The old/new question of comparison in literary studies: A post-European perspective

ELH - English Literary History

Volumn 71, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 289-311

  Chow, Rey ^a  

^a BROWN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 60950350227     PISSN: 00138304     EISSN: 10806547     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/elh.2004.0022     Document Type: Review

References (64)

1. Edward W. Said, "Introduction to the Fiftieth-Anniversay Edition," in Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask, Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1953, 2003), xvi.
2. For an example of an influential and controversial philosophical essay on these ideas, see Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace, preface by Nicholas Murray Butler (Los Angeles: U.S. Library Association, Inc., 1932). The text of this edition follows the first edition of Kant's essay, translated from the German and published in London in 1796.
3. Susan Bassnett, Comparative Literature: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), 21. Bassnett offers an informative discussion of the origins of comparative literature as a discipline; see esp. 12-30.
4. "[T]he 'origin' of U.S. Comparative Literature had something of a relationship with the events that secured it: the flights of European intellectuals, including such distinguished men as Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer, René Wellek, Renato Poggioli, and Claudio Guillén, from 'totalitarian' regimes in Europe. One might say that U.S. Comparative Literature was founded on inter-European hospitality." Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2003), 8.
5. For an admirable attempt to engage with the problems posed by comparison in the age of multiculturalism, see Charles Bernheimer, "Introduction: the Anxieties of Comparison," in Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, ed. Bernheimer (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1995), 1-17.
6. However, Bernheimer's definition of comparison is rather too open-ended to be able to address some of the more thorny issues involved: "Comparison is indeed the . . . what is it? - activity, function, practice? all of these? - that assures that our field will always be unstable, shifting, insecure, and self-critical" (2).
7. These days, such a definition would tend to be adopted by sensible practitioners of almost any field of knowledge. For an account that emphasizes the more familiar humanistic dimensions of comparison as an act of liberation, defamiliarization, and creativity, see Ed Ahearn and Arnold Weinstein, "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time: the Promise of Comparative Literature," in Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, 77-85.
8. By contrast, some scholars see comparison as a matter of "defining general and constant rules" (see Michael Riffaterre, "On the Complementarity of Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies," in Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, 67). This notion of comparison, which has stemmed from comparative literature's close relationship to poststructuralist theory since the 1970s, is also unsatisfactory for reasons that will become clear in the rest of this essay.
9. See Bassnett, 27 and following, for a discussion of the French origins of this binarist (études binaires) approach, which has influenced generations of comparative literature scholars.
10. For a recent account of world literature, see, for instance, David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2003).
11. Damrosch defines world literature in terms of circulation: "I take world literature to encompass all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language"; "world literature is ... a mode of circulation and of reading, a mode that is as applicable to individual works as to bodies of material, available for reading established classics and new discoveries alike" (4, 5).
12. For a persuasive earlier study of the histories and politics involved in examples of such circulation, see Michael Hanne, The Power of the Story: Fiction and Political Change (Providence: Berghan Press, 1994).
13. Bassnett, 21.
14. Susan Sniader Lanser, "Compared to What? Global Feminism, Comparatism, and the Master's Tools," in Borderwork: Feminist Engagements with Comparative Literature, ed. Margaret R. Higonnet (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1994), 287.
15. Lanser's essay offers a shrewd and constructive argument for dismantling comparative literature's linguistic hierarchies.
16. Roland Greene, "Their Generation," in Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, 146.
17. Lanser, 288.
18. Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature, 3rd ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1984), 19.
19. Wellek and Warren's project is parallel in aim to what is called Literaturwissenschaft or poetics (Dichtung).
20. See also Wellek's "The Crisis of Comparative Literature," in which he defines the problem of comparative literary study in a similar manner: "The most serious sign of the precarious state of our study is the fact that it has not been able to establish a distinct subject matter and a specific methodology" (in Concepts of Criticism, ed. and intro. Stephen G. Nichols, Jr. [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1963], 282).
21. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970), 296.
22. See Foucault's elaborations in the section "Language Becomes Object" (294-300) of The Order of Things. These elaborations obviously demand much more discussion. However, because my goal in this essay is to discuss the problems of comparison, I will have to leave aside a detailed discussion of the historical emergence of literature as such as Foucault proposed (together with the controversies over the definitions of the literary) for another occasion. In her argument for a new comparative literature in Death of a Discipline, Spivak reissues a romantic and modernist call for understanding literature as what "escapes the system" (52)
23. and "contains the element of surprising the historical" (55)
24. as "transgressive" (56)
25. and as the "Unheimlich" (74). Such definitions of literature seem strictly in keeping with the trajectory of the emergence of so-called literary language in the West as Foucault describes it, though Spivak is describing writings of what she calls the global South as well as those of the European canon.
