Table Of ContentThe Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative literature
TRANSLATION TRANSNATION
SERIES EDITOR EMilY APTER
Writing Outside the Nation B y A ZAD E S E y HAN
The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel
EDITED BY MARGARET COHEN AND CAROLYN DEVER
Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing
BY I<IRSTEN SILVA GRUESZ
Experimental Nations: Or, the Invention of the Maghreb
BY RÉDA BENSMAIA
What Is World Uterature? B Y D A VI D DAM ROS C H
The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of "The Pilgrim's Progress"
BY ISABEL HOFMEYR
We the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship
BY ÉTIENNE BALI BAR
Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation
EDITED BY SANDRA BERMANN AND MICHAEL WOOD
Utopian Generations: The Po/itical Horizon ofTwenti~th~Century Uterature
BY NICHOLAS BROWN
Guru English: South Asian Religion in a Cosmopolitan Language
BY SRINIVAS ARAVAMUDAN
Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and Avant-Gardes B y MAR TIN PU C H N ER
The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature BYE MIL Y APT ER
ln Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Umits of Separatist Imagination
BY GIL Z HOCHBERG
The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature: From the European Enlightenment
ta the Global Present
EDITED BY DAVID DAMROSCH, NATALIE MELAS, AND MBONGISENI BUTHELEZI
3415138
Edited by
DAVID DAMROSCH
NATALIE MELAS
MBONGISENI BUTHELEZI
ft
1
From the European Enlightenment
to the Global Present
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON AND OXFORD
Copyright © 2009 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Princeton sourcebook in comparative literature : from the European enlightenment to
the global present / edited by David Damrosch, Natalie Melas, Mbongiseni Buthelezi.
p. cm. - (Translation/transnation)
Inc:ludes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-691-13284-6 (hardcover: aIle paper) ISBN 978-0-691-13285-3 (pbk.: alk.
paper) 1. Literature, Comparative. 2. Literature, Comparative-Methodology.
3. Literature, Comparative-Theory, etc. 1. Damrosch, David. II. Melas, Natalie.
III. Buthelezi, Mbongiseni, 1980-
PN865.P74 2009
809-dc22 2009006521
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Minion with Gill Sans Display
Printed on acid-free paper.
00
press. princeton.edu
Printed in the United States of America
10987654321
1 N T R 0 DUC T ION ix
PART ONE
ORIGINS
Results of a Comparison of Different Peoples' Poetry in
Ancient and Modern Times (1797) 3
Johann Gottfried Herder
2.
Of the General Spirit of Modern Literature (1800) /0
Germaine de Staël
3
Conversations on World Literature (1827) /7
J. W von Goethe and J. P. Eckermann
4
From The Birth of Tragedy (1872) 26
Friedrich Nietzsche
5
Present Tasks of Comparative Literature (1877) 4/
Hugo Meltzl
6
The Comparative Method and Literature (1886) 50
Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett
7
World Literature (1899) 6/
Georg Brandes
8
From What Is Comparative Literature? (/903) 67
Charles Mills Gayley
PART TWO
THE YEARS OF CRISIS
9
The Epie and the Novel (19/6) 8/
Georg Luk6cs
10
Chaos in the Literary World (1934) 92
Kobayashi Hideo
Il
From Epie and Novel (1941) /04
Mikhail Bakhtin
Preface to European Literature and the Latin Middle
Ages (1948) /20
Ernst Robert Curtius
13
Philology and Weltliteratur (1952) /25
Erich Auerbach
From Minima MoraUa (1951) /39
Theodor Adorno
Poetry, Society, State (1956) /50
Octavio Paz
16
Preface to La Littérature comparée (1951) /58
Jean-Marie Carré
vi CO NTE NTS
17
The Crisis of Comparative Literature (1959) /6/
René Wellek
PART THREE
THE THEORY YEARS
18
The Structuralist Activity (/963) /75
Roland Barthes
19
J
Women's Time (1977) /83
Julia Kristeva
j 20
Semi%gy and Rhetoric (1973) 208
Paul de Man
21
Writing (1990) 227
Barbara Johnson
The Position of Translated Literature within the
Literary Polysystem (1978) 240
Itamar Even-Zohar
Cross-Cultural Poetics: National Literatures (1981) 248
Édouard Glissant
24
--J The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983) 259
Edward W 5aid
The Quest for Relevance (1986) 284
NgügT wa Thiong'o
vii CON T E N T S
PART FOUR
CONTEMPORARY EXPLORATIONS
26
Comparative Cosmopolitanism (1992) 309
Bruce Robbins
27
Literature, Nation, and Politics (1999) 329
Pascale Casanova
28
Comparative Literature in China (2000) 341
Zhou Xiaoyi and Q. S. Tong
29
From Translation, Community, Utopia (2000) 358
Lawrence Venuti
30
Crossing Borders (2003) 380
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
31
Evolution, World-Systems, Weltliteratur (2006) 399
Franco Moretti
32
A New Comparative Literature (2006) 409
Emily Apter
BIBLIOGRAPHIES 42/
CRE DIT S 43/
1 N D E X 435
viii CON T E N T S
Comparative literature is a quixotic discipline. Its practitioners press against
institutional constraints and the limitations ofhuman capacity as they try to
grasp the infinite variety of the world's literary production. And why stop
with literature? Comparatists venture into art history, musicology, and film
studies, while interdisciplinary work draws on insights from anthropology
to history and from psychology to evolutionary biology. As they have wres
tled with their many options, comparatists have regularly engaged in processes
of self-scrutiny and redefinition, issuing proposaIs, manifestos, counter
blasts, and rebuttals at every opportunity. This volume brings together thirty
two essays illustrating the variety of ways in which the discipline has been
conceived and practiced over the past two centuries. Collectively, these ma
terials can help us to explore the long history of current debates and chart
our course going forward.
