LITTÉRATURE COMPARÉE / Comparative literature

ETYMOLOGIE / etymology

ETUDE SEMANTIQUE / Definitions

COMMENTAIRE / Analysis

1. The emergence of comparative literature (RW)

2. Problems of definition (RW)

3. An international history of the discipline of comparative literature (STZ)

4. Comparative literature in the 21st century (STZ)

1. The emergence of comparative literature (RW)

Charles Pougens in 1826 (149) complained that there is no work on the principles of literature he can recommend; «un cours de littérature, comme je l'entends, c'est-à-dire, un cours de littérature comparée». The term, however, seems to have become current mainly through the use in Abel-François Villemain's enormously successful lectures published in 1828-9 as Tableau de la littérature française au XVIIIe siècle: he praises, e.g. the chancelier Daguesseau for his «vastes études de philosophie, d'histoire, de littérature comparée». In the second lecture series Tableau de la littérature au moyen âge en France, en Italie, en Espagne et en Angleterre (1830) he speaks of «amateurs de la littérature comparée» (new edition, Paris, 1875, I: 187). The term comparative competed for a time with comparée.

J.-J. Ampère in his Discours sur l'histoire de la poésie (1830) speaks of «l'histoire comparative des arts et de la littérature». But in Renan's L'avenir de la Science (1848, not published till 1890, p. 296-97) the term littérature comparée is used as a matter of course. Later, the prominent use of the two words in Sainte-Beuve's obituary article on Ampère (1868, in Revue des Deux Mondes, reprinted in Nouveaux lundis) must have done much to spread it. It could be formed early in 19th century as the word littérature preserved in French one of its original meanings: «the study of literature». Voltaire in his unfinished article «Littérature» for his Dictionnaire philosophique (1764-72, published in 1819) defined literature as «une connaissance des ouvrages de goût, une teinture d'histoire, de poésie, d'éloquence, de critique», ( Œuvres, éd. Moland, XIX: 590), and Marmontel's Eléments de littérature (1787) defines littérature as «connaissance des belles lettres» (reprint quoted, Paris, 1865, 2: 335).

This usage existed also in English when, e.g. in 1755 Dr. Johnson called Baretti an «Italian of considerable literature» (Powell, 1934, I: 302), and it survived sporadically into the 19th century, e.g. in J. Petherham's Historical Sketch of the Progress and Present State of Anglo-Saxon Literature in England (1840) where «literature» must mean «the study of literature». But in English the new meaning «a body of writings» seems to have established very early (far earlier than the first example, dating from 1812, given in the N E D). E.g. in 1761 George Colman the elder says: «Shakespeare and Milton stand alone amid the general wreck of old English literature». In any case in the later 19th century and even today the word literature in English has lost its meaning of «study of literature» so thoroughly that the term comparative literature was resisted as unidiomatic. Lane Cooper, e.g. insisted on calling his department «The Comparative Study of Literature» and ridiculed Comparative Literature as illogical as Comparative Potatoes. While «comparative criticism» can be found as early as 1790 ( Specimens of the Early English Poets. London, 1801, I: 58), comparative grammar (Bopp, 1834) and comparative philology penetrated from Germany in the 1830s (Donaldson, 1839: 34) and the historian E. A. Freeman advocated comparative politics in 1873, comparative literature found acceptance only after the academic victory of «littérature comparée» in France, late in the 19th century. Posnett's book (1886) was the first to carry the term on the title page and it received some favorable attention, also the United States. It was e.g. praised by William Dean Howells ( Harper's Magazine, 73 [1886]: 318). In Charles M. Gayley and Fred Newton Scott's An Introduction to the Methods and Materials of Literary Criticism (1899: 248) a section devoted to comparative literature opens with a definition agreeing with Posnett's use. Comparative literature is «the general theory of literary evolution, the idea that literature passes through stages of inception, culmination and decline». But when Columbia University established a Department of Comparative Literature in 1899, and Harvard University in 1904 the Spencerian evolutionary scheme was forgotten. Also The Journal of Comparative Literature, edited by E. Woodbury and Joel E. Spingarn in 1903-4 adopted the view that comparative literature is «a study of interrelationships and interdependencies either of individual authors or of national literatures.» The resistance to the word and the subject was longest in England: there the first Chair of Comparative Literature (at the University of Sussex) filled by an Englishman who had acquired his Ph. D. at Yale University was not created till 1966.

