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Pauline Yu

Comparative literature in question

Comparative literature is at once a subject
of study, a general approach to literature, a
series of speci½c methods of literary histo-
ry, a return to a medieval way of thought,
a methodological credo for the day, an ad-
ministrative annoyance, a new wrinkle in
university organization, a recherché aca-
demic pursuit, a recognition that even
the humanities have a role to play in the
affairs of the world, close-held by a cabal,
invitingly open to all . . . . 1

So begins the foreword to Herbert

Weisinger’s and Georges Joyaux’s trans-
lation of René Etiemble’s The Crisis in
Comparative Literature, published in 1966
and itself one of many polemical contri-

Pauline Yu, a Fellow of the American Academy
since 1998, is president of the American Council
of Learned Societies. She is the author or editor
of ½ve books and dozens of articles on classical
Chinese poetry, literary theory, comparative poet-
ics, and issues in the humanities. Formerly profes-
sor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and
Dean of Humanities in the College of Letters and
Science at University of California, Los Angeles,
she is currently an adjunct senior research scholar
and a visiting professor in East Asian Languages
and Cultures at Columbia University.

butions to a substantial body of writings
on the nature of comparative literature.
As Weisinger and Joyaux suggest,
there has been scant consensus about
the de½nition and purpose of the ½eld
from its very inception. Debates have
been waged about its name and what
to call those who practice it. Disputes
have swirled about whether or not their
task is one of comparison. Questions
have been raised about whether or not
whatever it is they do constitutes a disci-
pline, producing delight, consternation,
or despair in the hearts of those who
care. Like the humanities as a whole,
comparative literature seems to face one
‘challenge’ after another and to exist in a
state of perpetual ‘crisis,’ as even a quick
glance at the titles of numerous works
on the subject can con½rm.

Is it, as one critic describes it, “a house
with many mansions,” or should we re-
gard it as “permanently under construc-
tion”?2 Perhaps this is why Charles

1 Herbert Weisinger and Georges Joyaux, fore-
word to their translation of René Etiemble,
The Crisis in Comparative Literature (East Lans-
ing: Michigan State University Press, 1966),
vii–viii.

2 S. S. Prawer, Comparative Literary Studies
(London: Dudworth, 1973), 166, and Roland
Greene, “American Comparative Literature:
Reticence and Articulation,” World Literature
Today 69 (Spring 1995): 297.

Dædalus Spring 2006

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Mills Gayley, a professor of English at
Berkeley, writing in 1894, believed that
the members of his proposed new Soci-
ety of Comparative Literature “must be
hewers of wood and drawers of water.
Even though they cannot hope to see the
completion of a temple of criticism, they
may have the joy of construction . . . . ”3
Joyful or not, the hewers and drawers
have toiled for more than a century,
struggling to de½ne an enterprise that
–at once chameleon and chimera–has
de½ed such attempts by mirroring the
shifting political climate and intellectu-
al predilections of each successive age.
In comparative literature’s history, then,
we can witness a series of contests that
have shaped the past two centuries, be-
tween nationalism and cosmopolitan-
ism, scientism and humanism, literature
and theory, and within the very notion
of disciplinarity itself.

In an Outline of Comparative Literature

from Dante Alighieri to Eugene O’Neill,
½rst published in 1954, the Swiss émigré
Werner P. Friederich traced the roots of
comparative literature to the influences
of Mediterranean and Near Eastern cul-
tures on ancient Greece and of the latter,
in turn, on Rome, although for him the
real activity began during the Renais-
sance. His history of the discipline set
out to demonstrate “the essential one-
ness of Western culture and the stulti-
fying shortsightedness of political or lit-
erary nationalism,” a unifying impulse
shared by many other scholars writing
after the ravages of World War II. All
national literatures, he argued, have in-
curred “foreign obligations,” for “even

the greatest among our poets have bor-
rowed, and borrowed gladly, from values
given by other lands. In the words of a
witty Frenchman: we all feed on others,
though we must properly digest what we
thus receive. Even the lion is nothing but
assimilated mutton.”4

Friederich’s study exempli½es on a
grand scale what had become by the
middle of the twentieth century a signa-
ture method of comparative literature,
the study of literary influence. Viewed
from such a transnational perspective,
literary reputations could shift in inter-
esting ways, with some individuals neg-
lected by historians of the national liter-
ature vaulting to surprising prominence
abroad, and some locally eminent lumi-
naries ½nding their signi½cance in the
international arena eclipsed. What is
important here is the light Friederich’s
history casts on a fundamental tension
within the founding impulse of the dis-
cipline: the relative priority of the trans-
national versus the national.

Cosmopolitanism, comparison, and
a transcendence of strictly national in-
terests and characteristics presuppose
an awareness of what the latter in fact
might be. Just as contemporary exhor-
tations toward interdisciplinarity re-
quire thriving disciplinary bases, so the
tracing of relationships across national
traditions depends on a strong sense of
what they separately are. Comparative
literature’s early forebears were thus as
inclined to focus on the local and par-
ticular as they were on moving beyond
them, but the oscillation between these
two alternatives left the question of pre-
cedence unclear.

3 Charles Mills Gayley, “A Society of Compar-
ative Literature,” The Dial, August 1, 1894, 57,
reprinted in Hans-Joachim Schulz and Phillip
M. Rhein, eds., Comparative Literature: The Ear-
ly Years. An Anthology of Essays (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1973), 85.

4 Werner P. Friederich, preface to Outline of
Comparative Literature from Dante Alighieri to
Eugene O’Neill (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1954). The “witty
Frenchman” was Paul Valéry.

Comparative
literature
in question

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Dædalus Spring 2006

Pauline Yu
on the
humanities

Consider two pioneers in comparative

literature, Herder and Goethe. Johann
Gottfried Herder urged German writers
to study foreign literatures in order to
learn how others had succeeded in “ex-
pressing their natural character in liter-
ary works,” not for the purposes of emu-
lation but rather to understand their dif-
ferences and “develop along their own
lines.”5 His research into and revival of
interest in German folklore was central
to this process of national identity for-
mation, which, he hoped, could help to
ameliorate the “dismal state of German
literature.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, by con-
trast, shifted the balance toward the cos-
mopolitan, urging writers to eschew an
easy provincialism and recognize the
larger literary community to which they
belonged, the home of Weltpoesie (world
poetry), the common property of hu-
mankind, and of Weltliteratur (world lit-
erature): “National literature means
little now, the age of Weltliteratur has
begun; and everyone should further
its course.” Having learned much from
various foreign perspectives on his own
writings, Goethe proposed the concept
of world literature not as a canon of
works to be studied and imitated but
rather, anticipating the world of a Da-
vid Lodge novel, as “the marketplace
of international literary traf½c: transla-
tions, criticism, journals devoted to for-
eign literatures, the foreign receptions
of one’s own works, letters, journeys,
meetings, circles.”6

5 Robert Mayo, Herder and the Beginnings of
Comparative Literature (Chapel Hill: Univer-
sity of North Carolina Press, 1969), 107.

