DEFINITIONS OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

Comparative literature: a specialized discipline in studying and explaining the exchanges between
literatures, viewed through those exchanges and the differences they reveal.

One of the purposes of comparativism is, precisely, to expose that

political borders are insufficient to frame literary phenomena, as the
national identities are not purely internal and autonomous processes with respect to
continental and global events.

Comparative literature focuses on the literary phenomenon from an international perspective.

(concrete exchanges between the literatures of two or more countries) or supranational.

(phenomena that exceed national borders). It provides a cultural framework for reflection,
attending to the phenomena of contact between national literatures: issues of
production (work with aesthetics, themes, and motifs appropriate to the universal tradition)
circularity (intermediaries that connect one culture with another) and reception (literature)
foreign translated, literary criticism, etc.)

Comparative literature is characterized by its open attitude in the conception of

cultural phenomena, which in some cases are shared heritage among several countries, and in
others constitute a phenomenon of communication between literatures.

Paul Van Tieghem: The reason for being of comparative literature is 'essentially' the study of
the works of the different literatures 'in terms of their reciprocal relationships'. It is about the
relationships by contact, by interference, by circulation, causal in any case, between
two or more national literatures. (...) Any other approach that is not the study of
"contacts" is "methodologically suspect," and therefore, condemned in advance.

C. Pichois and A. M. Rousseau: Comparative literature: it is the analytical description,

methodical and differential comparison, the synthetic interpretation of literary phenomena
interlingual and intercultural, through history, criticism, and philosophy, in order to
better understand literature as a specific function of the human mind. In hands
More skilled, comparative literature is also a tool for general theory.

A concern of the comparatist: to understand the general nature of culture and the
literary creativity and its continuity over long periods of time.

René Étiemble: Study of analogous literary works without relating contacts or derivations.
if only studying a unit of the background of literature. The experience gained by the
senses (our critical sensitivity) and the logical-mathematical demonstration (our search
or research demonstration) The comparative critic performs a second creation in their
interpretative and exploratory contact with the literary work or the cultural epic it focuses on.

Dionýz Durísin: Comparative literature not as relationships between authors and between works but
between systems and subsystems governed by rules and trends. Its objective is not to describe
these relationships rather explain them within the communication system and an apparatus
stratified ideological. From its beginnings, comparative literature was posed as
historical discipline, as a branch of the history of literature. This conception is still valid.
in broad sectors of current comparativism.

Jonathan Culler: Comparative literature requires reading the text against another, reading a text
like a re-reading of another, to read a text in the intertextual space of a culture.

Weisstein Ulrich: Search for affinities, study of those contrasts that,

comparatively, they serve enlighteningly to characterize a literature or an author

Parallelisms and affinities, characterizing divergences for each literature.

J.M. Carré: It is nothing more than a branch of the history of literature.

Rene Wellek and Austin Warren: Comparative literature: it is much broader than the simple
history of literature, since it studies, in addition to this last discipline, criticism and
literary theory, and even poetic theory, while excluding the aesthetic element as a theme
special belonging to philosophy and in which literature is used not only to illustrate
aprioristic conceptions

The substitution of 'de facto relationships' for 'relationships of ' is beginning to be advocated.
value”, to consider inner relationships more than outer ones.

The sector 'comparative literature' should be divided into 'history of comparative literature',
comparative literary criticism and comparative poetics or literary theory

Comparative literature...will be more demanding in terms of the linguistic expertise of our

scholars. It demands a broadening of perspectives, a suppression of feelings.
localists and provincialists that are not entirely easy to reach.

L. P. Betz: Cosmopolitan Understanding of Literature.

Henry H. Remak: Literature as a universal totality. Comparative literature is comparison.

of one literature with another or others, and the comparison of literature with other spheres
from human expression. Integrative literary science (national, comparative, and general science
from literature). Comparison of differentiation and synthesis (aesthetic and/or national)

H. Rüdiger: A more adequate understanding of 'the literary work of art', research on the
reciprocal interliterary relations. For comparativism to find its objective
specifically, it is necessary to cross some linguistic, cultural, or ethnic border, it is necessary to
to transfer the field of national literature, it must be directly related to two or more
foreign authors or national literatures.

Bassnett Susan: It is about the study of texts across different cultures, which encompasses a
interdisciplinary scope and related to connection models between literatures
through time and space.