In German the development is analogous to the English one: it is difficult to speak of vergleichende Literatur when in German the term Literatur was early confined to «a body of writing». It is so used for the whole of literary production, in Lessing's Briefe die neueste Litteratur betreffend (Berlin , 1759-65, 24 vol.) and the term Nationaliteratur appears regularly in the titles of histories of German literature since Leonhard Meister's Beyträge zur Geschichte der teutschen Sprache und Nationalliteratur in 1777. E.g. Wachler (1818), Koberstein (1827), Vilmar (1845), Gottschall (1881). The rival term Allgemeine Geschichte der Litteratur announced a series of histories edited by J. G. Eichhorn since 1788 and «Goethe's term Weltliteratur became common since he used it first in 1827 in a review of a French translation of his drama, Tasso (Werke, Jubiläumausgabe, 38: 97, 137, 170, 278). Vergleichende Anatomie was one of Goethe's preoccupations since 1795 ( Werke, 39: 137 ff). Vergleinchede Grammatik was used by A. W. Schlegel in a review in 1803 ( Sämtliche Werke, 12: 152) and Friedrich Schlegel's pioneering book, Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Inder (1808), used vergleichende Grammatik prominently as a program on a new science expressly recalling the model of vergleichende Anatomie. ( Sämtliche Werke, 8: 291, 318). The adjective became common in Germany in combination with poetics, Völker-psychologie, mythology, and later psychology and historiography. (Moriz Haupt proposed vergleichende Poetik in 1835. cf. W. Scherer, Kleine Schriften, ed. K. Burdach and E. Schmidt, Berlin, 1893, Vol. 1, 120, 123, 130. See A. Bastian, «Zur vergleichenden Psychologie» in Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie 5 (1868), 153-180. Wilhelm Scherer proposed «vergleichende Geschichtswissenschaft» in Preface to Zur Geschichte der deutchen Sprache, (1868), etc.) But for the same reason as in English it has difficulty to make its way with the word Literatur. Moriz Carriere, in Das Wesen und die Formen der Poesie (1854) uses the term «vergleichende Literaturgeschichte» prominently, possibly for the first time. But the term «vergleichende Literatur» occurs as a title of a forgotten periodical Zeitschrift für vergleichende Literatur, edited by Hugo von Meltzl, in the remote Klausenburg (now Cluj in Rumania) which ran from 1877-1888. In 1886 Max Koch, at the University of Breslau (now Wroclaw in Poland) founded a Zeitschrift für vergleichende Literaturgeschichte which survived till 1910. Von Meltzl emphasized that his concept of comparative literature was not confined to history and changed, in the last numbers of his periodical, the title to Zeitschrift für vergleinde Literaturwissenschaft. Literaturwissenschaft was then a rare term which can be found as early as 1842 but was not widely adopted till the 20th century for what in English is called «literary theory» or «criticism» (See Wellek, 1961: 32-3). The newest (1966) German periodical Arcadia is called Zeitschrift für vergleichede Literaturwissenschaft.

In Italian letteratura comparata is easily formed on the French model: a chair of this description was founded at the University of Naples in 1861 for the German poet Georg Herwegh but it was occupied only since 1872 by Francesco De Sanctis. The Spanish term literatura comparada seems to be even more recent.

In Russian the term sravnitelnoe literaturo-vedenie is closely modeled on vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft. It is used by Alexander Veselovsky in a review of Koch's newly founded periodical in 1887. Recently terms such as komparativizm and komparativistika are also in use. In the other Slavic languages resistance to the combination comparative literature seems to have disappeared: the University of Prague as a chair called srovnávací literatura since 1910, Polish uses porównawczy literatura, Serbo-Croat uporedna književnost.

2. Problems of definition (RW)

The use of the term «comparative literature» has given rise to disputes as to its exact scope and methods which are not yet settled. It is useless to be dogmatic about such matters as words have the meanings authors assign to them and neither a knowledge of history nor common usage can prevent changes and even distortions of traditional meanings. The shifts of meaning clearly reflect the whole history of literary scholarship and, more recently, the diverse traditions of educational systems.

One may distinguish first a narrow definition: e.g. Paul Van Tieghem's (1931: 57) «l'objet de la littérature comparée est essentiellement d'étudier les oeuvres des diverses littératures dans leurs rapports les unes avec les autres», or Guyard's succinct «l'histoire des relations littéraires internationales». This is also the definition of Anna Saëtta Ravignas: «una scienza moderna rivolta appunto ad indagare i problemi connessi cogli influssi esercitati reciprocamente dalle varie letterature» (Momigliani, 1948: 430). Theorists such as J. M. Carré seem to delimit «comparative literature» even further by emphasizing that it is «une branche de l'histoire littéraire: elle est l'étude des relations spirituelles internationales, des rapports de fait qui ont existé entre Byron et Pouchkine, Goethe et Carlyle, Walter Scott et Vigny, entre les oeuvres, les inspirations, voire les vies d'écrivains appartenant à plusieurs littératures» (Préface of Guyard, 1951: 3) where the clause excludes comparisons not based on historical relationships. Fernand Baldensperger, in the programmatic article introducing the first number of the Revue de littérature comparée, (1921) 7, does not attempt a definition but formulates the same limitation: he has no use for comparisons which do not involve «une rencontre réelle», which have not created «une dépendance».

In a wider sense «comparative literature includes what Van Tieghem (1931: 170, 174) and others call general literature. He confines comparative literature to «rapports binaires entre deux éléments seulement», while general literature concerns «les faits communs à plusieurs littératures». This distinction has not been widely accepted as general literature has traditionally meant «literary theory», or the study of the principles of literature (Montgomery, 1833). Besides it is impossible to draw a strict line between comparative and general literature in Van Tieghem's sense. There is no distinction between a study of the influence of Walter Scott in France and the rise of the historical novel.

