Post on 12-Mar-2015
Gretchen G. Velarde
Comparative Literature versus Translation Studies
In a world where specialization on a specific and well-defined field is the primary key to
open doors leading to various career opportunities, the very broad scope and nature of
comparative literature led some academicians and literary experts to consider it as an eclectic
type of academic pursuit and to question the probability of those with Ph.D.s in this field to find
employment in the highly specialized environment of the academe and career markets alike. But
beyond mundane concerns on financial gain and employment opportunities, there is a more
intricate and definitely pressing criticism to comparative literature that has been swung by
literary critiques and scholars from all angles. It is the question of the end-point significance as
well as the importance of comparative literature aside from the notion of satisfying a certain
curiosity in identifying a mediating line that connects all the literary works in the world. Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak wrote in her collection of essays entitled Death of a Discipline, that the way
forward for a discipline that she perceives to be in decline is to move beyond its Eurocentric
origins, and “to acknowledge a definitive future anteriority, a ‘to-comeness’, a ‘will have
happened’ quality” (Spivak, 6). Spivak’s central argument regarding the so-called requiem of
comparative literature is not entirely about the discipline per se but about the perspective injected
by scholars when studying about the interconnectivity of world literature. To better understand
the current intellectual swordfight about this discipline, one need to first have a retrospective
analysis as to the origin of comparative literature and its objective to contribute a larger and
universal understanding about the differences as well as similarities of literature and other arts
across the globe.
The history of the entrance of comparative literature studies in the academic world is
relatively recent appearing in the middle of the 19th century. Yet, as what literary critiques
observed, the diffuse beginnings of comparative literature have long been present as a more or
less moving motive in the work of individual critics. Frederico Lolice pointed out that the
“Italian nature of much of the best in Chaucer, the Norman and Latin origin of much of
Shakespeare, the English influence on Goethe and the Greek on Lessing have long formed
subjects of special research and elucidation. At length it occurred to someone to combine and
classify these foreign influences on native literatures that certain lines of universal development
might be discerned and the rules of that development codified” (381). In the early nineteenth-
century, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe introduced the notion of Weltliteratur or World Literature
in which he postulated that art and literature should not be separated by cultural or social
differences. Johann Peter Eckermann, Goethe’s secretary and disciple, recorded his remark to a
young Englishman saying, “It is part of the nature of the German to respect everything foreign
for its own sake and to adapt himself to foreign idiosyncrasies. This and the great suppleness of
our language make German translations particularly accurate and satisfying” (Conversations with
Goethe, 27). Although Goethe did not particularly pursue this kind of literary undertaking, he
nevertheless continued to insert his ideas of creating a world where equanimity in the realm of
arts and letters exists.
Comparative literature has been deemed as the study of “literature without borders” due
to its interdisciplinary nature and its necessity to move across languages, time periods, across
boundaries between literature and other arts such as music, painting, and filmmaking, et al. The
interdisciplinary programs of comparative literature places a stress on language skills and critical
thinking particularly because it practices literary criticism on works written in different
languages and/or those hailing from different cultures. For many of comparative literature’s
hostile opponents in national literature departments, they would charge that this discipline is
nothing but merely a whimsical fascination to the idea of an invisible rope that ties up and links
all the literature across the globe regardless of time, culture, and language differences. Frederico
Lolice insightfully wrote that “while a study of comparative literature is recognized by all those
who have undertaken it as one of the most fascinating, its importance, aside from augmenting the
culture of the world, is still a matter of dispute. When the greatest poets, dramatists, historians,
biographers, and storytellers, have been influenced side by side, their formative influences, their
environments, their similarities, and their differences compared, there still remain the lesser light,
who offer quite as attractive work, infinite in variety, but perhaps profitless to pursue to any great
length (Lolice, 382).
