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Critical Debates in Comparative Literature

Since their "first" appearances in Noël and de Laplace (France, 1816) and in Goethe (Germany, 1827), comparative literature and its corollary, world literature, have defied easy definition: a problem, perhaps, all to the good. In this graduate seminar, we will confront questions that have vexed comparative literature since its inception. If the act of comparison presupposes both the similarity and dissimilarity of two things, what does it mean to "compare" literatures or to study "comparative" literature? If comparison establishes equivalence between two things only to claim the superiority of one over the other or to mask the inequality of one to the other, what are its ethics of commensurability and incommensurability? How do we liberate--indeed can we liberate--comparative literature from the tautological tyranny of difference and likeness? Our approach in this seminar will be transhistorical. After a look at foundational problems of comparison (Derrida, Melas), we will probe the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century roots of modern comparative and world literature in the United States (Shackford, 1876, and Gayley, 1903) and in France, Egypt, Germany, Britain, India, and China: from Goethe on Weltliteratur (1827) to al-Tahtawi and Chasles on comparativity and comparative literature as such (1834, 1835), from de Lomnitz's mobilization of Weltliteratur in defense of "minor" literatures (1877) and Posnett's social Darwinist approach to national and world literatures (1886) to the thought of Tagore and Zheng on comparative and world literature (1907, 1924-1927). At each turn, we will interleave--and yes, compare--post-World War II, postcolonial, and other contemporary reinterpretations of the meaning, method, and compass (disciplinary, linguistic, literary/trans-medial, political, geographic) of comparative and world literatures. Our discussions will center on four axes of critical debate: 1) objectivity: historicity/scientism (Chasles, Shackford, Posnett, Moretti, Tsu); 2) philology, literariness, and their discontents (Gayley, Auerbach, Said, Pollock, Ahmed, Mufti); 3) worldliness (Goethe, Tagore, Damrosch, Casanova, Tiwari, Cheah); and 4) un/translatability: the opening and impasse--across epistemes, languages, literatures, and oratures old and new--that wrinkle would-be unified worlds with the differences of comparison (al-Tahtawi, Lomnitz, Kilito, Apter, Spivak, Gikandi, Ngũgĩ). In discussions and in final papers, seminar participants are encouraged to relate their own research to these problems. By semester's end, we will come away with a sharper sense of the history of our field; its periodic reengagement of the relationship of the "literary" to geopolitics, science, and linguistic and economic exchange; and its struggle to replace a Eurocentric worldview with a polycentric vision.

Marx. Focus on Capital Volume One and excerpts from the Grundrisse, with minimal secondary literature (e.g., Althusser, Balibar, Negri).