6 J. P. Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe,
January 31, 1827, trans. Joel Spingarn and
reprinted in Schulz and Rhein, eds.,
Comparative Literature: The Early Years, 6, 3.

Dædalus Spring 2006

Goethe’s views would be echoed at
various points over the next two cen-
turies as scholars called upon literary
study–and speci½cally comparative lit-
erature–to exercise a form of cultural
diplomacy that would af½rm a shared
heritage of aesthetic excellence as an
antidote to parochial political animosi-
ties. For some this would be interpreted
as a return to the world of the Middle
Ages, “a universal culture expressed in
a universal language and comprehended
in a universal mode of thought.”7 For
others, Goethe’s ideal provided rather a
cultural mirror for the anticipated with-
ering away of capitalism and the nation-
state, as Marx and Engels declared in the
Communist Manifesto: “National one-sid-
edness and narrow-mindedness become
more and more impossible, and from
the numerous national and local litera-
tures, there arises a world literature.”8
In any event, most scholars agree that
while Goethe’s notion of world litera-
ture–a term that would resurface later
–was not coterminous with what was
to become comparative literature, we
can reasonably regard it as compara-
tive literature’s logical prerequisite. As
François Jost observed, one provides the
“raw materials and information” for the
other, which then groups them “accord-
ing to critical and historical principles.
Comparative literature, therefore, may
be de½ned as an organic Weltliteratur; it
is an articulated account, historical and
critical, of the literary phenomenon con-
sidered as a whole.”

Having provided this concise de½ni-

tion, however, Jost was almost imme-

7 Weisinger and Joyaux, foreword to The Crisis
in Comparative Literature, xii.

8 Cited in David Damrosch, “Comparative
Literature?” PMLA118 (2) (March 2003): 327.

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diately forced to concede that the very
term ‘comparative literature’ has long
been a “source of confusion,” for it
“af½rms the idea that literature is to be
compared, but does not indicate the
terms of comparison.”9 What, then,
has it meant to different critics? In an
authoritative essay on this question,
René Wellek has recounted in detail the
history and variety of meanings attached
to a term that may have occurred in En-
glish for the ½rst time in a letter written
by Matthew Arnold to his sister in 1848
–though Arnold played no role in the
birth of the discipline. Meanwhile, in
France, ‘littérature comparée’ had already
appeared without explanation on the
title page of a series of textbook anthol-
ogies of French, classical, and English
literature compiled by Jean-François-
Michel Noël and two collaborators in
1816. Ten years later Charles Pougens
lamented the absence of a course on
the subject, a lacuna that Abel-François
Villemain addressed in a series of lec-
tures at the Sorbonne in 1828–1830 that
offered amateurs de la littérature comparée
a comparative analysis of several mod-
ern literatures.10 When one of the

9 François Jost, Introduction to Comparative
Literature (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-
Merrill, 1974), 21–22. In a footnote here, Jost
recounts some of the variations in terminology
that have been employed in various languages.
In French one ½nds littérature both ‘comparative’
and ‘comparée’; Germans switched from ‘vergle-
ichende Literaturgeschichte’ to ‘vergleichende Liter-
aturwissenschaft,’ and then from ‘Komparativis-
tik’ to ‘Komparatistik.’ In English both ‘com-
paratist’ and ‘comparativist’ are used; Jost
states that the former has replaced the latter,
though the evidence does not support this. He
introduces the term “comparatistics” as a sub-
stitute for terms that have not gained wide ac-
ceptance–‘comparatism’ and ‘comparativism.’

10 René Wellek, “The Name and Nature of
Comparative Literature,” in Stephen G. Nich-
ols, Jr., and Richard B. Vowles, eds., Compara-

founders of modern criticism, Sainte-
Beuve, referred to “l’histoire littéraire com-
parée” and “littérature comparée” in two
articles on Jean-Jacques Ampère pub-
lished in 1840 and 1868, comparative lit-
erature appears to have achieved recog-
nition as both an academic discipline
and a critical system.11

Wellek and others have noted that
its most important model was likely
the new ½eld of comparative anatomy;
Georges Cuvier’s Anatomie comparée had
been published in 1800. As practiced by
natural scientists like Cuvier and subse-
quently in such disciplines as philology,
linguistics, religion, and law, the com-
parative method introduced an histori-
cal dimension to the cosmopolitan im-
pulses that motivated Goethe. Haun
Saussy has observed that they “all began
as what one might call tree-shaped dis-
ciplines, organizing historical and typo-
logical diversity into a common histori-
cal narrative with many parallel branch-
es,” but that in most of the human sci-
ences this methodology was dif½cult
to sustain “without begging too many
questions about the universal reach of
the categories employed,” and in the
case of comparative literature, “the ty-
pological tree of written culture was
never more than a vestige anyway.”12
Still, the conviction that the existence
of a common ground for the major Eu-
ropean literatures could and should be
demonstrated was shared with propo-
nents of the notion of world literature
and was to inspire the work of many
great comparatists until well into the
twentieth century.

tists at Work: Studies in Comparative Literature
(Waltham, Mass.: Blaisdell, 1968), 8–9.