The narrow definition of comparative literature has been subjected to many trenchant criticisms. A mere assemblage of «binary relations» cannot add up to a meaningful discipline as it would have to deal only with the foreign trade between literatures. Comparative literature would not allow the handling of a single work of art. It would be a strictly auxiliary discipline of literary history with a fragmented subject matter and with no method of its own, as the study of the influence, say, of Byron in England cannot, methodologically, differ from a study of Byron in France or from a study of European Byronism. The method of comparison is clearly not peculiar to comparative literature. It is ubiquitus in all literary study and in all sciences: social and natural. Nor does, even in the practice of the most orthodox comparative scholars, literary study proceed by the method of comparison alone. Any literary scholar will not only compare but reproduce, analyze, interpret, evoke, evaluate, generalize, characterize, etc, all on one page.

There are some attempts to widen the scope of comparative literature by adding some specific new item to the narrow definition. Thus J.-M. Carré (1947) and F.-M. Guyard (1954) add the study of national illusions ( mirages), the images nations form of each other as a legitimate subject for «comparative literature». In practice, such studies seem to be national psychology or sociology drawn from literary sources or simply a version of thematology: we learn what English clergymen, diplomats, soldiers, chorus girls, etc. appeared in French novels at a certain period.

Even more inclusive is the definition of «comparative literature» given by H. H. Remak (1961: 3). He calls it «the study of literature beyond the confines of one particular country, and the study of the relationships between literature on the one hand and the other areas of knowledge and belief, such as the arts, philosophy, history, the social sciences, the sciences, religion, etc, on the other hand» (See my review in Comparative Literature 14). Mr. Remak by his scheme is forced to make artificial and untenable distinctions. E.g., a study of Hawthorne's relation to Calvinism can be called «comparative» while a study of Hawthorne's concepts of guilt, sin and expiation must be reserved for «American» literature. The whole definition seems a device serving purely practical purposes in an American university where a thesis topic may have to be justified as «comparative literature» toward unsympathetic colleagues resenting intrusions into their particular bailiwicks of competence. As a definition it cannot survive closer scrutiny.

Finally the view has been propounded that comparative literature may be best defended and defined by its perspective and spirit rather than by any circumscribed partition within literature (See Wellek, 1949: 38-45; 1953, 1958). It will study all literature from an international perspective, with a consciousness of the unity of all literary creation and experience. In this conception (which is also mine) comparative literature is identical with the study of literature independent of linguistic, ethnic and political boundaries. It cannot be confined to a single method: description, characterization, narration, explanation, evaluation are used in its discourse as much as comparison. Nor can comparison be confined to actual historical contacts. There may be - as recent linguistics or anthropology might teach literary scholars - as much value in comparing themes, genres, or forms historically unrelated than the study influences discoverable from evidence of personal contacts, reading or parallels. A comparative study of Chinese, Korean, Burmese and even Tagalog or Indonesian narrative methods or lyrical forms is as justified as the study of casual Western contacts with the Far East illustrated by Voltaire's Orphelin de Chine. Nor can comparative literature be confined to literary history to the exclusion of criticism and contemporary literature. Criticism cannot be divorced from history as there are no neutral facts in literature beyond the barest annals. The mere act of selecting from millions of printed books is a critical act and the selection of the traits, aspects and qualities of a book which may be treated in innumerable ways is equally an act of criticism, discrimination and judgement. The attempts to erect precise barriers between the study of literary history and contemporary literature are also doomed to failure. Why should a specific date such as 1900 or even the death of an author make for the sudden lifting of a taboo? Such limits may be possible to enforce in a specific educational system but are impractical in the life of the mind. Nor can the historical approach be considered the only possible method even for the study of the dim past. Works of literature are monuments and not documents. They are immediately accessible to us today: they challenge us to understanding to which a knowledge of the historical setting and the place in the literary tradition may contribute importantly but not exclusively or exhaustively. The three main branches of literary study involve each other: history, theory and criticism, just as the study of the individual national literatures cannot be divorced from the study of the totality of literature, at least in idea. «Comparative literature» has crystallized the movement against the romantic emphasis on a single national literature; it obviously cannot and should not dispense of this basis in the study of single works and single literatures and will not and cannot ignore national differences. But it will transcend them and aim at a distant ideal goal: a universal literary history and a universal literary theory. Comparative literature can and will flourish only if it shakes off artificial limitations imposed by academic organization or the prejudices of nineteenth century methodologies and will boldly strike out to become the study of literature as a whole.

