COMPARATIVE LITERATURE: ISSUES AND INDIA
"Comparative
literature," Earl Miner writes, "clearly involves something more than
comparing two great German poets, and something different from a Chinese
studying French literature or a Russian studying Italian literature."
PRE-HISTORY…
Comparative
Literature is defined as "the study of literatures of different languages,
nations, and periods with a view to examining and analyzing their
relationships.
“In
the Middle Ages the literatures of Western Europe
were generally considered to be parts of a unified whole, mostly because they
were frequently written in a common language, Latin. In the nineteenth
century, concurrently with the beginnings of the comparative study of religion
and mythology, various European scholars began to develop theories and methods
for the comparative study of the literatures of different languages and
nationalities...Several different approaches to the examination of comparative
literatures have developed: the study of popular forms, such LEGENDS,
MYTHS, and EPICS; the study of literary GENRES and FORMS...; the study of
sources, particularly those that different literatures have in common; the
study of mutual influences among authors and movements; and the study of
aesthetic and critical theories and methods..." [Robert J. Clements,
Comparative Literature as Academic Discipline (1978) as quoted in A handbook to
literature]
F. W.
Chandler, the distinguished American professor of comparative literature, said
in the beginning of his lecture, “the comparative method is as old as thought.”
Although comparisons and influences have been a part and parcel of all literary
studies right form Greek tragedies through Shakespeare through Carlyle through
T.S. Eliot, it was only in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that
literary criticism and literary scholarship raised almost all the important
questions about the subject. Rene Wellek’s four volumes of ‘Modern Criticism’
was a path-breaking text in the subject.
In the
nineteenth century, European literary scholarship led to the emergence of
comparative literature as a new literary discipline. The influence of
positivism, of the idea of evolution of human institutions and values, of new
methods of historical research led to the inevitability of such a field of
study. Another factor leading to this inevitability was the rise and emergence
of the nation states as the home of national languages and national
literatures.
Curtius
sums it up in the following words in his ‘European literature and the Latin
Middle Ages’, “Thus Europe is dismembered into geographical fragments. By the
current division into Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Modern period, it is
also dismembered into chronological fragments.”
Comparative
Literature, in this sense, is essentially a search for some unity in this
fragmented world. Prof Nagendra also holds the same view that we see all the
literatures of Europe as a single literature
and comparisons appear in the context of a sense of universality as an aspect
of criticism, which as a theory needs to be revised.
As Wlad
Godzich said, “What we are dealing with here is a long-standing pretension and
implicit assumption of Comparative Literature: despite the diversity and
multifariousness of literary phenomena, it is possible to hold a unified
discourse about them. This pretension is the heir to the old project of a
general poetics, which was challenged and ultimately brought to a standstill by
the European turn to nationalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Comparative Literature is the heaven in which the idea of this project has been
preserved” (Kadir 246, "Comparative Literature International")
It is
very easy for us to understand in the post-Deconstruction era, that in its
enthusiasm for unity, this theory has always stuck to an ensemble of fixed
signifieds or a transcendental signified capable of generating stable meanings
with ‘truth’ and ‘ objectivity’.
This was
also a response to the hegemonic needs of rising capitalist class, from the
pressures of a disintegrating Europe due to the World Wars, and the ideological
remains of the theocentric view of universe with a center, and of course, the
Hiedeggerian idea of ‘Being’. This can be identified with Eliot’s notion of
tradition, Arnold
From
here, two different trends have arisen: the first, the French emphasized the
element of literary history, while the other, the American school insisted on
aesthetic and interpretative insight. Influenced by the Nineteenth century
Positivist school of thought, they always understood Comparative Literature as
a historic discipline, rather than an aesthetic one and stressed on the
concrete reality, factual details about the author, their associations, with
each other, the readers, viewers, and the others. So what was investigated was
‘ the mode of transmission’, ‘reception’, ‘success’, ‘influence’, ‘sources’,
etc.
The
American school of Comparative Literature, shaped by scholars like Rene Wellek,
Harry Levin, and others, worked within the general structure of literary
history, and introduced investigations in comparison of analogies, stylistics,
motifs, genres, movements, traditions, “bringing out in the process the
artistic complexion of the literary work.
Later,
Comparative literature has received, and thankfully so, from the prevailing
literary theories, like Formalism, Structuralism, Deconstruction, Culture
studies, Travel writing, Post modernism, Posy colonialism, as they dominated
the literary scenario.
Comparative
literature as evident from the title itself is a study of literature in
comparison. It is both a mode of study and an independent concept of
literature. Quite obviously, it is a study of literature in comparison, not in
isolation- a comparison of two or more similar or dissimilar forms or trends
within the span of literature of the same language or two or more languages.
Secondly, it could also cross borders and move across countries (Sufi
influences or Marxist influences across nations and time). Also, it may extend
vertically and study relationships between literature and other knowledge
forms- art, psychology, history, etc.
As Susan
Bassnett would define, “the simplest answer is that comparative literature
involves the study of texts across cultures, that it is interdisciplinary and
that it is concerned with patterns of connection in literatures across both
time and space”. [Bassnett, Susan. Comparative Literature: A
Critical Introduction. Oxford
Research
into the problems connected with influences exercised reciprocally by various
literatures- a study of international and cultural relations, or,
Of
international themes and motifs- of migration of themes and motifs (Slavic
countries).
As
Posnett would say, it could be a study of literary evolution, marking its
inception, culmination and decline, or,
It could
be a study of literary history in general or in the context of the milieu, or,
A study
of historical relativism- an assessment of the present against the background of
past traditions, or,
Of
national illusions, of fixed ideas which nations have of each other, or,
As Rene
Wellek said-a study of all literature from an international perspective with a
consciousness of unity of all literary creation and experience-independent of
ethnic and political boundaries.
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