11 Jost, Introduction to Comparative Literature, 10.

12 Haun Saussy, “Comparative Literature?”
PMLA118 (2) (March 2003): 337–338.

Comparative
literature
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Dædalus Spring 2006

Pauline Yu
on the
humanities

Although Wellek credited Hutcheson
Macaulay Posnett, an Irish barrister who
became a professor of classics in New
Zealand, with the ½rst “decisive” use
of the term ‘comparative literature’ in
English in 1886, it appears to have been
discussed even earlier by a professor
of English at Cornell, Charles Chaun-
cey Shackford, who delivered a lecture
on the subject at the university in 1871.
Clearly influenced by Cuvier’s work,
Shackford argued that the comparative
method provides a means of analyzing,
classifying, and relating the numerous
facts and details that histories only col-
lect, revealing thereby “universal laws of
mental, social and moral development.”
Comparative literature, he declared,

traces out the analogies that exist between
the literary productions of remotest na-
tions, the peculiarities which distinguish
each as belonging to a particular period
of social and mental development, the
variations in type with the causes, thus
bringing together related points of excel-
lence and power, with the exceptional re-
sults produced by peculiarities of climate,
race, and surrounding institutions.

Working back from individual branches
to a common trunk not only affords a
deeper understanding of each national
literature, he claimed, it also provides a
proper understanding of literature “not
in the isolated works of different ages,
but as the production of the same great
laws, and the embodiment of the same
universal principles in all times.”13

Shackford’s contribution to the litera-
ture was never published outside of local
university records and thus went largely

13 Charles Chauncey Shackford, “Comparative
Literature,” Proceedings of the University Convo-
cation (Albany: New York [State] University,
Albany, 1876), reprinted in Schulz and Rhein,
eds., Comparative Literature: The Early Years,
42, 46.

unnoticed in favor of Posnett’s more vis-
ible intervention, both in a book he pub-
lished in 1886 and an equally influential
article published ½fteen years later on
“The Science of Comparative Litera-
ture.” There Posnett made the audacious
claim “to have ½rst stated and illustrated
the method and principles of the new
science.” These principles, according
to Posnett, were simply “social evolu-
tion, individual evolution, and the influ-
ence of the environment on the social
and individual life of man.”14 Here Pos-
nett acknowledged the influence of Fer-
dinand Brunetière, a powerful and pro-
li½c French scholar who had applied
Darwinian theories to the study of lit-
erature, arguing, for example, that gen-
res grew, declined, and evolved into new
ones just as animal species did. Concepts
drawn from comparative anatomy and
evolution were thus instrumental in
shaping the emerging ½eld of compara-
tive literature, as the nineteenth-centu-
ry literary comparatists shared the pre-
sumption of both sciences that unitary
principles linked disparate phenomena.
Other American pioneers followed
Posnett’s lead in embracing evolution-
ary principles as models for the practice
of comparative literature. Charles Mills
Gayley, who introduced a course on the
topic into the curriculum at Berkeley,
believed that “trustworthy principles of
literary criticism depend upon the sub-
stantiation of aesthetic theory by scien-
ti½c inquiry,” which, given the vastness
of the subject, requires systematic col-
laboration within the scholarly commu-
nity. He therefore proposed the creation
of the “Society of Comparative Litera-
ture (or of Literary Evolution),” whose

14 Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett, “The Science
of Comparative Literature,” The Contemporary
Review lxxix (1901): 855–872, reprinted in
Schulz and Rhein, eds., Comparative Literature:
The Early Years, 188.

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members would each specialize in the
study of a given literary type or move-
ment, pooling their ½ndings in a system-
atic way to achieve “an induction to the
common and therefore essential charac-
teristics of the phenomenon, to the laws
governing its origin, growth, and differ-
entiation.”15

Gayley’s contemporary Arthur Rich-
mond Marsh, a professor of compara-
tive literature at Harvard, also recog-
nized his discipline’s debt to the com-
parative method in the natural sciences.
Rejecting the notion that the point of
comparing literary works is to deter-
mine “their relative excellence,” Marsh
argued for a less subjective and more
scienti½c goal: “To examine, then, the
phenomena of literature as a whole, to
compare them, to group them, to classi-
fy them, to enquire into the causes of
them, to determine the results of them
–this is the true task of comparative lit-
erature.”16 However, both Posnett and
Gayley acknowledged that the very term
‘comparative literature’ did not appear
to make grammatical sense, a point that
both critics and adherents would reiter-
ate. In the 1920s, Lane Cooper of Cor-
nell insisted on calling the department
he headed “The Comparative Study of
Literature.” Otherwise, he pointed out,
“You might as well permit yourself to
say ‘comparative potatoes’ or ‘compar-
ative husks.’”17 In any case, the gram-

matical infelicity was reason enough
for many to wonder not only what the
term meant but also what the activity
it denoted was aiming to achieve.

Undaunted by continuous uncertain-

ty about the name and nature of the
½eld, universities established professor-
ships in comparative literature during
the second half of the nineteenth cen-
tury in both Europe and the United
States. Journals began publishing from
the 1870s on in Romania and Germany,
and from the turn of the century in the
United States. Louis Paul Betz, a lectur-
er at Zurich, published the ½rst compre-
hensive bibliography of the ½eld in 1896;
enlarged in 1904, it contained some six
thousand entries. A sequel published by
Fernand Baldensperger and Werner P.
Friederich in 1950 contained over thirty-
three thousand items.18

Betz’s bibliography, in particular, was

instrumental in stabilizing the use of
the term ‘comparative literature.’ The
majority of the works he included, and
this is even truer of Baldensperger and
Friederich’s compilation, reflected the
dominant principle in the ½eld, estab-
lished by French scholars and thus re-
ferred to as ‘the French school’: com-
parison was to engage in analysis of at
least two national literary and linguis-
tic traditions between which actual rap-
ports de faits, i.e., factual relations or his-

15 Gayley, “A Society of Comparative Litera-
ture,” in Schulz and Rhein, eds., Comparative
Literature: The Early Years, 84.

16 Arthur Richmond Marsh, “The Compara-
tive Study of Literature,” PMLAxi (2) (1896):
151–70, reprinted in Schulz and Rhein, eds.,
Comparative Literature: The Early Years, 128.

17 Lane Cooper, Experiments in Education (Ith-
aca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press 1943), 75;
cited by René Wellek, “The Name and Na-
ture of Comparative Literature,” in Nichols,

Jr., and Vowles, eds., Comparatists at Work,
4–5.

18 See Schulz and Rhein, eds., Comparative
Literature: The Early Years, 133–151; Robert J.
Clements, Comparative Literature as Academic
Discipline: A Statement of Principles, Praxis,
Standards (New York: Modern Language As-
sociation, 1978), 4; and David Malone, intro-
duction to Werner P. Friederich, The Challenge
of Comparative Literature and Other Addresses
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1970), xi.

