Comparative Literature at Western
Origins
"Comparative literature" was introduced and shaped during the nineteenth century by writers such as Goethe, the Schlegels, Mme de Staël, Sainte-Beuve, and Matthew Arnold. Twentieth-century scholars, including E.R. Curtius, Roman Jakobson, and René Wellek, helped to form it into an academic discipline. During the past decades, Comparative Literature has developed into an established and respected field of humanistic study at leading universities in Canada and around the world.
Defining the Discipline
The English term "Comparative Literature," a translation of the Romance littérature comparée or literatura comparada and the German vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft , needs to be interpreted with some latitude because the discipline has changed substantially over the years. The starting point of research in Comparative Literature is not comparison per se , but rather the principle that literature is a universal phenomenon. The outline of the discipline provided by UNESCO'S International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) (Paris, 1976), might be taken as a working definition:
Principal course content usually includes some of the following: the currency, reception, and influence of writers and their works in countries other than those of their origin; the transmission and evolution of international literary movements; the characteristics of and relationships between genres, themes and motifs; folk literature and folklore; criticism, aesthetics; intermediaries and the relations between literatures, as well as those between literatures and the other disciplines. Background sources usually include history, the social and behavioral sciences, philosophy, religion and theology, and natural sciences.
In his Introduction to Comparative Literature (1974), François Jost provides more specific examples of four major categories of comparatist study:
influences and analogies (e.g., Scott's influence on Dumas and Hugo or the relation between the Japanese and the French medieval epic);
movements and trends (e.g., Romanticism or Naturalism);
genres and forms (e.g., the sonnet from Petrarch to Shakespeare);
motifs, types, and themes (e.g., the theme of suicide from Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers to Flaubert's Madame Bovary, or the literary type of the tricky slave/servant or the national liberator).
Evolution
The value of studies such as those identified by Jost continues to be recognized, but Comparative Literature today is also a project of understanding and articulating the theory of literary study. It is not only a set of practices (e.g., comparing texts in different languages, comparing literary and "non-literary" texts, comparing literature and other arts) but also a perspective on literature as an activity involved in a complex web of cultural relations. In this context, comparatist practices acquire a new theoretical awareness. Eva Kushner, a past president of the International Comparative Literature Association and one of the founders of Comparative Literature in Canada, writes that:
Comparative literature has gradually become the comparative study of critical theory, as well as of the literary texts themselves, and this is what makes possible an osmotic relationship of comparative literature with the study of national literatures: all national literatures, today, share general problematics and theoretical concerns for the discussion of which comparative literature may be a meeting-ground, in theory as well as in practice. ("Comparative Literary History among the Human Sciences," 1988)
Kushner argues that Comparative Literature has shifted its main focus to the "workings of the literary system," that is, to the generation of literary texts within a culture relative to that culture's history, linguistic development, economic practices, philosophical and aesthetic assumptions and so on. This theoretical approach, or rather collection of theoretical approaches to national literatures in different states of development, can help us understand literary systems and make us aware of the historical specificity of our own categories of literary study, and the need to modify those categories when we study different or emerging literatures.
The Importance of Comparative Literature
Comparative Literature constitutes a significant intellectual response to the contemporary international situation. The advent of closer ties among the countries of the European Community, radical change within the former Soviet world, the rediscovery of national cultures in newly independent states, growing tensions between east and west, the multiplying of economic ties between countries on the Pacific Rim, and the importance of postcolonial and transatlantic perspectives all point toward the need for cross-cultural understanding.
The advent of mass media, rapid communication, and multinational economies has brought about an unprecedented merging and overlapping of cultural traditions that has been called the postmodern condition. Others call it globalization. Comparative Literature is at the centre of these changes - and central to the international and interdisciplinary study of the humanities.
For further information about any aspect of the program, please contact:
The Graduate Chair, Comparative Literature
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures
Phone: (519) 661-2111, ext. 85857/Fax: (519) 661-4093
E-Mail: Prof. David Darby, ddarby@uwo.ca
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