IN THE NAME OF

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
originally written by Rey Chow
presented by Fransisca Marta (20150600011)
In a manner beyond the control of those who
have strong feelings about what comparative
literature is and is not, all kinds of claims are
being made and all kinds of practices flourish
in its name.

However, precisely because comparative

literature is a name, it must be a subject to
change. Comparative literature should insist
on its own permanence only if that
permanence is acoompanied by continual self-
criticism.
 1.
COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE AND
“EUROCENTRISM”
“Languages and literatures other than the
ones traditionally sponsored by
comparative literature departments and
programs–namely English, French, and
German–be more widely and routinely
taught.”

▷ However, “othering” of other curriculum is

precisely the problem.

▷ Non-Western countries practice

Eurocentrism in the name of the other, the
local, and the culturally exceptional.
The Nation-State

▷ Comparative literature has been rightly criticized

for having concentrated on the literatures of a few
strong nation-states in modern Europe.

▷ “Comparative approaches to masterpieces of

Asian literature”

▷ The critique of Eurocentrism, if it is to be

thorough and fundamental, must question the very
assumption that nation-states with national
languages are the only possible cultural formations
that produce “literature” that is worth examining.
 “
The active disabling of such
reproduction of Eurocentrism-in-
the-name-of-the-other should be
one of comparative literature’s
foremost task in the future.
Multilingualism & Multiculturalism
▷ Multilingualism and multiculturalism alone
wouldn’t solve the problems faced by comparative
literature simply because they are already part of
comparative literature’s constitutive, disciplinary
features.

▷ Multilingualism has always been a humanistic

view of intellectual culture.

▷ Multilingualism for purposes of indoctrination and

surveillance or for embellishment and amusement,
for a mere change of decors.

▷Being multilingual does not necessarily free one

from bigotry.
 “
The problems of comparative literature–its
“Eurocentrism” and false “universalism”–can
therefore not be solved simply by strengthening
the local versions of the same problems, nor by
simply adding emphases to the study of non-
European languages and cultures as if such study
did not already have a fully implicated and
complicit role in the history of the teaching of the
humanities in the West.
 2.
“THEORY” AND THE
EVOLVING CONCEPT OF
“MEDIA”
▷ Deconstruction and poststructuralist theory
have very close ties with cultural studies,
gender studies, gay and lesbian studies, and
ethnic studies, in that the investigations of
disciplines, class, race, gender, ethnicity, and so
forth, however empirical, must always already
contain within them the implicit theoretical
understanding of the need to critique
hegemonic signs and sign systems from without
as well as from within.
How to approach the version of
Eurocentrism that is the passion
for the nation-state?
▷ Comparative literature should remain the place
where theory is used to put the very concept of the
nation in crisis, and with that, the concept of the
nation as the origin of a particular literature.

▷ The Imaginary Puritan make it possible for

comparative literature to form significant
connections with postcolonial studies by asking an
entirely different kind of question about national
literature.

▷ Not “how national literature, like class and

gender, linked to the formation of subjectivity?” but
“how does national literature participate in the
histories of colonialism and imperialism precisely as
widely distributed habits of writing and reading?”
 “
Comparative Literature would no longer
be a mechanistic juxtaposition of different
national literatures in the form of mutual
admiration societies but would be actively
engaged in the comparisons of imperialist,
designs, narratives, and print cultures.
How to approach the issue of
multilingualism?
 “
Just as multilingualism does not
necessarily prevent one from
becoming an intellectual bigot, so
monoligualism does not have to
mean that one’s mind is closed.
What about comparative
literature’s relation with “cultural
studies”?
▷ At times, blurry distinction between comparative
literature and cultural studies offers a good
opportunity for comparative literature to rethink
and restrategize itself.

▷ Comparative literature would need to extend its

traditional attention to the materiality of verbal
language into an equally meticulous examination of
the notion of the “medium” (storage, retrieval,
transmission).

▷ Comparative literature could borrow from

cultural studies by way of opening itself to the
study of media other than the word-based literary
of philosophical text.
 “
Perhaps, precisely in the name of comparative
literature, a new discipline would emerge in which
the study of literature is relativized not along lines of
nations and national languages, but, more rigorously,
along lines of aesthetic media, sign systems, and
discourse networks?

Perhaps the name itself would eventually transform

into an other, such as comparative media?
Thanks!