PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America · 2013 · 41 citations · 4 references
HumanitiesComparative LiteratureLiteratureComparative PoliticsPostcolonial LiteraturePostcolonial StudiesComparative MethodPostcolonial TheoryComparative Theory
Comparative literature lacks a single overarching discipline, existing instead as fragmented linguistic units that make it difficult to define a unified field. The paper seeks to restore a pre‑national, unified literary tradition by re‑imagining literature as a single, collective whole. The authors conclude that comparative literature has, through a metonymic inversion, become the very totalizing discipline it was intended to be.
Comparative literature is unlike any other discipline. elsewhere—for example, in politics or religion—the comparative operates as a subdiscipline within a larger general discipline. The problem for comparative literature is that there is no general discipline of literature: institutionally, the discipline consists of nothing but the fragments of different languages. As a result, through a curious metonymic inversion, comparative literature has come to figure as the totalizing general discipline of which it should form a part. This is why it also seems to offer a natural home for the idea of Weltliteratur. Comparative literature promises the Utopian recreation of the lost amphora of literature as it stood before its fall into the clutches of the nation.
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No Passion Spent: Essays 1978-1995
Hans H. Rudnick, George Steiner · World Literature Today · 1997 · 65 citations