Rey Chow, in his essay entitled In the Name of Comparative Literature, argued that
comparative literature “is not simply a matter of adding or juxtaposing one national literature to
another so that its existence is simply... redundant and superfluous” (Chow, 107). Even though
Frederico Lolice and M. Douglas Power admitted in their latter writings that engaging in
comparative literature is quite cyclical and has a tendency to traverse a plateau path when
everything has already been said and done for many scholars, they still believe that this
discipline is intellectually engaging because it is never still and never content, it continuously
touches various spheres of discipline including history, psychology, sociology, linguistics, and
anthropology. The works of Frederico Lolice published in his book entitled A Short History of
Comparative Literature: From the Earliest to the Present Day is considered as one of the finest
introduction to the study of comparative literature and the worldwide distribution of this
acclaimed work was made possible through the ingenuity, patience, and knowledge of M.
Douglas Power in literature specifically in translation. Lolice emphatically argued that
comparative literature is a never ending process of connecting the dots across multi-variance of
studies in the sphere of arts and letters. Lolice advised those who wanted to pursue this kind of
discipline that “the first essential to a study of comparative literature is that the student must free
him/herself from the limitations of periods both national and universal set by the historian, and
attempt to grasp the ideas of a world-wide civilization founded through a mutual exchange of
language and a diffusion of those ideas and feelings expressed by these languages” (Lolice, 374).
The New York Times in 1907 published a series of critique focusing on the significance
as well as ambiguities posed by the volume of 376 pages of Lolice’s work on comparative
literature. According to the published critique, the book is never wanting of surprises especially
as one becomes more and more emancipated from what is local and national, and freed from the
chains of history. It discusses questions regarding boundaries (time, language, culture, and time
frames, et al.) such as why three centuries should have separated the golden age of Italian
literature from that of England; why the Minnesingers did not produce and mould a national
literature in Germany as the troubadours did in France and Italy; why certain ideas can be
expressed in one language which cannot possibly be expressed in any other; and why each
language has a purpose which is absolutely individual and national. The entire theme of Lolice in
his intricately detailed work is that in the memory of native literatures alone will genuine and
lasting originality remain, and that this originality will be universally transfused when
cosmopolitanism and internationalism will inevitably become the life of the modern mind,
effacing the traditions of a picturesque past which will henceforth belong only to history. In
recent years since the emergence of the decolonization movement and the post-colonial period,
all reputable schools in Europe, the United States, and significant countries in Asia and other
developed continents offer basic as well as in-depth studies of comparative literature. The
massive entrance of this discipline led to the strengthening of criticisms posed by academicians
as to the continuous significance and intellectual importance of comparative literature to the
advancement of literature and progression of equity in the plane of arts and letters.
Comparative Literature and Eurocentrism
Comparative literature, according to scholars, academicians, and critics alike who are not
convinced about the significance of this discipline say that it is too gargantuan a leap to
undertake. They say that the so-called comparatists or the faithful disciples of comparative
literature zero in on familiarization and adaptation of broader literary and aesthetic spectrum that
constitute social sciences and humanities merged into one to create a holistic analysis of two or
more literary masterpieces and finding a binding force that unites these literary works together
are plain romanticists. When one looks at comparative literature using a historical perspective,
the genesis of this field of study was at some point, shaky and unstable specifically because it
was a result of a bandwagon movement in the early nineteenth century Europe in search of the
so-called national literature. As what Susan Basnett, a very active critique of comparative
literature cited, “The origins of comparative literature in the nineteenth century show an uneasy
relationship between broad-ranging ideas of literature, for example, Goethe’s notion of
Weltliteratur, and emerging national literatures. Attempts to define comparative literature tended
to concentrate on questions of national or linguistic boundaries. For the subject to be authentic, it
was felt, the activity of comparing had to be based on an idea of difference: texts, or writers, or
movements should ideally be compared across linguistic boundaries, and this view lasted for a
very long time” (5).