Comparative
literature
in question

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Dædalus Spring 2006

Pauline Yu
on the
humanities

torical contact, could be demonstrated.
One could focus on either terminus of
the traf½c across national boundaries
(Goethe in France, the French impact
on Goethe) and shift the labeling of
‘emitter,’ ‘intermediary,’ and ‘receiver’
accordingly. Influence studies shaded
naturally into those examining imitation
and reception, and from there it was but
a natural step to considering the role
translations played in literary relations.
In addition to studies of sources and
influence, comparative scholarship up
through the middle of the twentieth cen-
tury typically examined literature across
national frontiers and centuries with a
focus on one of three levels: movements
and trends (e.g., romanticism or natural-
ism); genres and forms (e.g., the short
lyric); and motifs, types, or themes
(e.g., the image of the shrew). All these
approaches sought to make the study
of literature more systematic and objec-
tive, achieving for comparative litera-
ture, in Gayley’s words, “the transition
from stylistic to a science of literature
which shall still ½nd room for aesthe-
tics, but for aesthetics properly so called,
developed, checked, and corrected by
scienti½c procedure and by history.”19
But if by this time a virtual consensus
had been reached regarding the practice
of comparative literature, its inspira-
tional power was limited. The ½rst gen-
erations of comparative scholars were
largely European and predominantly
French. Indeed, François Jost has sug-
gested that comparative literature in
France was “mainly an ancillary disci-
pline within the ½eld of French literary
history.” Its major ½gures employed the
historicist and positivist assumptions
and methods of the new ½eld to demon-
strate how French literature “formed

the backbone of the universal literary
system, and the task of the comparatist
consisted in examining how and why
the English, German, Spanish, Italian,
and Russian ribs were attached to it.”20
Whether or not such nationalistic im-
pulses were always discernible, it was
clear by mid-century that the method
had ceased to flourish across the Atlan-
tic. In the United States after the war,
Werner P. Friederich tried with some
success to revive the ½eld through vari-
ous institution-building efforts–news-
letters, journals, the creation of a special
section for comparative literature in the
Modern Language Association, etc. But
it was René Wellek, a Czech émigré and
doyen of literary and critical studies as
professor of comparative literature at
Yale, who diagnosed the malaise and
prescribed a cure that took.

Wellek attributed what he described
as a “crisis” in comparative literature
to the baleful positivistic legacy of influ-
ence studies in a calci½ed French school,
which had

saddled comparative literature with an
obsolete methodology and have laid on
it the dead hand of nineteenth-century
factualism, scientism, and historical rela-
tivism . . . . They believe in causal explana-
tion . . . [and] have accumulated an enor-
mous mass of parallels, similarities, and
sometimes identities, but they have rare-
ly asked what these relationships are sup-
posed to show except possibly the fact of
one writer’s knowledge and reading of
another writer.

As a consequence, comparative litera-
ture had become but “a stagnant back-
water.”21 Wellek based his objection

20 Jost, Introduction to Comparative Literature, 25.

19 Charles Mill Gayley, “What Is Comparative
Literature?” in Schulz and Rhein, eds., Compar-
ative Literature: The Early Years, 102.

21 René Wellek, “The Crisis of Comparative
Literature,” in Proceedings of the Second Congress
of the International Comparative Literature Asso-

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to the obsessive focus on causality not
only on his belief that any individual
example was at best only plausible and
rarely generalizable, but also on his con-
viction that the entire positivist project
of nineteenth-century scholarship–the
scienti½c model–had been discredited
as well. Croce, Dilthey, and others had
challenged it already, but the destabili-
zation of the political order wrought by
World War I had sealed the case: “The
world (or rather our world) has been in
a state of permanent crisis since, at least,
the year 1914. Literary scholarship, in its
less violent, muted ways, has been torn
by conflicts of methods since about the
same time.” Wellek bemoaned as well
the fact that comparative literature
seemed to have lost its early inspiration
as a truly cosmopolitan enterprise. Hav-
ing arisen, often in the hands of worldly
émigrés, “as a reaction against the nar-
row nationalism of much nineteenth-
century scholarship, as a protest against
the isolationism of many historians of
French, German, Italian, English, etc.,
literature,” it appeared to have been re-
captured and corrupted by the revival
of patriotic political sentiments, which
had “led to a strange system of cultural
bookkeeping, a desire to accumulate
credits for one’s nation by proving as
many influences as possible on other
nations or, more subtly, by proving that
one’s own nation has assimilated and
‘understood’ a foreign master more fully
than any other.”22

If comparative literature had forgotten

its cosmopolitan roots, in Wellek’s eyes
equally serious was the risk that it had

ciation (Chapel Hill: University of North Caro-
lina Press, 1959), I, reprinted in Wellek, Con-
cepts of Criticism, ed. Stephen J. Nichols (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963),
282, 285, 292.

22 Ibid., 282, 287–289.

lost sight of fundamental questions of
aesthetic value as well. He therefore
recommended moving beyond all such
demarcations–of language, country,
history, theory, and methodology–
to recognize “literary scholarship as a
uni½ed discipline.” Moreover, if com-
parative literature had “become an es-
tablished term for any study of litera-
ture transcending the limits of one na-
tional literature,”23 it was time to ac-
knowledge that it “can and will flourish
only if it shakes off arti½cial limitations
and becomes simply the study of litera-
ture.”24

Wellek ½red this salvo across the bow
of the French school at the second con-
gress of the recently established Inter-
national Comparative Literature Asso-
ciation in 1958. Out of the subsequent
brouhaha emerged what became known
as the ‘American school’ of compara-
tists, who were less exclusively positivist
and historicist in their orientation and
more interested in comparative litera-
ture as a broadly critical and humanistic
enterprise.

Still, many Americans were less will-

ing than Wellek to shed the adjective
‘comparative,’ even as they sought to ex-
pand its de½nition. In addition to being
less nationalistic (indeed, American lit-
erature was and is still often not includ-
ed in the discipline’s purview) and more
open to a multiplicity of theoretical and
methodological models, these scholars
introduced to the ½eld a new term–‘af-
½nity’–that did not require any docu-
mented historical contact at all. As A.
Owen Aldridge put it, “Af½nity con-
sists in resemblances in style, structure,
mood, or idea between two works which

23 Ibid., 290.

24 Wellek, “The Name and Nature of Compar-
ative Literature,” in Nichols, Jr., and Vowles,
eds., Comparatists at Work, 13.