Francois Jost: Comparative literature represents more than an academic discipline; it is a

overview of literature, of the world of letters, a humanistic ecology,
a literary worldview, an inclusive and comprehensive vision of the cultural universe.
Benedetto Croce: The comparative history of literature is history understood in its true
meaning as a complete explanation of the literary work, encompassing all its relationships,
entwined in the all-ordered history of the universe (where else, if not here, could it be
(to ever be hosted?)…

Julius Peterson: The themes are the only thing that the history of literature and comparative literature
have in common. The method used by both disciplines is different, since literature
compared does not pursue historical objectives. What it intends is to delve into the most
deep of analogous phenomena through their comparison to discover
the laws that condition the similarities and the differences.

Erich Schmidt: The history of literature must be part of the history of the development of the
spiritual life of a people with comparative references to other national literatures.

John Fletcher: Comparative literature is the branch of literary studies that deals with
the basic structures that lie beneath all literary manifestations, at any time
and place; that's why he is interested in anything that is universal and in any literary phenomenon
particular. Therefore, there is no theoretical limit in its field of research, since
literatures in all languages and their mutual relationships, as well as other forms of art,
they remain within their sphere. It aspires to be a dimension of criticism, with the final hope of
to shed a certain kind of light on what Gombrich has termed those "multiform crystals"
of miraculous complexity that we call works of art, as all forms and colors
they acquire their meaning only in cultural contexts. It deals with the multifaceted relationship between
the work and the context, striving to follow the intermediate course between formalism
dogmatic on one side, and the historicist blindness on the other. T.S. Eliot said that 'the comparison
and the analysis were the main tools of criticism." Granting its due
importance to the second, we must not allow ourselves to neglect the first.

Tamar Even-Zohar: emphasis on the view of literature as a 'conglomerate of systems'

differentiated and dynamic. This concept of literature as a polysystem considers systems
particular literary elements as part of a multifaceted whole, thus changing the terms of the
debate about 'majority' and 'minority' cultures, or 'great' literatures and literatures
marginal

Northrop Frye: literary studies must assume the coherence of their

discipline, postulating the possibility of a comprehensive poetics whose object would be the
literature as a whole, not the literature of a particular nation.

R.A. Sayce defines "general literature" as "the study of the relationships between the
national literatures." This is a useful distinction as long as it is recognized that the concept
the 'national' literature is not without difficulties, and both types of study must,
inevitably, converge. When we trace the development of the sonnet in Europe from the
days of Tetrarch we are contributing to the 'general literature', just as we do when,
in a supranational context, we consider issues of literary theory, poetics, and
criticism. But when during the course of that study, we compare a Shakespearean sonnet
with another Petrarchist we find ourselves within 'comparative literature.'

Schmeling, Manfred: The 'crisis' of comparative literature actually accounts for a

deeper discomfort and crosses -structurally and periodically, so to speak- through history
from literature and the body of literary research. It is, in fact, about the
the fundamental controversy between positivism and historicism, on one hand, which postulates the study of
the "de facto relationships" as an exclusive domain of comparativism, and the
literary, critical, and evaluative approach, on the other hand, that allows and even demands,
comparisons without historical relations, as well as generalizations and value judgments. For a
on one hand, the primacy of the 'fact', on the other, the primacy of the 'text' or the 'literary work', with
everything that this implies. The comparativism of the facts against the comparativism of the
literary structures, which implies a fundamental dichotomy and an acute conflict of
methods: historical on one side, aesthetic and theoretical on the other. (the two schools: the French and the
American

Comparative literature merges with the history of literature and literary criticism, if it
they focus on these from an aesthetic and international perspective

BIBLIOGRAPHIC REFERENCES

CULLER, JONATHAN, REMAK, HENRY AND OTHERS. GUIDELINES IN LITERATURE

COMPARADA. Madrid, Arco/Libros, 1998.

EAGLETON, TERRY, BAJTIN, MUJAIL AND OTHERS. TEXTS AND CONTEXTS. Havana City,
Art and Literature, 1989.

EVEN-ZOHAR AND OTHERS. THEORY OF POLISYSTEMS. Madrid, Arco/Libros, 1999.

GNISCI, ARMANDO. INTRODUCTION TO COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. Barcelona, Crítica, 2002.

SCHMELLING, MANFRED (comp.), THEORY AND PRACTICE OF LITERATURE

COMPARADA.Barcelona, Alfa, 1984.