The strongest point of scholarly and academic criticisms that were strewn at comparative
literature and, according to them, could lead to the eventual demise of this discipline is its long-
running tendency to embrace the concept of Eurocentrism. Simply put, Eurocentrism is a way of
looking at the world from a European perspective and with an implied belief, either consciously
or subconsciously, in the pre-eminence and superiority of European culture. This term has been
coined during the so-called de-colonization movement during the late part of the twentieth-
century and has been since used as a tool for criticism on various aspects of political, social, and
literary analysis. During the postcolonial movement in humanities and social sciences,
mountainous amounts of researches poured in focusing on the injection of a Eurocentric
perspective in judging and assessing the collected works in literature, accounts in history, and
criticisms of art whether visual, filmic, musical, or whatever. This undeniable use of European
eyeglasses in looking at the world is very much apparent in comparative literature as well as
post-colonial translation. In the realm of translation and multilingualism, Maria Tymoczko wrote
an essay entitled Post-Colonial Writing and Literary Translation pointing out that when a
literary translator works on a written text; he/she is translating a culture and not a language. In
line with this, she further said that, though translation is seen as a harmless transfiguration of one
language to the other, there are still important factors that a translator considers when translating
a text. One is the audience and the second is inevitably, patronage. “The demands of patronage
are intertwined with questions of audience, which is an important element in translation norms
and strategies... Issues about intended audience are often deceptive; for example, paradoxically
translations are at times produced for the source culture itself when, say, a colonial language has
become the lingua franca of a multicultural emergent nation or of a culture that has experienced a
linguistic transition of some sort” (31).
During the seemingly perpetual occupation and colonization of European empires such as
Portugal, Spain, and later, France and Great Britain, the manipulation of translation and
translation studies where evident on the prejudiced notions that were incorporated on the text.
According to Tymoczko, in the nineteenth-century, an English translation tradition developed, in
which texts from Arabic from Indian languages were cut, edited, and published with extensive
anthropological footnotes. She therefore postulated that “the subordinate position of the
individual text and the culture that had led to its production in the first place was established
through specific textual practices. The Arabs, Edward Lane informed readers in notes to his
popular translation of the The Thousand and One Nights, were far more gullible than educated
European readers and did not make the same clear distinction between the rational and the
fictitious…Both these translators were spectacularly successful, but when we start to examine
the premises upon which their translation practice was based, what emerges is that they clearly
saw themselves as belonging to a superior cultural system. Translation was a means both of
containing the artistic achievements of writers in other languages and of asserting the supremacy
of the dominant, European culture” (Tymoczko, 6). Simply put, translation, specifically post-
colonial translation is not merely a process of transfiguring a text from one language to another,
but a persistent inculcation of a dominant and superior culture to an inferior nation which were
mostly once, victims of colonization by these superior nations.
Susan Basnett cited a flawless example of a prejudiced Eurocentric perspective in judging
the practices and spiritual beliefs of the natives whose land were conquered and grabbed by
European colonizers. This is about the infamous concept of Anthropophagy or commonly known
as cannibalism: a practice that is sacred rather than inhumane and derogatory to the members of
the Tupinamba tribe. This historical account which tells about a Catholic priests devoured by
members o f the tribe was horrifying for the people of Portugal and Spain and prompted them to
deem it as the ultimate taboo in European Christianity. Subsequently, the term cannibal was born
referring to a person engaging in heinous and horrendous act of eating another human being.
This term, originally referring to a group of Caribs in the Antilles was associated with the
Americas, and entered the English language definitively in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED)
of 1796, meaning ‘an eater of human flesh’ and naturally passed into other European languages.
The eating of the priest was not an illogical act on the part of the Tupinamba, and may even be
said to have been an act of homage, although this perspective was never entertained by the early
Europeans and definitely even by most people of today’s generation. In the end, what was
created was a name of the tribe and the name given to savage peoples who ate human flesh fused
into a single term. This association has a subconscious or subliminal meaning to those
generations of people who, until the present time, are still using the term to describe an act that
was once viewed upon as holy and spiritual.
Vicente Rafael sharply pinpointed the profoundly different meaning that translation held
for different groups in the colonization process—that is the colonizers and the colonized. A sharp
critic of colonization, Eric Cheyfitz, boldly said that translation was the “the central act of
European colonization and imperialism in America” (104). This is the basis of the so-called
European Original wherein Europe was regarded as the great Original, the starting point, and the
colonies were therefore copies, or ‘translations’ of Europe, which they were suppose to
duplicate. The colony, by this definition, is therefore less than its colonizers, its original (Basnett,
4).