René Wellek

Yale University

3. An international history of the discipline of comparative literature (STZ)

With regard to the history of the discipline of comparative literature, it is surprising that a truly international and synthetic history of the discipline – a description of its history within the larger field of literary studies as well as the history of theories and methodologies within comparative literature and with a description of the discipline's institutional history and making – is yet to be written. Curiously, apart from usually short descriptive studies such as chapter two in the early volume by Ulrich Weisstein, Einführung in die Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft (1968) or chapter one in Claudio Guillén's The Challenge of Comparative Literature (1993), or, in German, the chapter "Zu Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Komparatistik," in Peter V. Zima and Johann Strutz's Komparatistik: Einführung in die Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft (1992) or brief descriptions of comparative literature within national borders such as those in the recent collected volume of Tania Franco Carvalhal, ed., Comparative Literature World Wide: Issues and Methods (1997) or as in the Italian volume by Armando Gnisci and Francesca Sinopoli, eds., Comparare i comparatismi. La comparatistica letteraria oggo in Europa e nel mondo (1995), the history of the discipline is available only in this fragmented form. There are also some volumes such as Arno Kappler's Der literarische Vergleich. Beiträge zu einer Vorgeschichte der Komparatistik (1976) or specific histories such as Peter Theodor Leithmann's Moriz Carriere and the Development of Comparative Literature (1977). However, these studies, similar to the article-length type I mentioned above, offer a partial and limited view of the history of the discipline at best (for a selected international bibliography of histories and theories of comparative literature, see Tötösy, 1999- <http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/library/clitbib1-99.html>; for a shortlist of recently published volumes in comparative literature, see Tötösy, 1999- <http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/library/booklist.html>; for a long list of works in comparative literature, see Tötösy, 1999-

<http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/library/clitbib2-99.html>; for a selected bibliography of comparative literature and cultural studies, see Tötösy, Aoun, and Nielsen).

There are "supplementary" types of material which would also be important for a synthetic international history of comparative literature. For example, personal histories such as in Lionel Gossmann and Mihail I. Spariosu, eds., Building a Profession: Autobiographical Perspectives on the Beginnings of Comparative Literature in the United States (1994); or descriptions of various conferences in comparative literature such as Marko Juvan's "Thematics and Intellectual Content: The XVth Triennial Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association in Leiden" (see Juvan at <http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb99-1/juvan99.html>) or my own "Comparative Literature and Applied Cultural Studies, Or, a Report About the XIVth Triennial Congress of the ICLA/AILC (University of Alberta, August 1994)" (Tötösy 1994). As well, here is a marked need of institutional histories of comparative literature in both national and international contexts (for a selection of sources, see Kirby 197-203; see also Tötösy, Aoun, and Nielsen).

The usual process of presenting histories of comparative literature in all of the above mentioned volumes and in all others is in the context of and limited to national borders, that is, comparative literature in Germany, in France, in the United States, in China, etc. While this is the approach I would like to circumvent in an international history of comparative literature I am working on now, I realize that it is indeed easier to proceed in the national model. And when I myself, in this article, present examples of a renaissance of comparative literature in various "peripheral" countries (see below), I present these examples by listing countries (because it is easier to do so). However, I would like to point out with utmost conviction that this is not the best approach. A more "comparatist" model would be to discuss the histories of comparative literature with regard to their cultural and regional settings, their sources of theory and method, and so on. One useful approach would be, I propose, to present a description of the history of the discipline based on a regional approach where "region" is understood as a specific cultural environment, a system of communication including a specific environment of scholarship historically and linguistically determined (and I hope to be able to present such an international and synthetic history of the discipline in my forthcoming work).

Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek

Halle-Wittenberg Univesität

4. Comparative literature in the 21st century (STZ)

In my observation, compressed here in a brief overview, the following developments can be observed in comparative literature from a global perspective of the last ten to fifteen years: 1) The recognition of the importance of theory, and, occasionally, of method, by cultural studies and English and the consequent reduction of the area in activity by comparative literature, tied to the diminishing institutional stability of the discipline of comparative literature in the traditional centers of the discipline (USA and Europe); 2) The development of a comparative European literature; 3) The emerging of comparative literature in "peripheral" geo-cultural loci of scholarship; 4) The "Americanization" of comparative literature; and 5) The potential development of comparative literature with/within new media. In the following, I proceed in my discussion with a focus on selected points from the above five points, with the plan to develop, eventually, my discussion and proposals in forthcoming publications. With regard to my second observation, namely the development of a comparative European literature, I take my point of departure with George Steiner. When Steiner gave his inaugural lecture as Lord Widenfeld Professor of European Comparative Literature at Oxford University in 1994, he presented a paper entitled "What is Comparative Literature?" First, Steiner described how "every act of reception of significant form, in language, in art, in music, is comparative" (1) and he argued that "from their inception, literary studies and the arts of interpretation have been comparative" (3). True, especially today, after literary theory has become mainstream and in the era of cultural studies, this position is hard to refute. Steiner proceeds to say that "I take comparative literature to be, at best, an exact and exacting art of reading, a style of listening to oral and written acts of language which privileges certain components in these acts. Such components are not neglected in any mode of literary study, but they are, in comparative literature, privileged" (9). If I understand Steiner correctly, he is referring here to that traditional form of comparative literature where the knowledge of foreign languages for the scholar of comparative literature is an essential factor. Fair enough and I agree with him. He then outlines three specific areas which are essential features of the discipline in his opinion: 1) "It aims to elucidate the quiddity, the autonomous core of historical and present 'sense of the world' (Husserl's Weltsinn) in the language and to clarify, so far as is possible, the conditions, the strategies, the limits of reciprocal understanding and misunderstanding as between languages. In brief, comparative literature is an art of understanding centered in the eventuality and defeats of translation" (10), 2) the "primacy of the matter of translation in comparative literature relates directly to what I take to be the second focus" (11), and 3) "Thematic studies form a third `center of gravity' in comparative literature" (13). Steiner's argument, clearly, hinges on the knowledge of foreign languages and on the matter of subject matter, that is, themes, which are universal, at least in principle.