WEISSTEIN, ULRICH. INTRODUCTION TO COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. Barcelona, Planeta,

1975.

WELLEK, RENÉ and WARREN, AUSTIN. LITERARY THEORY

RENE ETIEMBLE. THE COMPARATIVE APPROACH.

Comparatism is a method, although not the only one, that aims to study relationships.
of all kinds between the realm of the arts and that of literature, or also the relationships between the
set of literatures and the arts.
German comparative school: the preference for the investigation of common themes

French school: the pursuit of literary sources

INFLUENCE

The 'influences': unconscious imitation...

The relationship between influence and source is very clear.

The source is the origin and influence is the final goal.

In the field of literary research, it is advisable to separate both concepts of the

as follows: the term 'source' will be used only to refer to the
thematic models, that is, to the themes that have a material value, but whose nature
of a pre-literary nature.

Claudio Guillén: the term "source" is transformed into a material requirement, whose existence
makes an authentic creatio ex nihilo impossible.

The positivism of influences, the optics imposed by the sources, is reinforced by the
genetic positivism, for the 'causes' of literary creation.

The causal or teleological relationship, defined in terms of antecedence and consequence, is not what
it allows for understanding the specificity of the work; influence is always an interpretation
creative; one should not consider total coincidence as a copy; each work implies another
work, without one determining the other; the influence contributes to making only the
preexisting seeds; selection implies kinship, but also, and at times, above
everything, specific historical conditions, etc...

Only the influences need to be saved to the extent that they prove or provoke existence.
of coincidences, of recurrences, of common literary elements and, above all, of the
unity – in certain aspects – of literature as a global phenomenon.

Harold Bloom insists that influence should not be talked about as a relationship between an entity
independent and another..." some notions are harder to dispel than the one that comes from
of common sense and according to which a poetic text is independent, has a meaning
verifiable or meanings without reference to other poetic texts…Unfortunately, the
poems are not things but words, and those words refer to other words, and those
words refer to other words and so on continuously in the densely populated world of
the literary language. Any poem is an Inter-poem and any reading of a poem
it assumes an Inter-reading

Intertextuality is both the name used to refer to the relationship of a work with
certain previous texts, such as the statement that reading a work is to locate it in a
discursive space in which it relates to various codes formed by a dialogue between
text and reading. The study of sources and influence, as it was traditionally
conceived under certain theoretical pressure, it has been reconsidered as the study of the
intertextuality and expands its scope to include the anonymous discursive practices of a
culture, which allow a work to produce effects of meaning. As Julia Kristeva affirms,
once we think of an influence of one text in relation to another text that it itself
quote, transform and absorb, anonymously, then, 'the notion of intertextuality is installed
instead of intersubjectivity. (114)

Studies on influence focus on the relationships between events of

individual speech. Intertextuality addresses this relationship as part of a larger phenomenon.
broad: the dependence exerted by each speech act on the produced discursive system
for a particular type of speech activity.

(..) The transmutation of influence into intertextuality offers a new opportunity to the act
of comparison. (…) Comparative literature becomes the appropriate term for the
study of literature (reading one text against another, reading a text as a re-reading of another,
to read a text in the intertextual space of a culture). (115)

SCHMELING, MANFRED

THE CRISIS:

That 'crisis' of account is actually a deeper discomfort and runs through - structural and
periodically, so to speak - the history of literature and the body of research
literary. It is indeed about the fundamental controversy between positivism and historicism, due to a
part, which proposes the study of 'de facto relationships' as an exclusive area of
comparativism, and the literary, critical, and evaluative approach, on the other hand, that allows and
even demands, comparisons without historical relationships, as well as generalizations and judgments of
value. On one hand, then, primacy of the 'fact', on the other, primacy of the 'text' or the 'work'
literary, with all that it entails. The comparativism of facts against the
comparativism of literary structures, which entails a fundamental dichotomy and a
acute conflict of methods: historical on one side, aesthetic and theoretical on the other. (the two
schools: the French and the American

Comparative literature merges with the history of literature and literary criticism, if one
These are focused from an aesthetic and international perspective.

THE METHOD

Describing, interpreting, and evaluating constitute the basic triad of all comparative operations.
Any value judgment about foreign literatures derives from the value system of
each comparativist and/or their corresponding literature

the history is not 'excluded', but appears implicated, crystallized in a different way
in each literary work.