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Dædalus Spring 2006

Pauline Yu
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have no other connection.” He also ar-
gued strongly for the discipline to move
beyond its European frontiers: rather
than being “con½ned to the wares of a
single nation,” the comparatist “shops
in a literary department store,”25 which
includes not just the European tradition
but those of the rest of the world as well.
Equally important in the development
of an American school was an expansion
of the discipline’s de½nition that took
comparative literature beyond the
bounds of the strictly literary. Henry
H. H. Remak is generally credited with
this innovation, evident in the opening
statement of his essay, “Comparative
Literature, Its De½nition and Function”:

Comparative literature is the study of lit-
erature beyond the con½nes of one partic-
ular country, and the study of the relation-
ships between literature on the one hand
and other areas of knowledge and belief,
such as the arts (e.g., painting, sculpture,
architecture, music), philosophy, history,
the social sciences (e.g., politics, econom-
ics, sociology), the sciences, religion, etc.,
on the other. In brief, it is the comparison
of one literature with another or others,
and the comparison of literature with oth-
er spheres of human expression.”26

25 A. Owen Aldridge, Comparative Literature:
Matter and Method (Urbana: University of Illi-
nois Press, 1969), 3, 1. At the Sorbonne, René
Etiemble’s essay, “Littérature comparée ou
comparaison n’est pas raison,” published up-
on his 1958 election to the chair in compara-
tive literature, also called for a “different con-
ception of our discipline,” a truly internation-
al comparative literature that would not be de-
pendent on the demonstration of rapports de
faits, and thereby rattled the positivistic foun-
dation of the French school as well. See Etiem-
ble, The Crisis in Comparative Literature, an En-
glish translation of a longer version of the essay
published in 1963, 4 and passim.

While this extension of the domain
of comparative literature did not meet
with universal approbation, some ver-
sion of it gradually worked its way into
most descriptions of comparative litera-
ture programs in universities today and
into unesco’s de½nition of the ½eld as
well.27

However controversial, Remak’s ad-
dition to comparative literature’s agen-
da reflected a continuing degree of fluid-
ity in articulating its distinctive features.
Whether positivist or literary-critical
in orientation, some of its practitioners
worried about how in fact they could be
differentiated from scholars working in
a single literature who might also be in-
terested in exploring larger questions of
genre, theme, motif, and influence. Bean
counters wondered whether or not ‘dis-
ciplinarily valid’ comparisons could take
place between literatures of two coun-
tries written in the same language, or
with examples from a country within
which more than one language was used.
Boundaries began to dissolve, with Ald-
ridge writing that “the study of compar-
ative literature is fundamentally not any
different from the study of national lit-
eratures except that its subject matter
is much vaster, taken as it is from more
than one literature and excluding none
which the student has the capacity to
read,”28 and Remak flatly declaring that
“geographically speaking, an air-tight
distinction between national literature
and comparative literature is sometimes

ton P. Stallknecht and Horst Frenz, eds., Com-
parative Literature, Method and Perspective (Car-
bondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
1971), 3.

27 Clements, Comparative Literature as Academ-
ic Discipline, 8.

26 Henry H. H. Remak, “Comparative Liter-
ature, Its De½nition and Function,” in New-

28 Stallknecht and Frenz, eds., Comparative
Literature, Method and Perspective, 1.

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dif½cult,” and “there is no fundamental
difference between methods of research
in national literature and comparative
literature.”29

Attempting to shore up some vanish-
ing distinctions, others asked whether
a comparison should require examples
from more than two different traditions:
should a ‘rule of three’ be invoked?
Haun Saussy recalled that when he be-
gan graduate studies in the 1970s,

The three-language rule identi½ed the dis-
cipline as something apart from English,
national-language studies, or studies of
literature in translation; it set up a criteri-
on of eligibility for new entrants, thus lay-
ing a basis for the discipline’s continued
social reproduction; but it did not always
specify the three languages or dictate the
substance of what was to be done in them.

As he went on to note, the point of the
“magical third element” was “elusive,”
and it “de½ned the social membership
of comparative literature better than it
did the object of study.”30
In 2002, when stepping down as presi-

dent of the International Comparative
Literature Association, Jean Bessière
con½ded to his constituents that he
was “in the process of abandoning the
idea of comparison.”31 Many of his col-
leagues over the years had already re-
marked upon the paucity of actual com-
parisons undertaken by scholars in the
½eld, some with alarm, but others with
approbation. As if bracketing the ½rst

29 Remak, “Comparative Literature, Its De½ni-
tion and Function,” in Stallknecht and Frenz,
eds., Comparative Literature, Method and Perspec-
tive, 10–11.

30 Saussy, “Comparative Literature?” 336.

31 Jean Bessière, “Retiring President’s Ad-
dress,” ICLABulletin xxi (1) (2002): 11.

half of comparative literature’s name
were not enough, questions about its
second half have also been raised in
recent decades as programs previous-
ly dedicated to the study of literature
have opened their doors to theory and
to postcolonial and cultural studies.
Following the establishment of a ½rst
beachhead in a 1966 conference at Johns
Hopkins on “The Languages of Criti-
cism and the Sciences of Man,” succes-
sive waves of new approaches to literary
texts, informed by methods and argu-
ments developed outside the domain
of literature in ½elds like anthropology,
linguistics, and philosophy, began to
wash across the shores of American uni-
versities from the early 1970s on. They
found their most hospitable moorings
in comparative literature departments
and programs, both because the foun-
dational texts of these approaches were
still being translated from French and
German, and also because comparative
literature’s methodology inclined it,
however variously, to transnational and
often ahistorical conceptualizations of
the literary, in contrast to the chronolog-
ical march through the centuries typical-
ly mandated by English and foreign lan-
guage curricula.

Some departments–like those of Yale,

Cornell, Hopkins, Irvine, and Emory–
embraced European theory with special
fervor, but across the country students
began to sort themselves out, choosing
between the study of a national litera-
ture and comparative literature often
in relation to their degree of interest in
theoretical approaches. Some national
literature departments quite happily
ceded responsibility for teaching theo-
ry to their comparative literature col-
leagues; others began to note with some
alarm that the best graduate students
then seemed to be applying to those very
neighbors. Comparative literature’s fas-

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Dædalus Spring 2006

Pauline Yu
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cination with theory thus exacerbated
the longstanding tension between the
national and the transnational as insti-
tutionalized in university departmen-
tal structures. It also, in some eyes, ob-
scured what some thought was their rea-
son for being. Should students care more
about what de Man thought about Der-
rida’s reading of Rousseau than about
reading Rousseau himself? Theorists
would quickly respond, of course, that
one needed to ask their questions to un-
derstand both the conditions and the
possibility of such a reading, but those
nostalgic for a more humanistic and
less jargon-clogged past began to won-
der where the literature had gone.