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in her collection of essays titled Death of a Discipline
passionately discussed about the hovering problem of a Eurocentric perspective in hindering the
furtherance of comparative literature as a discipline. She obstinately stands on the belief that
there is a politicised dimension to comparative literature. In similar vein, Rey Chow deliberately
said that “of all the prominent features of Eurocentrism, the one that stands out in the context of
the university is the conception of culture as based on the modern Europe notion of the nation-
state. In this light, comparative literature has been criticized for having concentrated on the
literatures of a few strong nation-states in modern Europe” (109).
Resolving Eurocentrism
The basic argument of the proponents of the decline and inevitable demise of
comparative literature as what has been mentioned on the first part of this research is not the
notion that comparative literature is dead, per se. It is the argument that the old version, the old
concept of the New World, the Eurocentric perspective of the commonly existing comparative
literature should be replaced by, what Linda Hutcheon and formerly supported by Haun Saussy
the congenitally contrarian. Rey Chow, on his essay titled, In the Name of Comparative
Literature advised the comparatists or disciples of comparative literature that “the active
disabling of such reproduction of Eurocentrism…should be one of the comparative literature’s
foremost tasks in the future (109). Haun Saussy stated that “a comparative literature department
without confrontations is a collection of inert elements” and that comparatists are deemed
fortunate to “inhabit a multi-polar profession” in a unipolar, globalized world.
The common challenge to comparatists and practitioners of comparative literature is to
face head-on the need to go beyond its roots and to broaden the linguistic and cultural scope of
its work to include the rest of the world: the East as well as the West, the South as well as the
North (Hutcheon, 225). Rey Chow for this matter said that “the critique of Eurocentrism, if it is
to be thorough and fundamental, cannot take place at the level of replacing one set of texts with
another set of texts—not even if the former are European and the latter are Asian, African, or
Latin American. Rather, it must question the very assumption that nation-states with national
languages are the only possible cultural formations that produce “literature” that is worth
examining. Otherwise we will simply see, as we have already been seeing, the old Eurocentric
models of language and literature study being reproduced ad infinitum in non-European language
and literature pedagogy (109).
One of the most extreme critics of comparative literature is Spivak and who of course
wrote about the Death of Discipline citing that comparative literature needs to be radicalized and
it should steer away from its Eurocentric origins. “A new comparative literature will need to
‘undermine and undo’ the tendency of dominant cultures to appropriate emergent ones (Spivak,
100). Susan Basnett expounded this idea by saying that a just comparative literature should move
beyond the parameters of Western literatures and societies and reposition itself within a
planetary context (Basnett, 3). “The original enterprise of comparative literature, which sought to
read literature trans-nationally in terms of themes, movements, genres, periods, zeitgeist, history
of ideas is out-dated and needs to be rethought in the light of writing being produced in emergent
cultures” (Basnett, 3). It is in this line that Spivak proposed the idea of planetarity in opposition
to globalization which she argues involves the imposition of the same values and system of
exchange everywhere. Planetarity can be imagined from within the precapitalist cultures of
planet, outside the global exchange flows determined by international business.
Crucial to the destruction of a Eurocentric perspective is the formulation of the idea
called polyphony or plurivocality as opposed to an earlier model, promoted by the colonial
powers, of univocality. Spivak is envisioning a world where other voices can now be heard,
rather than one single dominant voice. Lucia Boldrini supported the proposals of other defenders
of the continuous existence of comparative literature in her published essay entitled Comparative
Literature in the Twenty-First Century: A View from Europe and the UK. She contradicted the
point of Basnett about the demise of comparative literature saying that the focus of Basnett’s
criticism was for a discipline born out of the European nineteenth-century, with its emphasis on
national literatures, its redefinition of the nature of literature itself, its focus on a direct
relationship between literature and (national) identity, and which now would give way to a new,
more open, lively, politically aware understanding of the discipline beyond its Eurocentric
historical definition, and its relocation in the wider field of the study of intercultural processes of
which translation studies would furnish the principal model (to the point that comparative
literature become for Basnett a sub-section of translation studies) (Boldrini, 13). Boldrini’s
stance regarding the survival of comparative literature is in similar vein with the rest of the
discipline’s supporters. She said that “a decolonising of the European mind needs to take place
not only in relation to its history of imperial domination over other continents, but also in
relation to the entirety of Europe and the historical relationships between its different
geographical and geopolitical areas” (15).
