportunities, and restrictions, but, irrespective of age or guise, prompted by the common needs and aspirations of man, sprung from common faculties, psychological and physiological, and obeying common laws of material and mode, of the individual and social humanity".
Remarkably similar sentiments to those expressed in 1974 by François Jost, when he 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 of the cultural universe, inclusive and comprehensive.
Gayley and others before him, are proposing comparative literature as some kind of world religion. The under- lying suggestion is that all cultural differences disappear when readers take up great works; art is seen as an instrument of universal harmony and the comparatist is one who facilitates the spread of that harmony.
Wellek and Warren in their Theory of Literature, a book that was enormously significant in comparative literature when it first appeared in 1949, suggest that: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 and Warren go on to state that 'Literature is one; as art and humanity are one'.
The great waves of critical thought that swept through one after the other from structuralism through to post-structuralism, from feminism to deconstruction, from semiology to psychoanalysis.
In 1950s and early 1960s, high-flying graduate students in the West turned to comparative literature as a radical subject, because at that time it appeared to be transgressive, moving as it claimed to do across the boundaries of single literature study.
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's 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.
New 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 literatures.
As Swapan Majumdar puts it: it is because of this predilection for National Literature - much deplored by the Anglo-American critics as a methodology - that Comparative Literature has struck roots in the Third World nations and in India in particular.
Ganesh Devy goes further, and suggests "that comparative literature in India is directly linked to the rise of modern Indian nationalism, noting that comparative literature has been 'used to assert the national cultural identity'." There is no sense here of national literature and comparative literature being incompatible.
Homi Bhabha sums up the new emphasis in an essay discussing the ambivalence of post- colonial culture, suggesting that: Instead of cross-referencing there is an effective,productive cross- cutting across sites of social significance, that erases the dialectical, disciplinary sense of 'Cultural' reference and relevance.
Wole Soyinka and a whole range of African critics have exposed the pervasive influence of Hegel, who argued that African culture was 'weak' in contrast to what he claimed were higher, more developed cultures, and who effectively denied Africa a history.
James Snead, in an essay attacking Hegel, points out that:The outstanding fact of late twentieth-century European culture is its ongoing reconciliation with black culture. The mystery may be that it took so long to discern the elements of black culture already there in latent form, and to realize that the separation between the cultures was perhaps all along not one of nature, but one of force.
Terry Eagleton has argued that literature, in the meaning of the word we have inherited, is an ideology, and he discussess the way in which the emergence of English as an academic subject in the nineteenth century had quite clear political implications.
Eagleton's explanation of the rise of English ties in with the aspirations of many of the early comparatists for a subject that would transcend cultural boundaries and unite the human race through the civilizing power of great literature.
Literature produced within the geographical boundaries of England? Of the United Kingdom? Or literatures written in English from all parts of the world? And where does the boundary line between 'literature' on the one hand and 'popular' or 'mass' culture on the other hand lie? The old days when English meant texts from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf are long gone, and the question of what to include and exclude from an English syllabus is a very vexed one); so also has Comparative Literature been called into question by the emergence of alternative schools of thought.
The work of Edward Said, pioneer of the notion of 'orientalism', has provided many critics with a new vocabulary. Said's thesis, that the Orient was a word which later accrued to it a wide field of meanings, associations and connotations, and that these did not necessarily refer to the real Orient but to the field surrounding the word.
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.
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 though out Europe and the expanding United States of America.
Comparative literature as it is being developed outside Europe and the United States is breaking new ground and there is a great deal to be learned from following this development.
Third World and the Far East changes the agenda for the subject, the crisis in the West continues.
New cross-cultural criticism which has merged in recent years and for the discourse through which this is constituted." What is this but comparative literature under another name?
Rapidly expanding development in literary studies, and one which has profound implications for the future of comparative literature, is 'translation studies'.
What distinguishes translation studies from translation as traditionally thought of, is its derivation from the polysystems theory developed by Itamar Evan- Zohar and later by Gideon Toury in Tel Aviv.
Evan-Zohar argues that extensive transla- tion activity takes place when a culture is in a period of transi- tion: when it is expanding, when it needs renewal, when it is in a pre-revolutionary phase, then translation plays a vital part. In contrast, when a culture is solidly established, when it is in an imperialist stage, when it believes itself to be dominant, then translation is less important.
Conclusion
English became the language of international diplomacy in the twentieth century (and also the dominant world commercial language), there was little need to translate, hence the relative poverty of twentieth-century transla- tions into English compared with the proliferation of translations in many other languages.Comparative literature has always claimed translation as a sub-category, but as translation studies establishes itself firmly as a subject based in inter-cultural study and offering a methodology of some rigour, both in terms of theoretical and descriptive work, so comparative literature appears less like a discipline and more like a branch of something else. Seen in this way, the problem of the crisis could then be put into perspective, and the long, unresolved debate on whether comparative literature is or is not a discipline in its own right could finally and definitely be shelved.
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