This question became even more sa-
lient as the interdisciplinarity that Re-
mak and others had proclaimed as in-
trinsic to comparative literature’s mis-
sion also made it a congenial home for
cultural studies approaches that rejected
literature’s privileged position as a win-
dow on the human condition. The call
for comparisons of literature to other
‘spheres of human expression’ has, in
extending the critical purview to ½lm,
media, and other forms of popular cul-
ture studies, often succeeded in pushing
literature off the stage entirely. And as
postcolonial studies have found a home
in comparative literature departments
as well, the geographical ½eld has ex-
panded and, in many departments, mar-
ginalized its old-world center. The per-
ceived monolingualism of these emerg-
ing ½elds also eroded, in some eyes, the
discipline’s time-honored expectation
that students would study several litera-
tures in the original languages.

The gradual extension and revision
of comparative literature’s territory did
not, therefore, come without controver-
sy. Commission reports mandated by
the by-laws of the American Compara-
tive Literature Association sought to de-

½ne the ½eld’s “professional standards”
in 1965 and 1975, with the second gener-
ally upholding the recommendation of
the ½rst to sustain rigorous, “arduous,”
even “elitist” expectations for work in
multiple languages. In 1985 enough dis-
sension and dissatisfaction had evident-
ly developed that the committee’s chair
never submitted its ½ndings. The 1993
effort, consisting of a committee report
proposing a signi½cant reorientation
of comparative literature away from its
traditional roots in studies of European
literature and toward multiculturalism,
postcolonialism, and cultural studies,
provoked enough commentary–three
‘responses’ and eleven ‘position papers’
–to ½ll a volume. Some disgruntled
scholars resigned their memberships
in the American Comparative Litera-
ture Association in protest. Small won-
der, then, that the committee’s chair,
Charles Bernheimer, characterized the
discipline as “anxiogenic” and titled his
introduction to the volume “The Anxi-
eties of Comparison.”32 In his 2003 re-
port, Haun Saussy sought to invoke the
“power and attractiveness of a concept
of ‘literariness,’ however variously put
to work, for comparative literature,”
but flanked his arguments with thirteen
other opinions from the members of his
committee.33

32 Charles Bernheimer, ed., Comparative Liter-
ature in the Age of Multiculturalism (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 1. Bern-
heimer recounts the history of the earlier com-
missions in his preface, ix, and includes the
½rst two reports of the commissions, chaired
by Harry Levin and Thomas Greene, respective-
ly, in the volume.

33 Haun Saussy, ACLAReport 2003 (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming),
14. I am grateful to Haun for sharing the manu-
scripts with me.

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Whatever the anxieties and disagree-

ments, comparative literature has man-
aged to maintain a modest but surpris-
ingly stable pro½le in the landscape of
American higher education. What does a
comparatist look like? Chances are that
she will have begun her formal study in
comparative literature as a graduate stu-
dent rather than as an undergraduate.
While some eight hundred B.A.s were
awarded in the ½eld last year, the rela-
tive proportion of Ph.D.s to B.A.s is six
times greater in comparative literature
than in other humanities disciplines.34
In many institutions, the undergradu-
ate degree in the ½eld is a relatively re-
cent innovation, owing to the typically
demanding language requirements.
Chances are about equal that an inter-
departmental program rather than a
department will have offered her course
of study, a fact that has been both de-
fended for its flexibility and contended
for its instability. Whatever the case, she
has been part of a relatively flourishing
cohort within the humanities: under-
graduate degrees have increased modest-
ly over the past three decades, with doc-
toral degrees awarded rising by approxi-
mately 50 percent. Chances are that she
will have done coursework in at least
one written tradition comprehensively
and intensively enough to be located, at
least for some portion of her profession-
al appointment, in a national language
and literature department, even though
she will probably also work with materi-
als from other languages. Chances are
that she will have studied works of liter-
ature, while acquiring as well a substan-
tial background in literary and cultural
theory. It is less likely than was the case
a few decades ago that her focus will be
exclusively European.

34 Data in this section provided by Benjamin
Schmidt of the American Academy of Arts &
Sciences.

When I applied to graduate school in
1971, Harry Levin regarded the notion
of doing a comparative literature degree
using French, German, and Chinese
with considerable skepticism. While
he admitted me to Harvard’s program,
I not unsurprisingly decided to go where
people thought it was, in fact, a good
idea. The other departments to which
I applied were also willing to give me
a chance, but only the newly minted
program at Stanford expressed enthu-
siasm about the prospect. Now, some
three decades later, such a combination
would be unexceptional, along with
enagement in what Wlad Godzich has
referred to as “emergent literatures,”
which “cannot be readily comprehended
with the hegemonic view of literature
that has been dominant in our disci-
pline.”35

Yet some scholars remain concerned
about the implications of such an expan-
sion. In his 2001 presidential address to
the American Comparative Literature
Association, for example, Jonathan Cul-
ler observed that “comparative literature
seems always to have been a discipline
in crisis, but simultaneously going glo-
bal and going cultural, as we have been
doing, has created special problems.
We don’t know what we are supposed
to teach.” Although Culler went on to
attribute this uncertainty to the facul-
ty’s inability to assume that students
can work in original languages,36 others
have argued that language competence
remains remarkably strong, in no small

35 Wlad Godzich, “Emergent Literature and
Comparative Literature,” in Clayton Koelb
and Susan Noakes, eds., The Comparative Per-
spective on Literature: Approaches to Theory and
Practice (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1988), 35.