According to Boldrini, there are models which can help in the reconfiguration of the
study of comparative literature, models which will embrace with new openness the richness and
variety of its cultural, literary, and linguistic heritage. One such example is the literary-historical
comparative model described by Linda Hutcheon and Mario J. Valdes in their Rethinking
Literary History, where literary history is rethought ‘away from the concepts of nations and
nationalism’ through the concept of nodal points , where different cultures come into contact,
and from which different historical, artistic, cultural forces irradiate. Sometimes these nodes are
cities, whose nationalities have changed through wars and subsequent border changes, or
sometimes they are people, or sometimes they are geographical forces. Boldrini suggested that
because comparative literature is the study of different literary works across cultures and across
nations, it is only proper that comparatists should have a sufficient knowledge of several
languages for them to achieve a certain level of objectivity when they compare two or more sets
of works of art (written, filmic, visual, musical, et al).
The concept of multilingualism and multiculturalism is also supported by Rey Chow
saying that comparatists should enforce a multilingual discipline citing a suggestion by Mary
Louise in “Comparative Literature and Global Citizenship” that we should desist from thinking
of non-English languages as “foreign” languages. He although threw some kicks afterwards
when he said that multilingualism does not necessarily free one from bigotry. This is in line with
the belief that expertise in various languages does not immediately erase the fact that the existing
framework of literature is still entrenched in the murky realm of Eurocentrism. Chow said that “a
multilingualism that was ‘Eurocentric’ before could easily incorporate within it the dimensions
on non-European languages without coming to terms with the Eurocentrism of its notions of
language and knowledge. Because of this, the sheer enforcement of multilingualism cannot
ensure that we educate our students about the power structures, hierarchies, and discriminations
that work as much in the “others” as in “us” (Chow, 111). This quite cynical assessment of Chow
regarding multilingualism as not the answer to the Eurocentrism of World literature and
comparative literature is also agreed upon by Spivak.
In the case of Spivak, she proposed that it is the intervention into dominant discourses of
multiculturalism traversing the arts and sciences, confronting a stubborn humanism that
continues to organize cultural studies. Spivak’s works were concentrated on her argument that
“literary comparison performs a kind of looking (at cultural others) which instantiates and
reinforces the origin of the look, i.e., the comparing subject or culture. The interest of
comparison in cultural otherness not only generates knowledge and facilitates cross-cultural
interaction. It enacts “the West” as a boundary that does not exist prior to comparison”(130).
Spivak radicalizes this now pedestrian critique of comparative ethnocentrism and cultural
essentialism by observing that while cultural analysis readily acknowledges the way comparison
reifies the distinction it analyzes, there is a tendency for this reification to endure without
troubling the narcissism of the comparative gaze. This persistence makes apparent an underlying
humanism common to liberal multiculturalism, “muscular Marxism,” and social scientific
rationalism. Spivak’s purpose, in short, is to suggest the literary practices of reading and
translation as counter-measures, instruments for dissimulating and disfiguring the self rather than
assimilating the other (Waggoner, 130).