26. Jorge Luis Borges, "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins," Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952, trans. Ruth L. C. Simms, intro. James E. Irby (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1964), 101-3.
27. Foucault, xvi-xvii.
28. Wellek and Warren, 49.
29. For a succinct discussion of the problems with "Francophonie," see Réda Bensmaïa, "La langue de l'Étranger ou la Francophonie Barrée," Rue Descartes 37 (2002): 65-73.
30. Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, "Questions of Japanese Cinema: Disciplinary Boundaries and the Invention of the Scholarly Object," in Learning Places: the Afterlives of Area Studies, ed. Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2002), 393.
31. For some constructive proposals for how comparative literature might revise its parameters and practices in light of the issues raised by multiculturalism and cultural studies, see "The Bernheimer Report, 1993: Comparative Literature at the Turn of the Century" (the third Report on Standards written for the American Comparative Literature Association and distributed in accordance with its bylaws), in Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, 39-48. Note, however, that some of the contributors to the volume disagree strongly with the proposals put forth in the report.
32. See, for instance, some of the essays in Cultural Institutions of the Novel, ed. Deidre Lynch and William B. Warner (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1996.)
33. The quoted phrase is from the editors' "Introduction: The Transport of the Novel," 4.
34. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000).
35. Lanser, 295. To this extent, even as scholars see translation as a way out of the conundrums of Eurocentrism and the elitism of those who favor using only original languages, I find most of the currently popular debates about translation rather unhelpful because they tend to remain bound to an unhistoricized notion of language and language users as such.
36. Bensmaïa, Experimental Nations or, the Invention of the Maghreb, trans. Alyson Waters (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2003), 6.
37. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (Tokyo: Zed Books, 1986);
38. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1993).
39. Olakunle George, Relocating Agency: Modernity and African Letters (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 2003).
40. Carlos J. Alonso, The Burden of Modernity: The Rhetoric of Cultural Discourse in Spanish America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998).
41. Gregory Judanis, Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing National Literature (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1991), 4.
42. The quote from Wellek is taken from Wellek's Discriminations: Further Concepts of Criticism (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970), 19.
43. Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On "Japan" and Cultural Nationalism, foreword by Meaghan Morris (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1997), 48.
44. Sakai, 59.
45. Jusdanis, 80;
46. Sakai, 51.
47. See, in particular, chaps. 9 and 10 of Foucault (303-87).
48. Bassnett, 5, 38.
49. Samuel Weber, "The Foundering of Aesthetics: Thoughts on the Current State of Comparative Literature," in The Comparative Perspective on Literature: Approaches to Theory and Practice, ed. and intro. Clayton Koelb and Susan Noakes (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1988), 65.
50. Weber's essay offers a thought provoking reading of Kant's work (in particular The Critique of Judgment) and a critique of Wellek's (mis)use of it for the founding of something like a discipline of general literature. Above all, the essay makes possible a linkage, with rich ramifications, between the issues of comparative literature and the wider problematic of aesthetic or reflective judgment. Among contemporary critics, Spivak's work is exemplary of an engagement with Kant along these lines in relation to post-European cultures. See, for instance, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1999).
51. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, 38, 42.
52. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983);
53. Chatterjee, "Whose Imagined Community?," chap. 1 of The Nation and Its Fragments, 3-13.
54. Harootunian, "Some Thoughts on Comparability and the Space-Time Problem," boundary 2, forthcoming.
55. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1983).
56. Harootunian, "Some Thoughts," 8 (ms. page).
57. Harootunian is quoting from Fabian's Time and the Other, 16-17.
58. In that work, Fabian argues that even taxonomy, a seemingly spatial arrangement, contains temporal implications: "[S]etting up a semiotic relation, especially if it is part of a taxonomy of relations, is itself a temporal act. While pretending to move in the flat space of classification, the taxonomist in fact takes a position on a temporal slope - uphill, or upstream, from the object of his scientific desire" (Time and the Other, 151).
59. See Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons : Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World (London: Verso, 1998);
60. Harootunian, "Ghostly Comparisons: Anderson's Telescope," diacritics 29.4 (winter 1999): 135-49. Harootunian's critique of Anderson is intimately tied to his sustained critique of the establishment of area studies and its lost calling for comparability;
61. see, for instance, Harootunian, "Tracking the Dinosaur: Area Studies in a Time of 'Globalism,'" in his History's Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2000), 25-58.
62. See also his "Introduction: the 'Afterlife' of Area Studies" (coauthored with Miyoshi), and "Postcoloniality's Unconscious/Area Studies' Desires," in Learning Places, 1-18, 150-74. For reasons of space, I must defer an elaborate discussion of this topic here.
63. For related discussions of comparability regarding the nation as found in Anderson's work, see the other essays in the same special issue of diacritics, in particular Pheng Cheah, "Grounds of Comparison," 3-18.
64. Harootunian, "Ghostly Comparisons," 148-49.