While I agree with Steiner that this knowledge is an essential and basic aspect of the discipline, I find his argument seriously lacking. For, as we know, the knowledge of foreign languages is not necessarily a privilege of comparatists, i.e., there are many scholars in literary studies in English departments or in other national language departments who do speak and work with other languages. In my opinion, the distinctive feature of comparative literature is cumulative, that is, including interlinked factors such as the knowledge of foreign languages with an inclusionary ideology (the attention to alterité) tied to precise methodology (for an elaboration, see Tötösy, Comparative Literature 13-23). Curiously, Steiner does not mention methodology either explicitly or implicitly in his argumentation and thus this part of his position is hardly defendable in the present situation of the discipline.

In the USA, the much discussed volume of collected articles in Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism (Ed. Bernheimer, 1995; see, e.g., Mourão) is in several ways similar to Steiner's arguments. With particular attention to what I find of importance, namely theory and methodology, the vast majority of contributors to the volume do not mention methodology either implicitly or explicitly. Of course, the main and most important feature of the volume is its aspects of and call for politically based ideology of inclusion. And the question of methodology does not appear in most comparative literature textbooks or works of today either. Perhaps this is for the reason that comparative literature, either as the translation of literatures and cultures (as in a conceptual and ideological translation and/or as actual translation) or as a cross-cultural inclusive ideology and practice is assumed to be a methodology per se. While I accept this as a historical argument and as an essential characteristic in the same historical context, I propose that this is not enough to justify the discipline today. And the fact that the comparative approach without explicit methodology is not enough to convince scholars today is evident, for instance, in an article entitled "Why Comparisons Are Odious" by the editor of Critical Inquiry, W.J.T. Mitchell, in 1996, in his response to the 1995 topical issue of World Literature Today, Comparative Literature: States of the Art. I would even argue that Steiner's proposal of a comparative European literature -- as coming from an internationally reputed scholar whose work otherwise without doubt has been influential -- manifests in some ways a certain regression. In contrast, Hugo Dyserinck situated comparative literature a decade earlier, in 1985, in two major areas, "1) A comparative history of literature, involving the mutual relations, as well as the similarities and differences, between individual literatures" and "2) A comparative theory and methodology of literature, dealing with literary theories developed in individual countries (or linguistic areas) and with corresponding methods of literary criticism" (xvii). In principle, the second point is closer to my own contention that in comparative literature one ought to state at all times a clearly and precisely described method which then is applied. And there are of course some good examples of such as in Dyserinck's theoretical and applied work, imagology, which has evolved since its early days in the 1960s and 1970s into a full-blown field of imagology with many studies where the framework has been applied successfully (see Joep Leersen's imagology material and bibliography at <http://www.hum.uva.nl/images>). There are some areas, however, where Steiner's argumentation corresponds to both Dyserinck's first area of comparative literature (literary history) and to Susan Bassnett's or André Lefevere's proposal that the discipline may be saved by such areas of study, among others, as the study of translation: see Bassnett's Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction (1993) and Lefevere's Translating Literature: Practice and Theory in a Comparative Literature Context (1992). In Steiner's proposal this is located in the "dissemination and reception of literary works across time and place" (11), further specified in the study of "who reads, who could read what and when? (12). This area of scholarship, indeed, I find promising, especially when defined as the area of "sociology and history of reading and readership" I propose in my own work (see, for example, Tötösy, Comparative Literature 43-78; see also the excellent volume of Bart Keunen and Bart Eeckhout, eds., Literature and Society: The Function of Literary Sociology in Comparative Literature).

