What is Comparative Literature Today? by Susan Bassnett

This Blog-post is a response to the thinking activity task on 'Comparative Studies' given by our professor Dr.Dilip Barad Sir. To know more about Comparative Literary Studies, CLICK HERE.

Article 1 'Why Comparative Indian Literature?' by Sisir Kumar Das

Article 2. Comparative Literature in India by Amiya Dev.

Article 3. 'An Overview of its History; by Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta

Article 4. What is Comparative Literature Today? by Susan Bassnett

Article 5. Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline' by Todd Presner

Article 6. Translation and Literary History: An Indian View by Ganesh Devy 

Article. 7 On Translating a Tamil Poem' by A.K. Ramanujan

Article. 8 History in Translation by Tejaswni Niranjana

Article 9. Shifting Centres and Emerging Margins: Translation and the Shaping of Modernist Poetic Discourse in Indian Poetry by E.V.Ramkrishnan

The task assigned by our professor is to read the article and give an Introductory presentation on a particular topic with our group members. We studying the paper, 'Comparative Literature and Translation Studies in which the third article 'What is Comparative Literature Today?' by Susan Bassnett presented by Janvi Nakum and Nidhi Dave on 12 December 2022. 

Article 3. What is Comparative Literature Today? by Susan Bassnett:

Introduction/Key Points:

The article starts with an explanation of the term 'Comparative Literature' that it involves the study of texts across cultures, that it is interdisciplinary, and that it is concerned with patterns of connection in literature across both time and space. Most people do not start with comparative literature, they end up with it in some way or other, traveling towards it from different points of departure. Sometimes the journey begins with a desire to move beyond the boundaries of a single subject area that might appear to be too constraining, at other times a reader may be impelled to follow up on what appear to be similarities between texts or authors from different cultural contexts. 

Matthew Arnold in his Inaugural Lecture at Oxford in 1857 when he said: 

Everywhere there is connection, everywhere there is illustration. No single event, no single literature is adequately comprehended except in relation to other events, to other literatures.

Russian writers (in trans- lation, of course), compare how James Joyce borrowed from and loaned to Italo Svevo.

Critics at the end of the twentieth century, in the age of post-modernism, still wrestle with the same questions that were posed more than a century ago:

1. What is the object of study in comparative literature?
2. How can comparison be the object of anything?
3. If individual literatures have a canon, what might a comparative canon be? 
4. How does the comparatist select what to compare?
5. Is comparative literature a discipline? Or is it simply a field of study? 

As early as 1903, Benedetto Croce argued that comparative literature was a non-subject, contemptuously dismissing the suggestion that it might be seen as a separate discipline. He discussed the definition of comparative literature as the exploration of 'the vicissitudes, alterations, developments and reciprocal differences' of themes and literary ideas across literatures, and concluded that 'there is no study more arid than researches of this sort'.

Croce maintained, is to be classified 'in category of erudition purely and simply'. Instead of something called comparative literature, he suggested that the proper object of study should be literary history: 

the comparative history of literature is history understood in its true sense as a complete explanation of the literary work, en- compassed in all its relationships, disposed in the composite whole of universal literary history (where else could it ever be placed?), seen in those connections and preparations that are its raison d'être.s 

Croce claimed he could not distinguish between literary history pure and simple and comparative literary history. The term, 'comparative literature', he maintained, had no substance to it. 

Charles Mills Gayley, one of the founders of North American comparative literature, proclaimed in the same year as Croce's attack that the working premise of the student of comparative literature was: 

literature as a distinct and integral medium of thought, a common institutional expression of humanity; differentiated, to be sure, by the social conditions of the individual, by racial, historical, cultural and linguistic influences, opportunities, and restrictions, but, irrespective of age or guise, prompted by the common needs and aspirations of man, sprung from common faculties, psychological and physiological, and obeying common laws of material and mode, of the individual and social humanity." 

Yet even as that process was underway in the West, comparative literature began to gain ground in the rest of the world. New programmes in comparative literature began to emerge in China, in Taiwan, in Japan and other Asian countries, based, however, not on any ideal of universalism but on the very aspect of literary study that many western comparatists had sought to deny: the specificity of national literatures. As Swapan Majumdar puts it: 

it is because of this predilection for National Literature - much deplored by the Anglo-American critics as a methodology - that Comparative Literature has struck roots in the Third World nations and in India in particular.

Ganesh Devy goes further, and suggests that comparative literature in India is directly linked to the rise of modern Indian nationalism, noting that comparative literature has been 'used to assert the national cultural identity' There is no sense here of national literature and comparative literature being incompatible. 

Homi Bhabha sums up the new emphasis in an essay discussing the ambivalence of post- colonial culture, suggesting that: 

Instead of cross-referencing there is an effective,productive cross- cutting across sites of social significance, that erases the dialectical, disciplinary sense of 'Cultural' reference and relevance.

 James Snead, in an essay attacking Hegel, points out that: 

The outstanding fact of late twentieth-century European culture is its ongoing reconciliation with black culture. The mystery may be that it took so long to discern the elements of black culture already there in latent form, and to realize that the separation between the cultures was perhaps all along not one of nature, but one of force.

What we have today, then, is a very varied picture of comparative literary studies that changes according to where it is taking place. African, Indian, Caribbean critics have challenged the refusal of a great deal of Western literary criticism to accept the implications of 

their literary and cultural policy.of force.

Ganesh Devy's argument that comparative literature in India coincides with the rise of modern Indian nationalism is important, because it serves to remind us of the origins of the term 'Comparative Literature' in Europe, a term that first appeared in an age of national struggles, when new boundaries were being erected and the whole question of national culture and national identity was under discussion throughout Europe and the expanding United States of America.

What distinguishes translation studies from translation as traditionally thought of, is its derivation from the polysystems theory developed by Itamar Evan- Zohar and later by Gideon Toury in Tel Aviv.19 Translation studies will be discussed in more detail later in this book, but essentially the key to its rapid expansion and successful entry into literary studies lies in its emphasis on literature as a differentiated and dynamic 'conglomerate of systems', characterized by internal oppositions and dynamic shifts. This notion of literature as a polysystem sees individual literary systems as part of a multi-faceted whole, thereby changing the terms of the debates about 'majority' and 'minority' cultures, about 'great' literatures and 'marginal' literatures.

Conclusion/Concluding remark:

Comparative literature has always claimed translation as a sub-category, but as translation studies establishes itself firmly as a subject based in inter-cultural study and offering a methodology of some rigour, both in terms of theoretical and descriptive work, so comparative literature appears less like a discipline and more like a branch of something else. Seen in this way, the problem of the crisis could then be put into perspective, and the long, unresolved debate on whether comparative literature is or is not a discipline in its own right could finally and definitely be shelved. 

Here is the video presentation and the Presentation is embedded:

Introduction: what is comparative literature Today ? from JanviNakum

To read the next blog on Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline' by Todd Presner, CLICK HERE.