36 Jonathan Culler, “Comparing Poetry,” Com-
parative Literature 53 (3) (Summer 2001): xvi.

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Dædalus Spring 2006

Pauline Yu
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measure owing to a more richly multi-
lingual immigrant population in the
United States and to the high numbers
of foreign students in American gradu-
ate programs. Jean Bessière’s presiden-
tial remarks to the International Com-
parative Literature Association in 2002
situated this transformation in a differ-
ent and broader context, the “crisis
of the humanities,” which is “nothing
other than the progressive erasure of
the model of literary study established
during the nineteenth century in Eu-
rope. This model was symbolically and
ideologically a mixture of tradition,
universalism, nation, and positivism.”
Comparative literature participates in
the crisis, but it is also, he hoped, “the
step beyond all of that.”37
Where that step might take us should

be reviewed in the context of the path
taken thus far. As Claudio Guillén ob-
served, in what should now be a very
familiar refrain, “a peculiar trait of
comparativism, for good or for ill, is
the problematical awareness of its own
identity, and the resulting inclination to
rely on its own history.”38

Two aspects of this history are parti-
cularly worth recalling as we consider
the situation of comparative literature
today. First, if we have called into ques-
tion the universalism that inspired
Goethe’s promulgation of the notion
of world literature because of the Euro-
pean hegemonic presumptions that it
could all too easily conceal, it is also the
case that some arguably less sinister im-
pulses have motivated this obsession
with universals. As has been noted, com-

parative literature’s origins coincided
with the rise of European nationalism,
which, on the one hand, it presupposed
and to which, on the other, it also repre-
sented an oppositional response, an
attempt to reunify a Europe divided by
the Napoleonic wars through the salu-
tary consideration of native traditions
in a larger and cosmopolitan context.
More than one historian has noted that
subsequent revivals of interest in the
discipline have occurred at similar mo-
ments in world history, and we might
then consider the ½eld as part of a larg-
er and periodically renewed effort to
emphasize humankind’s possible com-
monalities. As Werner Friederich com-
mented,

It is one of the ironies and the tragedies
of Comparative Literature that it seems
to flourish only after the catastrophes of
World Wars, when men are suf½ciently
aroused to denounce the folly of political
or cultural chauvinism and to advocate a
far more tolerant program of literary in-
ternationalism instead.39

A twenty-½rst-century version of this

phenomenon, Vilashini Cooppan has
suggested, is the linkage of comparative
literature with globalization. Arguing
that “globalization is by no means re-
ducible to the universal reign of com-
modi½cation” and is, rather, “an inher-
ently mixed phenomenon, a process that
encompasses both sameness and differ-
ence, compression and expansion, con-
vergence and divergence, nationalism
and internationalism, universalism and
particularism,” Cooppan declared that
“the history of comparative literature is
also to some degree the history of glob-

37 Bessière, “Retiring President’s Address,” 17.

38 Claudio Guillén, The Challenge of Compara-
tive Literature, trans. Cola Franzen (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 93.

39 Werner P. Friederich, “The First Ten Years
of Our Comparative Literature Section in the
mla,” in Friederich, The Challenge of Compara-
tive Literature and Other Addresses, 11.

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alization.” While cautioning against
“reanimating” Goethe as a “globaliza-
tion theorist before his time,” Cooppan
nonetheless credited him with “the un-
mistakable shattering of the national
paradigm that is one of the hallmarks
of our own moment” and comparative
literature’s “foundational aspirations to
a broadly imagined, incipiently global
knowledge of literature.”40

So Goethe’s ideal of Weltliteratur has
returned, having traveled many paths
over the years. Most recently associated
with survey courses on great books in
translation, it has resurfaced in connec-
tion with examples of comparative liter-
ature at its most ambitious, resolutely
multilateral, nonhegemonic, and non-
hierarchical. Some recent proponents
of a new world literature, like Franco
Moretti, have argued that only “distant
reading” works in this cosmopolitan
literary universe, whereas others, like
David Damrosch, have insisted on the
continuing validity of close readings
that move dynamically across contexts
and translations.41 Whatever the case,
world literature embraces a body of
texts “that, even as they represent par-
ticular national spirits . . . , also manage
to traverse, even to transcend, their na-
tional, linguistic, and temporal origins,
effectively deterritorializing them-
selves.”42

40 Vilashini Cooppan, “Ghosts in the Discipli-
nary Machine: The Uncanny Life of World
Literature,” Comparative Literature Studies 41 (1)
(2004): 12–16.

41 See Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World
Literature,” New Left Review 1 (January-February
2000): 54–68, and David Damrosch, What Is
World Literature? (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 2003).

42 Cooppan, “Ghosts in the Disciplinary Ma-
chine,” 13–14.

This reference to deterritorialization
brings us to a second distinctive feature
of comparative literature’s disciplina-
ry history, its association with scholars
who share a personal history of emi-
gration, if not exile, associated with
war. If, as Cooppan suggested, Leo Spit-
zer and Erich Auerbach are to be count-
ed among the “patron saints” of the dis-
cipline, the path to canonization was
laid for both scholars during their es-
cape from Nazi depredations to Istan-
bul. As Emily Apter put it, comparative
literature “is unthinkable without the
historical circumstances of exile,”43
and she has traced in fascinating detail
the ways in which a seminar Spitzer
offered while in Istanbul that granted
equal time to the study of Turkish litera-
ture “furnished the blueprint” for post-
war departments of comparative litera-
ture. These continue to bear the “traces
of the city in which it took disciplinary
form–a place where East-West bound-
aries were culturally blurry and where
layers of colonial history obfuscated
the outlines of indigenous cultures.”44
Among those instrumental in building
the ½eld in the United States, both Wel-
lek and Friederich, as already noted,
were European émigrés, along with Re-
nato Poggioli and Claudio Guillén, and
the list goes on. Indeed, two-thirds of
the contributors to a recent collection
of essays chronicling the beginnings of
the ½eld in the United States are immi-
grants, including the volume’s editors,
who observed that “an experience of
uprootedness and exile occasioned by

43 Emily Apter, “Comparative Exile: Compet-
ing Margins in the History of Comparative
Literature,” in Bernheimer, ed., Comparative
Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, 86.

44 Emily Apter, “Global Translation: The ‘In-
vention’ of Comparative Literature, Istanbul,
1933,” Critical Inquiry 29 (Winter 2003): 271.

