Abstract: In his article “Comparative Literature and the History of Literature” Slobodan Sucur argues that the origins of comparative literature are tied to debates concerning the renewal of the notion of literature in the nineteenth century. Further, Sucur discusses literary periodization in the history of literature and concepts including transculturalism, based on past and recent work in the field. Following his discussion, he proposes a framework based on geometrical modeling as a possible solution that would bring together literary theory and comparative literature via the representation of a conceptual-stylistic-figural continuum through the dimensionality of geometrical models.

Introduction

The Pandora's Box of literary theory, with its many antagonisms and confusion, and with its potential to destabilize and threaten the presence of disciplines such as comparative literature, seems to have its origin in Romanticism, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's notion of Weltliteratur (on Goethe, see, e.g., Birus; Pizer; Sturm-Trigonakis). The theorizing of the early Romantic phase contains inconsistencies, and this discord may indeed have filtered down into modern debates about literary theory. Miroslav John Hanak focuses in his discussion of idealism and theory in early Romanticism on the discord and development present in Schelling's and Hegel's reactions to their respective philosophies and their reaction to Kant's and Schlegel's attempts to reconcile these contradictions.