comparative literature - Overview, Early work, French School, American School, Current developments

The study of literature across national and linguistic boundaries. This developed during the 19th-c in the spirit of Schlegel's Universalpoesie and Goethe's Weltliteratur, and studies by Mme de Staël. Abel François Villemain (1790–1870) introduced the term littérature comparée in 1829; it was taken up by Sainte-Beuve, and there are clear influences on Matthew Arnold in his pursuit of ‘the best that is known and thought in the world’. During the 20th-c, comparative literature was cultivated especially in Europe and the USA, its admixture of historical and synthetic methods producing some fine works of scholarship and interpretation. Notable contributions were made by Rene Wellek (1903–95), Leo Spitzer (1887–1960), Erich Auerbach (1892–1957), and George Steiner (1929– ). There are several journals devoted to the discipline.

Overview

Students and instructors in the field, usually called "comparatists," have traditionally been proficient in several languages and acquainted with the literary traditions and major literary texts of those languages.

The interdisciplinary nature of the field means that comparatists typically exhibit some acquaintance with translation studies, sociology, critical theory, cultural studies and history. As a result, comparative literature programs within universities may be designed by scholars drawn from several such departments. This eclecticism has led critics (from within and without) to charge that Comparative Literature is insufficiently well-defined, or that comparatists too easily fall into dilettantism, because the scope of their work is, of necessity, broad.

Since WWII, there have been three major international conferences in Comparative Literature: in 1965, 1975 and 1993.

Early work

The work considered foundational to the field, and the first to be so-titled, was New Zealand scholar H.M Posnett's Comparative Literature, published during the 1860s.

During the late 19th Century, comparatists were chiefly concerned with deducing the purported "national character" or "spirit of the people", which they assumed to be embodied in the literary output of each nation.

French School

In the early part of the 20th century until WWII, the field was characterised by a notably empiricist and positivist approach, termed the "French School", in which scholars examined works forensically, looking for evidence of "origins" and "influences" between works from different nations.

American School

Reacting to the French School, postwar scholars, collectively termed the "American School", sought to return the field to matters more directly concerned with literary criticism, de-emphasising the detective work and detailed historical research that the French School had demanded. The American School was more closely aligned with the original internationalist visions of Goethe and Posnett (arguably reflecting the postwar desire for international co-operation), looking for examples of universal human "truths" based on the literary archetypes that appeared throughout literatures from all times and places.

Prior to the advent of the American School, the scope of comparative literature in the West was typically limited to the literature of Western Europe and North America, predominantly literature in English, German and French literature, with occasional forays into Italian literature (primarily for Dante) and Spanish literature (primarily for Cervantes).

The approach of the American School would be familiar to current practitioners of Cultural Studies and is even claimed by some to be the forerunner of the Cultural Studies boom in universities during the 1970s and 1980s. The field today is highly diverse: for example, comparatists routinely study Chinese literature, Arabic literature and the literatures of most other major world languages and regions as well as English and continental European literatures.

Current developments

Indeed, there is a movement amongst some comparatists to re-focus the field entirely away from the nation-based approach with which it has previously been associated (see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline, Columbia University Press, 2004; It remains to be seen whether this approach will be successful, given that the field had its roots in nation-based thinking and that much of the literature under study was (and is) inspired by issues relating directly to the nation-state.