Susan Basnett, a figure frequently mentioned and quoted when it comes to criticism of
comparative literature wrote in her essay that “a fundamental question that comparative literature
now needs to address concerns the role and status of the canonical and foundation texts that
appear to be more highly valued outside Europe and North America than by a generation of
scholars uneasy about their own history of colonialism and imperialism (5). In a book edited by
Susan Basnett and Harish Trivedi entitled Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice, it
cited a concept on how to decolonize comparative literature and along with it, post-colonial
translation. It is about the metaphor dealing with the question on how the colonies could find a
way to assert themselves and their own culture without at the same time rejecting everything that
might be of value that came from Europe. To shed light on this, Oswald de Andrade’s Manifesto
Anthopofago, which appeared in 1928, was dated 374 years after the death of Father Sardinha,
the cannibalized priest, proposed the metaphor of cannibalism as a way forward for Brazilian
culture. “Only by devouring Europe could the colonized break away from what was imposed
upon them. And at the same time, the devouring could be perceived as both a violation of
European codes an act of homage” (5).
Many points were cited about the limitation and the dead-end fashion of comparative
literature and many has bemoaned its certain demise in the world of arts, letters, and especially
the academe. But in the end, there seems to be a perpetual head-on collision between
comparative literature and translation studies specifically post-colonial translation. It is the
question of whether comparative literature exists symbiotically with translation studies or if they
are two separate schools of thought that always traverse two parallel paths—existing side by side
but would never meet and merge. This academic jousting of which is superior and which one is
the underdog in literature had been constantly featured in the writings of Susan Basnett who kept
on lamenting about where comparative literature is going and if it is indeed walking in circles
and kept on coming back to its point of origin. Basnett’s argument provoked intellectual
arguments among literary figures and academicians alike and it initiated the outpouring of essays
and researches to either support her or counter her point. Basnett went further to juxtapose
translation studies and comparative literature appealing to people engaged in literature “to look
upon translation studies as the principle discipline from now on, with comparative literature as a
valued but subsidiary subject area” (Basnett, 6).
Comparative Literature versus Translation Studies
Susan Basnett’s Reflections on Comparative Literature in the Twenty-First Century is a
fearless revelation of her so-called struggle with comparative literature all her academic life. She
admitted that “engaging with the idea of comparative literature has not been easy nor, as we
move forward in this new century, is it at all clear where the discipline will move to next. In her
1993 book on comparative literature, she argued that the subject was in its death throes. She
clarified by saying that “the basis of my case was that debates about a so-called crisis in
comparative literature stemmed from a legacy of nineteenth-century positivism and a failure to
consider the political implications of intercultural transfer processes.”
Susan Basnett, although she agrees with Spivak’s proposition saying that it works for
anyone approaching the great literary traditions of the Northern Hemisphere from elsewhere, she
still has some criticisms regarding the feasibility of her propositions. She stated that the
paradigm offered by Spivak is particularly helpful for those who have as a starting point one or
other of those great traditions. But her reservations lie on the question that remains as to “what
the new directions in comparative literature there can be for the European scholar whose
intellectual formation has been shaped by classical Greek and Latin, by the Bible, by the
Germanic epic, by Dante and Petrarch, by Shakespeare and Cervantes, by Rousseau, Voltaire
and the enlightenment, by the Romanticism and post-romanticism, by the European novelists of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, by generations of writers who have borrowed, translated,
plagiarized, and plundered, but whose works run inexorably to some degree through the
consciousness of writing today (Basnett, 5).
Lucia Boldrini from the University of London wrote an essay entitled Considerations on
the Historical Relationships between Translation and Comparative Literature which highlighted
the differences and similarities between translation and comparative literature. She started by
saying that “the relationship between comparative literature and translation has always been
much debated, whether the primacy of the one or the other is declared, or their inextricable
relation is asserted, or maybe their incompatibility” (Boldrini, 1).
In the case of the argument posted by Susan Basnett, she initially stood on the academic
belief that comparative literature is on the gradual process of dying. However, this argument did
not linger because in one of latter essays, she stated that despite the decline of this discipline in
the West, comparative literature elsewhere in the world, albeit under other labels, was
flourishing. With her extensive research on post-colonial translation, it was inevitable that she
publish a work which contrasted comparative literature with translation studies where the latter
was put in the pedestal while the other was relegated to a lower position. She said, “Comparative
literature as a discipline has had its day. Cross-cultural work in women’s studies, in post-colonial
theory, in cultural studies has changed the face of literary studies generally. We should look
upon translation studies as the principle discipline from now on, with comparative literature as a
valued but subsidiary subject area” (161).