The notion of a comparative European literature is also prominent in French comparative literature. Among the publications of recent years, in particular the collected volume of Béatrice Didier, ed., Précis de littérature européenne (1998) and Didier Souiller and Wladimir Troubetzkoy, eds., Littérature comparée (1997) propagate the said notion championed by Steiner. The Précis de littérature européenne is divided into sections of methods, space, periods, and genres. In the first section, methods, the volume contains several articles discussing in various ways and from several points of view the notion of a the theory of comparative European literature and the topics range from the problematics of the study of European literature, the history of a European literature, the comparative history of myth in European literature, the question of European literature and social classes, European cultures and interdisciplinarity, the publishing history, libraries, and the reading of literature in Europe, and the history of the teaching of literatures in Europe. As the editor of the volume, Didier, announces and argues for, the volume is about comparative European literature. However, the definition of a European literature encompasses mainstream literatures and cultures (which I would call canonization one) and within the mainstream canonized texts and authors (which I would call canonization two). There are a few articles which deal with marginal, minor, or peripheral literatures and cultures in Europe, such as Yiddish and Arabic and there are two articles which argue "pour une littérature qui ne se limite pas à celle des 'langues courantes'" (185-89) and for the "place des littératures régionales en Europe" (191-98). Overall however, the general tone of the articles emanates from a national approach to literatures and cultures and the notion that in a unified Europe each literature and culture becomes "regional" is untouched and implicitly rejected. The approach and tone in the Souiller and Troubetzkoy volume is similar. In other words, there is an implicit and at times explicit hierarchy in the approach, which then stretches also to the methodologies discussed and presented. Here, comparative literature is based on the premise of national literatures which then can be and should be compared to each other and that the comparisons rest on the canon of mainstream literatures and cultures as well as on the canon of specific authors writing in the mainstream languages and cultures. Granted, it is difficult to argue for a divorce of literature from national bases and it takes some work to do this: Souiller and Troubetzkoy and the contributors to the Didier volume offer studies where the focus on national literatures -- compared or not -- is mediated by attention to genres or themes, for instance. However, overall both volumes are in a traditional mode of literary study and they do not take into account the newer developments of cultural studies, feminism, multiculturalism, or any such. There are also a number of programs in comparative literature where the notion of comparative European literature is established. For example, there is multimedia graduate course in distance education at the University of Granada (Spain) with the designation "Curso multimedia de literaturas europeas (Proyecto Euroliteratura)."

With regard to my observation that comparative European literature is, in principle, based on the premise of national literatures despite various claims that the discipline is global and inclusive and that this represents anew an entrapment in the national paradigm, there is a further aspect I would like to mention briefly. This is the problem of national self-referentiality within the scholarship of comparative European literature. For example, in the above mentioned volumes of Souiller and Troubetzkoy and Didier, such volumes as Margaret R. Higonnet's collected volume Borderwork: Feminist Engagements with Comparative Literature (1994) are not often enough cited and referred to thus indicating limited attention (a similar "by-passing," at least in my observation, happens to Marie Francoeur's Confrontations. Jalons pour une sémiosis comparative des textes littéraires (1985), a volume that would deserve attention by comparatists and scholars in the humanities in general). I am not criticizing the fact that a particular text was not cited; rather, my observation brings me to the following additional factor with regard to national self-referentiality in scholarship, comparative European or other. Whether it is German or French oriented comparative literature, all too many scholars concentrate on "home-grown" sources, that is, in the case of French works on French sources and in the case of German works on German sources and in the case of the US (and Canada) scholars pay attention to mainstream French and German sources (although rarely to any other). I think it is precisely in comparative literature where the notion of "theory approximation" ought to be a standard, that is, when a theoretical framework, method, or theme is discussed, attention must be paid to similar and/or analogous frameworks in a range of languages and cultures (see Tötösy, Comparative Literature 215-20). In principle, I do not object to a comparative European literature if it constitutes method but I do object to it if it is implicitly or explicitly ideological and based on perceived or real hierarchies and by keeping to the "national" agenda. At the same time, in a curious twist, there is potential in comparative European literature and that is to counteract the often criticized Eurocentrism of comparative literature itself. Although I did not find any reference to this most obvious aspect of a comparative European literature, I assume that the focus on a truly inclusive study of all European literatures would make the criticism of Eurocentrism in this specific new designation redundant and paradoxical. And as to what I said above about national self-referentiality in scholarship and the national bases of comparative literature and comparative European literature, a new geo-political focus no matter how much on the surface aesthetically oriented would also include the lapsus with regard to the established parameters of comparative literature; regardless of the truth of the criticism that the discipline -- or rather some of its practitioners -- have indeed often been and are Eurocentric.