The three essential components of a comparative methodology:

The historical-scientific context

The types of comparison (the types of relationship between the members of the comparison)

The methodologically oriented comparison.

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND GENERAL LITERATURE

R.A. Sayce has provided a succinct exposition of the differences between the two:

Define 'general literature' as 'the study of the relationships between literatures'

nationals." This is a useful distinction as long as it is recognized that the concept of literature
"national" is not without difficulties, and that the two types of study must, inevitably,
to converge. When we trace the development of the sonnet in Europe from the days of Petrarch
we are contributing to the 'general literature', just as we do when, in a context
supranational, we consider issues of literary theory, poetics, and criticism. But when
In the course of that study, we compared a Shakespearean sonnet with another Petrarchan one.
we find ourselves within 'comparative literature'.

----------

While it is true that there are de facto relationships, due to influences, to the circulation of works,
Of themes, etc., it is no less true that there are also relationships between events due to
homologies of structures, of texts, of values, etc. What right do we have to exclude them?
of comparativism? You don't need to be very sharp (a comparativist) to realize that
the study of the "relations between facts" (of a causal or documentary type) does not lead, in order to
accounts, more than empirical observations about something that has nothing general about it,
meaning, specifically literary.

Five types of comparison:

The monocausal comparison, which is based on a direct genetic relationship between two or more
members of the comparison. Example: The relationship of Heinrich Heine with Lord Byron.

There is primarily a causal relationship between two or more works of different nationalities.
But this is added to an extraliterary dimension, the historical process in which they are inserted.
members of the comparison. For this second type of comparison, it is methodologically
competent, and in particular measure, the investigation of reception.(...) because it places in the
center of its interest the stations of the text production, historically, socially determinable
historical-spiritual and psychologically, and the perspective of the subject of the recipient instance.

3. It is based on the analogy of contexts. The tertium comparationis is not primarily provided.
intra-literary contexts (for example, from the history of motifs) or reciprocal relationships
interliterary, founded on contacts, but the extraliterary background common to the diverse
members of the comparison. Naturally, political and sociological interests predominate there.
historical-cultural or also general worldviews.
4. It differs from the others, above all, by its ahistorical point of view. In it, the dominance is
structuralist disinterest, in a broad sense, for the literary product. Comparative literature is
It puts here at the service of a general phenomenological methodology. Here they are among
others, aesthetic-formal, structuralist, linguistic, semiotic, and psychological methods. It seems
irrefutable that these procedures also have their value for comparative science of
literature (which is not exclusively comparative literature). The legitimization
quasi-genetic or historical basis of comparison does not necessarily have to
to abandon oneself for that.

5. Comparative literary criticism. Comparison as a heuristic procedure tends to,

this case, to the confrontation of various critical attitudes, to the different "methods" in
narrow sense. It is not directly aimed at the literary objects themselves, but rather they
captured immediately, that is, at the level of description, interpretation, and
valuation.

REMAK, HENRY H: Comparative literature has five important tasks:

1- It constitutes the tangible demonstration or refutation of the general principles on the

structure of literature through comparative analysis or the synthesis of specific authors,
texts, genres, currents, movements, periods that belong to two cultural units
linguistic or more, whether from different nations or in very different cultures in one
Nation: comparative literature should be the main laboratory of any literary theory.

Comparative literature provides through analogy, contrast or studies of cause and

effect, the inductive syntheses of historical periods, movements, currents, trends,
themes and stylistic traits at a bicultural or multicultural level (e.g. the renaissance, the
romanticism, symbolism, the avant-garde, expressionism). In this category the
national characteristics are preserved, but contribute to a supranational synthesis in a
higher level.

3-Comparative literature, through an intensive juxtaposition of two or more compositions or

critical essays not necessarily related by cause (…) seeks to intensify the
verbal and cultural understanding of the texts: in this case represents a facet, active or
passive, of literary criticism.

4-Comparative literature investigates what Wellek has called the aspects of 'trade'
"foreign" of certain works: intermediaries, reception, success, influence, translations; the
foreign trips, national images, and attitude studies would belong to this
category. This type of effort is basically historical and self-sufficient.

5- Comparative literature pursues interdisciplinary studies in the four categories

previous.

An earlier perspective to consider is the one opened by Mikhail Bakhtin with his studies of the
statement theory. Under this communicative approach, all lines of the theory are gathered
literary works that seek to surpass the immanent analysis of the literary work, integrating it into the
framework of the social circulation of discourses, all disciplinary approaches that focus on
in the figure of the reader as an indispensable member of the communicative triad author-work-reader
reader (Iser, 1987; Jauss, 1976; Eco, 1987).