Later on however, Basnett herself criticized the above statement saying that it is ‘flawed’
owing to the fact that translation studies has not developed very far at all over three decades and
comparison remains at the heart of most translation studies scholarship. She went as far as saying
that her above statement was deliberately provocative and was as much about trying to raise the
profile of translation studies as it was about declaring comparative literature to be defunct.
Basnett’s self-criticism however did not lead to her return to the studies of comparative
literature. Rather, a different epiphany occurred to her wherein neither comparative literature nor
translation studies claimed academic victory. She subsequently concluded that comparative
literature and translation studies should not be deemed as a discipline or a field of study but
simply as a wagon that could transport readers to a path of literary enlightenment. “What I would
say...is that neither comparative literature nor translation studies should be seen as a discipline:
rather both are methods of approaching literature, ways of reading that are mutually beneficial”
(6). Her main reason as to why she did not perceive comparative literature as a discipline sprang
from her diagnosis of a crisis derived from excessive prescriptivism combined with distinctive
culturally specific methodologies that could not be universally applicable or relevant. She said
that “the act of comparing thus takes place both in terms of the ways in which individual scholars
approach the same topic and then, most significantly, in the reading process. Individual essays
may make comparative points, but the actual comparison comes through the juxtaposition of the
diverse contributions and through the response of readers to that juxtaposition (Basnett, 7).
Basnett further criticized the varying approaches in comparative literature such as the so-called
French school of comparative literature in the twentieth-century and the approaches of
comparatists in the United States saying that both of these schools of thought struggled with the
idea of comparison itself, getting caught up in definitions of boundaries.
Her concern with the nature of prescriptivism of the currently existing practice of
comparative literature led her to focus more on the reading process itself and with it, the
experience of readers when they languish on a text at hand. She stated, “Where the subject starts
to make sense and where it offers a genuinely innovative way of approaching literature is when
the role of the reader is foregrounded, when the act of comparing happens during the reading
process itself, rather than being set up a priori by the delimitation of the selection of specific
texts (Basnett, 7). She highly recommended that a historical perspective should be given
emphatic importance when analyzing texts for this can radically change the reading and alter the
whole notion of comparison. She exemplified her argument by using the collected poems of Ezra
Pound entitled Cathay. She said, “The significance of Ezra Pound’s translations, if they can be
called such, of Chinese poetry that resulted in his Cathay lies in how the poems were read when
they appeared and in the precise historical moment when they were published” (8). Hugh Kenner
pointed out the same thing about Cathay saying that “the poems may have started out as
translations of ancient Chinese verse, which is what Pound intended them to be, but in the way
they were received; they were transformed into war poems that spoke to the generation coping
with the horrors of the trenches in Flanders” (Kenner, 202). Basnett supported Kenner by saying
that the object of the comparative literature scholar is therefore to see these poems in a context
and to compare them with other kinds of war poetry being produced at the same time. With the
citation she made on Cathay, she went on to use it to fortify her claim about translation as a field
of study to attend to. She said that “Cathay is interesting because it highlights the way in which
translation can serve as a force for literary renewal and innovation. This is one of the ways in
which translation studies research has served comparative literature as well; whereas once
translation was regarded as a marginal area within comparative literature, now it is
acknowledged that translation has played a vital role in literary history and that great periods of
literary innovation tend to be preceded by periods of intense translation activity. Basnett wanted
to elevate translation to higher plane because it can serve as an eye opener to people living in a
highly globalized world to achieve a point of understanding of cultures that were once deemed as
exotic and even obscure.
The final point of Basnett against comparative literature is that she is suffering from what
she calls a plague of uncertainty. In the first place, she is not certain on how to classify
comparative literature or what terminology to use when speaking about this topic. Is it a subject,
a discipline, or a field of study? She advised comparatists and comparative literature scholars
“that rather than seeing comparative literature as a discipline, it should be seen simply as a
method of approaching literature, one that foregrounds the role of the reader but which is always
mindful of the historical context in which the act of writing and the act of reading take place...
