ClassInfo

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 seminar, we will confront questions that have vexed the discipline from the start. If the act of comparison presupposes both the similarity and the 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 and the other; or to erase the uniqueness of each, what are its measures, and its ethics? How do we liberate--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 (Radhakrishnan, Mignolo, Spivak, Derrida), we will probe the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century roots of modern comparative and world literature, criss-crossing Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. At each turn, we will interleave post-World War II, postcolonial, and contemporary reinterpretations of the meaning, method, and compass of the field. We will focus on three axes of critical debate: 1) historicity, scientism, and the literary (Chasles, Shackford, Gayley, Posnett, Melas, Liu, Bhattacharya, Griffiths); 2) markets and literary circulation (Goethe, Marx, Tagore, Zheng [via Tsu], Damrosch, Casanova, Moretti, Tiwari, Mufti); and 3) philology and un/translatability: the openings and impasses--across languages, literatures/oratures, and old/new media--that wrinkle unified worlds with difference (al-Ṭahṭāwī, Meltzl de Lomnitz, Auerbach, Said, Ahmed, Allan, Kilito, Apter, Gikandi, Ngũgĩ, Glissant). Along the way, we will connect big-picture questions to literary texts. In class discussions and in papers, you are encouraged to relate your interests to key debates. By the end of this seminar, we will come away with a sharper sense of the history of our field; its constant restatement of the relationship of the "literary" to geopolitics, science, other media, and linguistic and economic exchange; and its struggle to replace a Eurocentric worldview with a polycentric vision.