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Comparative literature in the age of multiculturalism      by Charles Bernheimer

Introduction: the anxieties of comparison

I.            CL students have no firm ground underfoot. The multifacetedness is viewed as a sign of dilettantism. (p.1)

l            René Wellek “The Crisis of Comparative Literature” (1958): it has not been able to establish a subject matter and a specific methodology. (p.2)

II.         The unclear of CL definitions:

A.           Comparison: Comparison is activity, function, practice, or all of these? The unstable shifting, insecure and self-critical

B.           Literature: what is literature?

III.       Changes in the discipline’s focus since WWⅡ can be viewed as a series of attempts to cure the anxiety of Comparison. (p.3)

A.           The goal of 50s~60s CL (wartime): 1. Francois Jost: unify, totalization, supranationalism, cross-disciplinarity. 2. Owen Aldridge: literary category across national boundaries. Division promotes unity. Method is less important than matter. 3. Harry Levin: orientation of CL. (p.4)

B.           Post-Vietnam and Nixon: deconstruction. Gave priority to theory over literature, to method over matter. (p.5)

C.           Reagan-Bush years: Hillis Miller: away from the intrinsic rhetorical study toward study of the extrinsic relations of literature.

D.           Now: multiplicity of diverse theoretical perspectives: contextualization.(p.8)

IV.      Multiculturalism: 2 levels(p.8)

A.           The canon should be representative throughout the world

B.           The works should be representative of the culture where they were created.

l            Both levels assume a reflectionist view of literature’s relation to the cultural site of its production.

l            Identity politics are aniogenic for comparatist.→imposing a universalist model or suggest the impossibility of any meaningful relation between cultures.(p.9)

l            Globalization: Mary Louise Pratt: an especially hospitable space for deep intercultural understanding and global consciousness.

V.         CL: unity or diversity?

A.           Jonathan Culler: CL study and teach literature as such,      without worrying about the historical contingencyof this category.(similar to Peter Brook) (p.10)

l            They see the 1993 ACLA report as an abandonment of the true forms of literary study. (p.11)

B.           The messiness of globalization might result from the democratization of the idea of literature as an intersubjective practice. The critic’s voice echoes with those of his or her cultural inheritance

C.           Author’s view: multiculturalist comparatism begins at home with a comparison of oneself to oneself. This process precludes the cultural essentialism of identity politics, while it sensitizes the comparatist to the extremely difficult issues involved in evaluating cultural differences.

VI.      Multicultural: a global broadening of perspective (p.12)

A.           Dislocation, unhomely: the challenge facing us now is to increase the scope of our haunting, to broaden the space of those sites we are between.

B.           Suggest a fundamentally relational and dynamic approach to cultural forms, including literary texts.

VII.    CL subject: team-teaching offers good way to promote a responsibility to global perspectives in pedagogical practice. (p.13)

VIII. An area studies model may be more proper if that have sustained such models in the past are reviewed and revised. (p.14)

IX.      Literary study should be ethically motivated both in its pedagogical practice and in its institutional formation. (p.15)

X.         The space of comparison: literature shift the boundaries if what is construed as peculiarly literary in our culture→context.

XI.      In the age of multiculturalism, the comparatist’s anxiety has finally found a field adequate to the questions that generated it → the space of one’s own death, literature’s construction and function in different cultures. (p.16)