The most productive has been the one from the period (Cioranescu, 1964; Pichois and Rousseau, 1969; Warren,
1966; Weisstein, (1975) considering periods as 'extensive supranational units'
(Guillén, 1985), which encompass and link the literary series and the historical-social series.

THEMATIC STUDY:

The origin and more detailed contribution in this area pertains to folkloric studies, from which
has been nourished by the Dictionary of E. Frenzel (1980) and that they also appropriated for the study of the
"author literature" the comparatists Ulrich Weisstein (1975), Manfred Beller (1984) and
Claudio Guillén (1985) mainly. On the other hand, formalist and semiotic studies have
privileged the narrative structures of motives (Tomachevski, 1997 and U. Eco, 1987). Eco
links the recognition of motives with a specific skill of the reader: competence
intertextual). For his part, T. Ziolkowski (1980) emphasizes the relative nature of the
Historically, a specific reason can become a symbol.

The review of thematic studies, on the other hand, favored the recovery of concepts.
like the reason, wasted so far in the teaching of literature, which
traditionally leaned towards concepts such as that of theme, which is different from the first
requires a high level of abstraction to be formulated. The concept of motive, on the other hand,
allows the interpretation of the literary text starting from the concrete presence in it of
certain content elements, such as in this case the appearance of doubles. The specific character
of these elements is the one that precisely, and reappearing in works from different times and
places, leads to the determination of constants, breaks and reworkings that only
they can be explained by the historical condition of the formal and thematic elements of the
literature.

The following budgets were delineated as a theoretical framework for this area of the
Semantics:

The thematic elements belong primarily to the content level, to which...

they are added characteristic features from textual plots, typical situations of
genre, rhetorical codifications, etc;

b- The concept of thematic element differs from the textual theme (abstract proposition and
macrostructural about the content of a text) as it is proposed as a manifestation
represented in the text; the thematic element is associated with the textual function it serves:
theme, reason, symbol;

Literary themes are constituted as such according to historical processes and codes.
historical discipline, as a branch of the history of literature. This conception is still valid.
in broad sectors of current comparativism.

Jonathan Culler: Comparative literature requires reading the text against another, reading a text
like a re-reading of another, to read a text in the intertextual space of a culture.

Weisstein Ulrich: Search for affinities, study of those contrasts that,

comparatively, they serve enlighteningly to characterize a literature or an author

Parallelisms and affinities, characterizing divergences for each literature.

J.M. Carré: It is nothing more than a branch of the history of literature.

Rene Wellek and Austin Warren: Comparative literature: it is much broader than the simple
history of literature, since it studies, in addition to this last discipline, criticism and
literary theory, and even poetic theory, while excluding the aesthetic element as a theme
special belonging to philosophy and in which literature is used not only to illustrate
aprioristic conceptions

The substitution of 'de facto relationships' for 'relationships of ' is beginning to be advocated.
value”, to consider inner relationships more than outer ones.

The sector 'comparative literature' should be divided into 'history of comparative literature',
comparative literary criticism and comparative poetics or literary theory

Comparative literature...will be more demanding in terms of the linguistic expertise of our

scholars. It demands a broadening of perspectives, a suppression of feelings.
localists and provincialists that are not entirely easy to reach.

L. P. Betz: Cosmopolitan Understanding of Literature.

Henry H. Remak: Literature as a universal totality. Comparative literature is comparison.

of one literature with another or others, and the comparison of literature with other spheres
from human expression. Integrative literary science (national, comparative, and general science
from literature). Comparison of differentiation and synthesis (aesthetic and/or national)

H. Rüdiger: A more adequate understanding of 'the literary work of art', research on the
reciprocal interliterary relations. For comparativism to find its objective
specifically, it is necessary to cross some linguistic, cultural, or ethnic border, it is necessary to
to transfer the field of national literature, it must be directly related to two or more
foreign authors or national literatures.

Bassnett Susan: It is about the study of texts across different cultures, which encompasses a
interdisciplinary scope and related to connection models between literatures
through time and space.

Francois Jost: Comparative literature represents more than an academic discipline; it is a

overview of literature, of the world of letters, a humanistic ecology,
a literary worldview, an inclusive and comprehensive vision of the cultural universe.