Comparatively theoretical

Rodolphe Gasché

pp. 417-432

in: Hendrik Birus (ed), Germanistik und Komparatistik, Stuttgart, Metzler, 1995

Abstract

Compared to disciplines that study national literatures, the self-understanding of comparative literature has been highly volatile since its institutionalization early in the 19th Century, as a branch of learning in the university. Not that definitions of comparative literature have been hard to come by, or that they lacked clarity and rigor. The opposite has been true. Indeed, each of the various schools that emerged in each of the countries in which comparative literature had become an academic discipline formulated its own very definite concept of what this branch of learning comprised. Comparative literature was seen variously as the study of themes, motives, myths, or legends common either to a set or to literature as a whole, of their migration across national literatures, of the factual relationships between writers, of national illusions, and so forth. As a result of this national differentiation, manuals devoted to a presentation of comparative literature and its method must still break its idea down according to its different developments in different countries. But, as the history of the discipline shows, even within one national context no unified understanding presides over its evolution. In the absence of such a unified conception, theories about the nature of comparative literature are thus in abundance. Yet, as if this plurality were not enough, a new way of thinking about the nature of comparative literature has lately arisen, especially in North America, which sees comparative literature as theory itself, not a theory, but theory period.