Comparative Literature and
Other Disciplines
• In 1993, British scholar Susan Bassnett claimed in her
book Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction
that comparative literature was in decline
• In 2003, Indian critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
declared the ‘Death of a Discipline’
• Barely a decade on, such obituaries have been proven
wrong.
• Comparative literature has experienced a surge of
interest in recent years, driven by its strategic position
between languages, literary criticism, and cultural
studies.
• The growth of literary theory and cultural studies,
in particular, helps us understand the growth of
comparative literature.
• Since the turn of the millennium, the role of
world literature as a model of comparison has
come to the fore while translation remains the
prerequisite for and the very practice of
comparative literature.
• Comparative literature draws sustenance from
other fields of enquiry just as it takes on their
colours.
• With the rise of literary theory in the 1970s, and
of cultural studies in the 1980s, the idea of the
‘text’ began to be contested.
• The barriers between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture
became increasingly blurred
• The concept of the ‘canon’ became increasingly
problematic
• The previously unquestioned legitimacy of
literature as the ultimate form of verbal art came
under fire.
• Comparative literature was further destabilized.
Literary Theory
• In order to justify itself, Comparative Literature has
become ever more theoretical; yet for this reason the
ostensible object of this theory—literature—has
become ever more marginalized.
• Theoretical discussions of Comparative Literature have
proliferated, to such an extent that they sometimes
seem to push out the actual work of comparing one
text with another
• Comparison is often more conceptualized than carried
out, more theorized than practised.
• To understand the growth of comparative literature,
one has to understand the growth of literary theory.
Literary Theory
• Literary theory emerged out of comparative literature:
its energy derives, among other sources, from a
rejection of neat, national traditions, from an attempt
to rethink traditional models of writing.
• Theory travels readily between countries; theoretical
models are easy to transfer, since they are, ‘in theory’,
universally applicable.
• Ambitious comparatists were therefore encouraged to
theorize about their subject .Writing about comparing
has always been as central to the discipline as
comparing writing.
Literary Theory
• In the last fifty years, literary theory has emerged as a
discipline in its own right.
• Placing an ever-greater premium on the ideological
allegiances of the critic had important consequences for
comparative literature
• Literary theory has had the paradoxical effect of
constraining the autonomy of literature by depicting it as a
product of the forces—economic, psychological, political,
cultural, or sexual—acting upon it.
– Hamlet, seen through psychoanalytic eyes, emerges as a story
of Oedipal conflicts
– The Tempest, read from a postcolonial perspective, reflects the
early modern exploitation of the New World.
Literary Theory
• The critic’s role becomes to tease out what
the text ‘really’ means, what it tells us
• The comparative critic’s role, by extension,
becomes to compare what numerous texts
really mean, and to establish what literature
tells us
Literary Theory
• There is no such thing as ‘theory’, only a
proliferation of theories, each one foregrounding
a particular method—from structuralism to
deconstruction, from psychoanalysis to feminism
• The underlying consequence for comparative
literature is an increased self-consciousness
regarding the notions of both ‘comparison’ and
the ‘literary’.
• If comparative literature remains a highly
theoretical discipline, it is because of this basic
tendency to question its own premises
Cultural Studies
• With the increasingly mixed, postcolonial society of the
postwar era came an increasingly broad, postmodern
sense of culture.
• Previously taken to indicate the elite achievements of
the human mind, the term now started to include
within its realm much wider range of reference
• In the spirit of postwar democratization, the
undereducated as well as the overeducated were now
afforded equal legitimacy in their customs and habits,
the mandarins and the masses viewed as part of the
same social fabric. With this panoramic perspective, a
new discipline was born: cultural studies.
Cultural Studies
• The study of culture, to take just the English-
speaking world, goes back at least as far as
thinkers such as Matthew Arnold in the 19th
century and T.S. Eliot in the early 20th.
• Cultural studies, however, was very much a
postwar invention. Where the study of culture
took as its focus a traditional understanding of
‘high’ art, cultural studies turned the idea on its
head.
• Cultural studies was as much a sociological as an
aesthetic theory
• Advocated the continuing vitality of working-class
culture.
Cultural Studies
• British cultural theorists were particularly interested in
youth culture as an expression of identity and class-
consciousness, as well as in the politics of immigrant
and minority cultures such as those of West Indians or
East Asians.
• British cultural theorists developed interest not only in
advanced art, but also in everyday artefacts:
newspapers, cinema, television, advertisements.
• In the postwar era of flattened cultural hierarchies, a
text could be anything designated as such; it is the way
that we perceive the text that assigns it this status, not
its inherent qualities.
Cultural Studies
• The implications for comparative literature were obvious. In the age
of mass media, two basic courses were now available to the
comparatist: either to cling to the ‘canon’ as the only legitimate
source of culture; or to embrace the brave new world of the textual
revolution.
• Both literary theory and cultural studies foreground the critic,
raising his/her work from its traditional, secondary role to the
status of a primary intervention in contemporary culture.
• The interpretive power of cultural studies is considerable: with its
combination of aesthetics and sociology, and its focus on urgent
contemporary issues, it represents a genuinely interdisciplinary
comparative undertaking
• It also places a particular burden of responsibility on the critic, who
must now not merely analyse pre-existing texts—whether verbal,
like literature, or visual, like skin colour—but also identify and
politicize them.
Cultural Studies
• No longer beholden to an already established set of canonical
works, the cultural critic is given free licence to compare
whatever catches his/her attention; it is the very act of analysis
and comparison that dignifies the chosen artefacts with the
status of ‘text’.
• Whether the same level of subtlety and sophistication is present
in an advertisement as in a poem or novel is irrelevant; it is the
critic who brings this apparatus with him/her.
• The advent of cultural studies has thus simultaneously lowered
and raised the stakes for comparative literature: lowered,
because everything is now subject to comparison, not just
‘literary’ texts; raised, because the choice of texts to be
compared inevitably implies a political position. Comparison
thus emerges as an ideological as well as an aesthetic enterprise.