Next, I would like to briefly elaborate on my third observation of comparative literature today, namely that there is an emerging of comparative literature in some corners of the globe, geo-cultural spaces which in the politics of education and scholarship one would understand as "peripheral" areas. I would like to note that in some but not all cases this "peripheral" situation of education and scholarship overlaps with economics and technology while in some it does not. The said emerging of comparative literature is of some interest from several points of view, such as the sociology of knowledge, the current situation and history of literary studies, and the general status and situation of the humanities, etc., and including for and in the history of the discipline itself. This emerging appears to take place despite Bassnett's statement in her Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction that "today, comparative literature in one sense is dead" (47). This development -- perhaps as a quasi implicit structural response to the Anglo-American situation as perceived by Bassnett -- is not occurring in the traditional geographical and cultural loci and mainstream of the discipline such as the United States, France, or Germany (although, I should add in a context of differentiation and with an eye on the particular that disrupts generalizations, some universities in states of the former East Germany such as Halle-Wittenberg and Erfurt, and in Frankfurt in the former West Germany appear to be interested in establishing new chairs of comparative literature). While Bassnett may be right that comparative literature in the traditional centers -- France, Germany, the United States -- is undergoing both intellectual and institutional changes and a certain loss of intellectual as well as institutional position owing to factors such as the takeover of theory by English, the impact of cultural studies, the diminishing number of comparative literature professorships, etc., this loss of presence is occurring in the centers of the discipline and with regard to its own natural context of Eurocentrism and Euro-American center. Clearly, Bassnett's pronouncement of the death of comparative literature is exactly from that Eurocentrism she otherwise attempts to subvert and to oppose in her work. And thus, curiously, Bassnett pays no attention to the strong development of the discipline and the promise its holds outside of the discipline's traditional centers: in the last two decades comparative literature has shown much promise in some countries and cultures where the discipline has not been very strong or, in some cases, in existence at all before. The argumentation put forward by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her 2003 book she titled The Death of a Discpline is similar to that of Bassnett. In my view, Spivak makes a grave error to suggest that comparative literature is "dead," similar to Bassnett. While they are right to suggest new thought and notions to revive and to alter the intellectual parameters of the discipline, this ought to be done in such a way that no dean who wants to eliminate yet another department or program of comparative literature to save money would be able to point to Bassnett's statement or to the title of Spivak's book in order to justify the elimination of or cutbacks in funding of comparative literature. As I argue, there are other ways to maintain the achievements of comparative literature. And this is, in my view, the more important because the fate of comparative literature is tied closely to the fate of the humanities as a whole everywhere. I should also like to note that Spivak's book contains many if not all of my own suggestions and notions as to how to revive and do comparative literature, notions I have published in a number of journals in different languages since the early 1990s. Rather, the problem, at least in my view, is the spurious and in-your-face title of her book. As I mentioned earlier, interestingly, while the traditional centers of the discipline -- the ménage-à-trois of France, Germany, and the United States -- are at best able to maintain a status quo of the discipline, in Mainland China, Taiwan, Japan, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, universities in the states of the former East Germany, etc., the discipline is emerging and developing strongly and this can be gauged by the emergence of new comparative literature journals, new chairs in comparative literature, a marked increase in publications, etc. And it is not without reason that colleagues from Spain and Italy, for example, write to me that in their view the insistence of the International Comparative Literature Association to maintain English and French as the official languages of the association is wrong, colonial, outdated, etc., because if French than why not Spanish, German, Chinese, and ALL the other languages. Consequently, they argue, only English should be the official language -- as our present lingua franca -- with many other languages allowed for presentation if there is an audience and interest.

Following my argument -- in relation to my above third observation of the current situation of comparative literature -- namely that we must pay attention to the situation of the discipline of comparative literature not only in the centers but also (or perhaps mainly) in the "peripheries," here are a few examples of recent work published in comparative literature in the "peripheries": in Portugal, the Portuguese Comparative Literature Association brought out several series of publications emanating from the annual conferences of the association, for example, Margarida L. Losa, Isménia de Sousa, and Gonçalo Vilas-Boas, eds., Literatura Comparada: Os Novos Paradigmas (1996). In Brazil, we have the collected volume of Tania Franco Carvalhal, ed., Comparative Literature World Wide: Issues and Methods (1997). In Spain -- a particularly active area of comparative literature today -- several books and manuals of comparative literature are of note. There are, for example, Dolores Romero López, ed., Orientaciones em literatura comparada (1997), Maria José Vega and Neus Carbonell, eds., Literatura comparada. Principios y métodos (1998), Dolores Romero López's Una relectura del "fin de siglo" en el marco de la litteratura comparade" teoría y praxis (1998), Claudio Guillén's Múltiples moradas. Ensayo de literatura comparada (1998) (for a review of these volumes, see Zambrano at <http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb99-2/zambrano99.html>), and Darío Villanueva's collected volume, Avances en... teoría de la literature (1994). Although not specifically comparative literature, most material in Montserrat Iglesias Santos's Teoría de los Polisistemas (1999) is comparative. As well, the University of Huelva publishes a new comparative literature journal since 1997, Exemplaria: Revista Internacional de Literatura Comparada. In Argentina, we have the special issue of Filología 30.2 (1997), Literaturas comparadas; the latter volume is interesting because it contains a mixture of foreign and domestic authors while most other such volumes I cited above contain translated work. Further, there are the volumes with selected papers from the second and third conferences of the AALC: Asociacion Argentina de Literature Comparada of 1997 and 1998.

In Italy we have the collected volumes of Armando Gnisci and Franca Sinopoli, Comparare i comparatismi. La comparatistica letteraria oggi in Europa e nel mondo (1995) and Manuale storico di letteratura comparata (1997). The 1995 Italian volume is also of some interest for the following reason. It is common knowledge that in Italy the mastery or even interest in foreign languages is limited (perhaps even more than in the United States) and thus the publication of anthologies of comparatist texts serves at least two purposes: it supports the suggestion that the interest in comparativism as an international discipline in the age of globalization makes sense and it suggests -- via the presentation of the texts in Italian -- that the local aspect of scholarship, that is, the study of the international via the local is also with purpose and of intellectual and pragmatic content and potential results. As to the pragmatically important genre of manuals for the teaching of comparative literature, Gnisci and Sinopoli's other collected volume, Manuale storico di letteratura comparata (1997) is of note. The editors provide their Italian readership with a historical perspective of comparative literature from the earliest times through the discipline's golden age through its present tense. The volume contains also a list of comparative literature handbooks and incisive articles since 1931 to the present, a list of the proceedings of International Comparative Literature Association congresses, a list of published volumes of the International Comparative Literature's A Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages, a list of major comparative literature learned journals, and a list of bibliographies of comparative literature. Similarly to Iglesias Santos volume in Spanish, Teoría de los Polisistemas, cited above, Aldo Nemesio's collected volume, L'esperienza del testo (1990), too, contains much comparative literature material.