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Dædalus Spring 2006

Pauline Yu
on the
humanities

war lies at the basis of the very being of
many of the contributors.”45 Remark-
ably apt in this context, therefore, is
Claudio Guillén’s invocation of a pas-
sage from Hugh of St. Victor’s twelfth-
century educational program, the Didas-
calicon, in his conclusion to a history of
comparative literature: “That mind is
still tender for whom the homeland is
sweet, but brave for whom the whole
world is a homeland, and truly mature
for whom the entire world is a place of
exile.”46

If most historians of the discipline
have, as Guillén believes, tended ‘prob-
lematically’ to rely on its history, others
have chosen to advocate that the past
be rewritten, if not interred. In her obit-
uary for the discipline, for example, Gay-
atri Chakravorty Spivak seeks to “undo”
comparative literature’s own version
of its European provenance to reveal an
“unacknowledged prehistory” in a Mus-
lim Europe and Arabic-Persian cosmo-
politanism familiar to scholars of Mid-
dle Eastern studies and history, if not
to comparatists. And she urges us to
“redo Comparative Literature” as a tru-
ly “planetary” discipline that will “col-
laborate with and transform Area Stud-
ies,” sharing with it a respect for serious
study of languages but moving beyond

45 Lionel Gossman and Mihai I. Spariosu, fore-
word to Gossman and Spariosu, eds., Building
a Profession: Autobiographical Perspectives on the
Beginnings of Comparative Literature in the United
States (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1994), ix.

46 Book Three, Chapter 19, cited in Guillén,
The Challenge of Comparative Literature, 334.
Guillén’s reference (erroneously to iii.20) is
from Erich Auerbach, “Philologie der Welt-
literatur,” in Weltliteratur: Festgabe für Fritz
Strich zum 70. Geburtstag (Bern: Francke, 1952),
49. See The Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor,
trans. Jerome Taylor (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1991), 101.

its borders in a new alliance with cultur-
al studies.47

As others have observed, such a glob-
alizing perspective also offers a salutary
counter to the tendency of many area
studies specialists to limit access to and
interpretations–beyond the biographi-
cal and philological–of materials they
control by virtue of special linguistic
expertise.48 By the same token, it must
constantly take care to ensure that a new
cosmopolitanism does not disguise a
much older form of metropolitan think-
ing. For instance, when the ½eld of
‘East-West comparative literature’ ½rst
opened up to introduce consideration
of Asian examples, comparisons were
inevitably one-sided or unwittingly in-
vidious: similarities or ‘af½nities’ could
be demonstrated if something Chinese
was just like something European. Dis-
cussions comparing Chinese to Western
poets on an individual basis proliferated,
uncovering the proleptically ‘romantic’
or ‘symbolist’ practices of the former, or
discovering that deconstruction’s her-
alds were fourth-century b.c.e. Daoists.
If differences existed, it was to the detri-
ment of the Chinese example (China
‘lacked’ epic and tragedy, for example,
or its ½ction suffered from the ‘limita-
tions’ of a strong didactic impulse). En-
tire richly varied traditions became ho-
mogenized as unquali½ed monoliths
in the face-off of East and West, with a
selected group of Asian texts and ½gures
charged with the burden of being ‘repre-
sentative,’ reduced to distillations of an
already essentialized culture, and subject
to the measure of literary ‘universals’

47 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Dis-
cipline (New York: Columbia University Press,
2003), 87, 19, 5.

48 See, for example, Jale Parla, “The Object of
Comparison,” Comparative Literature Studies 41
(1) (2004): 118.

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that turned out, to no one’s surprise, to
be Western ones.49 Such early discus-
sions only con½rm a point Natalie Melas
has made, that comparison “is a highly
normative procedure” that “seems al-
ways constrained by an invisible bina-
ry bind in which comparison must end
either by accentuating differences or by
subsuming them under some overarch-
ing unity.”50 It is perhaps a good thing,
therefore, that unabashed comparison
is rarely a feature of comparative litera-
ture these days and that the discipline,
as Haun Saussy put it, “has failed to live
up to its name.”51
In the end, however, for all its hand

wringing and self-questioning, its fret-
ting about names, standards, and iden-
tities, comparative literature has man-
aged to do quite a lot over the past two
centuries. If its methods and focus have
continually shifted, it is to a large extent
owing to the ways in which, like a cha-
meleon, it has absorbed powerful con-
temporary influences, be they the dy-
namic tension between nationalism and
transnationalism, the appeal of a scien-
ti½c method to humanistic study, the re-
assertion of humanistic values, or the
impulse to challenge the boundaries
of disciplinarity. Its current practice re-

49 For a recent discussion of some of these
issues, see James St. André, “Whither East-
West Comparative Literature? Two Recent
Answers from the U.S.,” Zhongguo wenzhe yan-
jiu jikan 20 (March 2003): 291–302.

50 Natalie Melas, “Versions of Incommensu-
rability,” World Literature Today (Spring 1995):
275. Melas refers to the ½rst case as “contrastive
literature,” a term employed two years earlier
as the title of an article by Michael Palencia-
Roth in the Bulletin of the American Comparative
Literature Association xxiv (2) (Spring/Summer,
1993): 47–60.

51 Saussy, “Comparative Literature?” 338.

flects a hard-fought understanding that
the commitment to language study does
not require a narrow nationalism and
that a hegemonic comparative literature
swallowing up foreign language depart-
ments would soon risk starvation. Its
turmoils have been those of the humani-
ties writ large. The upheavals wrought
by a theoretical climate of suspicion that
questioned the coherence and credibility
of both the literary work and its critic;
the increasingly eager unwillingness of
some, and reluctant inability of others,
to continue to disregard the presence of
new or hitherto unrecognized players
on the literary scene; the destabilization
and decentering of a largely European,
‘elitist’ canon of study; the changing de-
mographics of the American scholarly
and student community; and the inher-
ent impulse of the humanities in general
to question their very premises–are all
shared to some extent by comparative
literature with its sister disciplines.

In his contribution to the 2003 acla
draft report, David Ferris suggested that
there is a “logic that drives Comparative
Literature to question continually what
constitutes it as a discipline,” a will to
what he called “indiscipline” that en-
sures that “the answer to what Compar-
ative Literature is should always fail in
order to preserve the question.” And in-
deed, precisely because of its incessant
anxieties and continuing flirtation with
crisis, its habits of engaging in “a cri-
tique that seeks to sustain the limits
within which it operates,” comparative
literature has become “a theoretical
account of the humanities in general.”52
In that relentless questioning of aims
and contexts resides, after all, one of the
most important strengths of all the hu-
manistic disciplines.

52 David Ferris, “Indiscipline,” 2003 acla
draft report manuscript, 2, 11.

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