The history of comparative literature lies in jettisoning attempts to define the object of study in
any prescriptive way and in focusing instead on the idea of literature, understood in the broadest
possible sense, and in realizing the inevitable interconnectedness that comes from literary
transfer... That history involves translation as a crucial means of enabling information flow,
hence the need to position the history of translation centrally within any comparative literary
study (Basnett, 9-10).
Conclusion
The provocative statement of Susan Basnett regarding the inevitable demise of
comparative literature is indeed flawed, misled, and a bit careless especially coming from a
scholar and academician who spent a considerably large amount of time practicing, scrutinizing,
and dissecting a discipline that she once believed on and defended herself. Although there are
widely respected critics and scholars alike who also expressed their discontent and lost of faith in
the discipline, there are still more literary masters who are marching behind comparative
literature and with all their might, pushing it upward, forward. Spivak who blatantly used the
word death in describing the future of comparative literature did not also conclusively stated that
the discipline is indeed dead. She merely said that if comparative literature wanted to survive and
progress, it should shift its perspective and inject a less prejudiced tone in comparing texts and
other forms of artworks. The common denominator among those who are against and for the
continued existence of comparative literature is their criticism towards Eurocentrism.
Spivak, Chow, Boldrini, Hutcheon, Bermann, and even Basnett herself all directed their
efforts in creating concepts, notions, theories, and academic suggestions to create a comparative
literature that has a stable sense of universality which encompasses all native languages as equal
and belonging to an even plane. In the writings of Bermann, she admitted that majority of works
collected about comparative literature mostly have not shown equanimity to literature across the
globe. “It is true of course that comparative literature has not always shown quite such a
welcoming face to other literatures—particularly non-European ones—or to other fields...
Comparative literature generally takes as its topics genre, language, and period, and the
explorations of those topics are limited to European literatures, with occasional readings in the
literatures of China and Japan” (Bermann, 435).
A more hard-hit criticism of comparative literature came from the great Italian critic
Benedetto Croce who was highly sceptical about the discipline, believing it to be an obfuscatory
term disguising the obvious: that the proper object of study was literary history. “The
comparative history of literature is history understood in its true sense as a complete explanation
of the literary work, encompassed 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 etré (Croce, 222).
But the continuous flow of literary works in comparative literature created a stronger
sense of grip as to the supposed importance and significance of comparative literature as a
discipline and as a field of study. A radicalization as well as democratization of comparative
literature is what comparatists should work on to ensure that the discipline will not stay as an
obsolete perspective in looking at world literature in the twenty-first century. And as what was
added by Susan Basnett, “Hopefully, literary scholars will follow where they lead, and will
abandon pointless debates about terminology, and definition, to focus more productively on the
study of texts themselves, mapping the history of writing and reading across cultural and
temporal boundaries” (10).
Works Cited
Basnett, Susan. “Reflections on Comparative Literature in the Twenty-First Century.” Edinburgh
University Press, 2006.
Basnett, Susan & Trivedi Harish, Eds. “Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice.” London
and New York, 1999.
Bermann, Sandra. “Working in the And Zone: Comparative Literature and Translation.”
University of Oregon, 2009.
Boldrini, Lucia. “Considerations on the Historical Relationships Between Translation and
Comparative Literature.” University of London.
Boldrini, Lucia. “Comparative Literature in the Twenty-First Century: A View from Europe and
the UK.” Edinburgh University Press, 2006.
Chow, Rey. In the Name of Comparative Literature. John Hopkins, 1995.
Eckermann, Johann Peter. “Conversations with Goethe.” Strich, 1835. 27.
Hutcheon, Linda. “Comparative Literature: Congenitally Contrarian.”
Kenner, Hugh. “The Pound Era.” London: Faber, 1972.
Lolice, Frederico. A Short History of Comparative Literature: From the Earliest to the Present
Day. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1907.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Death of a Discipline.” New York: Columbia University Press,
2003.
Waggoner, Matt. “A Review of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline.” New York:
Columbia, 2003.