Hostname: page-component-89b8bd64d-ktprf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-05-06T02:59:44.567Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Comparative Literature?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

David Damrosch
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In recent years, North American literary studies has been marked by a double movement: outward from the Euro-American sphere toward the entire globe and inward within national traditions, in an intensified engagement with local cultures and subcultures. Both directions might seem natural stimuli to comparative study—most obviously in the transnational frame of global studies but also in more local comparisons: a natural way to understand the distinctiveness of a given culture, after all, is to compare it with and contrast it to others. Yet journal articles and job listings alike have not shown any major growth in comparative emphasis in recent years. Is the comparatist doomed to irrelevance, less equipped than the national specialist for local study and yet finding the literary globe expanding farther and farther out of reach, accessible only to a multitude of, again, local specialists?

Information

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Information
PMLA , Volume 118 , Issue 2 , March 2003 , pp. 326 - 330
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2003

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Works Cited

Aldridge, A. Owen. “East/West Comparative Literature: An Inquiry into Possibilities.” Chinese-Western Comparative Literature Theory and Strategy. Ed. Deeney, John J. Hong Kong: Chinese UP, 1980. 1–24.Google Scholar
Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1953.Google Scholar
Barthes, Roland. Sade, Fourier, Loyola. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill, 1976.Google Scholar
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gayley, Charles Mills. “What Is Comparative Literature?” 1903. Comparative Literature: The Early Years. Ed. Schulz, Hans-Joachim and Rhein, Phillip H. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1973. 85–103.Google Scholar
Glissant, Edouard. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Trans. J. Michael Dash. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1989.Google Scholar
Guérard, Albert. “Comparative Literature?” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 7 (1958): 1–6.Google Scholar
Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich. Manifesto of the Communist Party. Trans. Samuel Moore. Marx. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952. 415–34. Vol. 50 of Great Books of the Western World.Google Scholar
Melas, Natalie. All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison. Stanford: Stanford UP, forthcoming.Google Scholar
Pollock, Sheldon. “The Cosmopolitan Vernacular.” Journal of Asian Studies 57 (1998): 6–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Posnett, Hutcheson Macaulay. Comparative Literature. London: K. Paul, Trench, 1886. New York: Johnson Reprint, 1970.Google Scholar
Said, Edward W. “Travelling Theory.” Raritan 1.3 (1982): 41–67.Google Scholar
Said, Edward W. “Travelling Theory Reconsidered.” Critical Reconstructions: The Relationship of Fiction to Life. Ed. Polhemus, Robert M. and Henkle, Roger B. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994. 251–65.Google Scholar
Spitzer, Leo. Linguistics and Literary History: Essays in Stylistics. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1948.Google Scholar
Venturino, Steven. “Reading Negotiations in the Tibetan Diaspora.” Constructing Tibetan Culture: Contemporary Perspectives. Ed. Koram, Frank J. Quebec: World Heritage, 1997. 98–121.Google Scholar
Venuti, Lawrence. The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference. London: Routledge, 1998.CrossRefGoogle Scholar