An entire anthology could be composed purely of essays complain
ing about the tenn «Comparative Literature" itself. Institutional as weIl as
intellectual concerns have fueled the debate over the label and the relative
merits and nuances of a host of alternatives, from Vergleichende Literatur
geschichte to «Literary and Cultural Studies" to «World Literature" to, simply,
«Literature." Arnbiguously situated in relation to nationalliterature de
partments, Comparative Literature programs take many fonns and show
a protean tendency to shift over time even in a single setting, shaped and
reshaped by changing faculty availability and the sometinles uneasy dy
namics of relations with the departments around them. Intellectually, com
paratists rejoice in their freedom to cross national and disciplinary bound
aries, and today there is great interest in an emergent global perspective on
literary studies. Yet this growing range confronts comparatists with impor
tant conceptual challenges and breeds profound uncertainties about how to
maintain cultural and literary-historical depth in our work. Comparatists
have often been leaders in the development and promulgation ofliterary the
ory, but theOl-Y itself needs to be freshly theorized in light of the far greater
range of cultural difference it can now be asked to take into account.
Comparatists around the world have been exploring new approaches
to these concerns, and the creative ferment of comparative literature today
finds expression in the almost annual appearance of major statements on
the shape and direction of the discipline, induding Charles Bernheimer's
influential committee report for the American Comparative Literature
Association, published with responses as Comparative Literature in the Age
ofMulticulturalism (1995), Pascale Casanova's La République mondiale des
lettres (1999), Gayatri Spivak'sDeath ofa Discipline (2003), and Haun Saussy's
2006 ACLA report, Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization. As
engrossing as these current debates are, it is equally important for com
paratists to attend to the discipline's longer history. A prime goal of this
collection is to enable readers to encounter various configurations of the
discipline over the past two centuries and to counterpoint old and new state
ments on issues of recurring concern. Édouard Glissant's vision of Carib
bean discourse recalls Herder's argument for the intimate relation between
nation and language, even as Glissant's daim about the double function of
postcolonialliterature bears affinities with Georg Lukacs's distinction be
tween epic and novel. Franco Moretti's evolutionary model for the global
spread of the novel represents a sophisticated return to the Darwinian/
Spencerian framework already employed by Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett
in 1886. Pascale Casanova's concern with the imbalance of cultural power
in the globalliterary system is foreshadowed in Hugo Meltzl's 1877 essay
"Present Tasks of Comparative Literature," which describes less-spoken
languages and their literatures as endangered species that must not fall
victim to literary great-power politics.
We have envisioned this collection more as a provisional genealogy
than a definitive history, selecting essays from earlier periods that seem to
us to speak with particular pertinence to comparatists today. In this re
spect, this volume differs frOIn Hans-Joachim Schultz and Phillip H. Rhein's
1973 collection Comparative Literature: The Barly Years, still valu able for
readers wishing to go further into the discipline's nineteenth-century roots,
which indudes various items of more historical than current interest. Com
paratists often seem to suppose that today's issues have sprung full-blown
from the mind of sorne theorist just discovered in a Parisian café or an
ltalian prison. For a discipline that has moved beyond formalism to a dose
engagement with cultural history, it is fundamentally important to give
direct attention to the discipline's history as weIl. As a way into this history,
x INTRODUCTION