In the German-language area, in Austria – a country where in recent years substantial efforts have been made in educational policy, university restructuring, funding, etc., to internationalize its scholarship – a volume of interest is the collected volume of Norbert Bachleitner, Alfred Noe, and Hans-Gert Roloff, eds., Beträge zu Komparatistik und Sozialgeschichte der Literatur (1997). We also have Peter V. Zima and Johann Strutz's volume Komparatistik: Einführung in die Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft (1992). Note: It is somewhat difficult to classify Zima and Strutz's volume as "Austrian" as the volume was published in Germany for a German readership and predicated on the fact that it is in Germany where there are a good number of comparative literature programs while in Austria only in Vienna and Innsbruck; the Lehrstuhl (chair) in comparative literature has no degree program in the discipline; however, what is interesting at Klagenfurt is that there is a Faculty of "Kulturwissenschaften." At the same time, since both authors teach at the University of Klagenfurt, we are dealing with, obviously, a different cultural source than that of Germany. Strutz and Zima published a collected volume previously, Komparatistik als Dialog (1991), a precursor of their 1992 volume (above) in that the volume deals with questions relating to the triangle of the cultures of Southern Austria, Slovenia, Switzerland, and Italy. There is also the recent volume by the doyen of Austrian comparative Literature, Zoran Konstantinović, his Grundlagentexte der Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft aus drei Jahrzehnten, selected and edited by Beate Burtscher-Bechter et al. (2000). In Germany proper, there is Reinhold Görling's Heterotopia: Lektüren einer interkulturellen Literaturwissenschaft (1997). The volume is interesting because while the author refrains from naming comparative literature -- there are brief references to the discipline on pages 27, 34, 53, and 65 -- the general concept of the book as well as the applications to primary texts of the proposed approach are comparativist. Perhaps the reason for the author's understated references to comparative literature is a result of his acute observation of the discipline's often preoccupation of doing comparative literature by default only. That is, the situation when the framework and its applications are based on and in the bases on national literatures, one would have better success in the academe. And there are some more recent volumes such as Carsten Zelle's Kurze Bücherkunde für Literaturwissenschaftler (1998) and Allgemeine Literaturwissenschaft (1999). The former contains a good section on comparative literature as well as it contains material about new media and the study of literature; the latter is a collection of selected articles about the history and contemporary situation of the specifically German Allgemeine Literaturwissenschaft (general literature) including specific examples of the subject matter taught at the universities of Essen and Siegen but also extending, briefly, to the example of Vanderbilt University. Interestingly, one author discusses the question of the study of general literature in the context of new media and technology in more detail. Angelika Corbineau-Hoffmann's Einführung in die Komparatistik (2000) is an example of traditional Eurocentric comparative literature and contains few newer sources and relies, instead, on older, although not necessarily outdated material. An interesting volume is, although presented very much in the tradition of German Philologie, Emer O'Sullivan's Kinderliterarische Komparatistik (2000). Further in Europe, in Holland -- a traditionally strong area of comparative literature -- we have the Festschrift in honor of Douwe Fokkema by Harald Hendrix, Joost Kloek, Sophie Levie, and Will van Peer, eds. The Search for a New Alphabet: Literary Studies in a Changing World (1996) and in Hungary -- perhaps the strongest proponent of comparative literature, traditionally, in Central Europe -- we have neohelicon: acta comparationis litterarum unversarum, a journal that over the last two decades issued several state-of-the-art volumes about the discipline of comparative literature. A good example of journal's interest in the history and theory of comparative literature is the more recent issue of 24.2 (1997).

Although a "periphery" from the standard Eurocentric point of view (but not otherwise as I am arguing here) in Mainland China including Hong Kong and Taiwan -- among publications in Western languages -- we have Yue Daiyun and Alain Le Pichon, eds. La Licorne et le dragon. Les Malentendus dans la recherche de l'universel (1995) and the volume New Perspectives: A Comparative Literature Yearbook (1995; for a more recent description of the situation of comparative literature in Taiwan and the Mainland today, see also Tötösy 1997; for a selection of studies in comparative literature published recently in Mandarin, see the bibliography in the present volume). Of note is that the XVIIth Congress of the ICLA: International Comparative Literature Association will be held in Hong Kong in 2003, organized by Indiana at Bloomington and Lingnan University's Eugene Eoyang. Further, in Australia there is the new University of Sydney World Literature Series with volume one by Mabel Lee and Meng Hua, eds., Cultural Dialogue and Misreading (1997) and volume two by Mabel Lee and A.D. Syrokomla-Stefanowska, eds., Literary Intercrossings: East Asia and the West (1998). Further volumes in the series are planned.

In addition to the volumes published in the traditional centers of the discipline I refer to above, I should mention Yves Chevrel's L'étudiant chercheur en littérature (1992), a good manual because despite its general title, as the volume is clearly comparatist. Further, Chevrel's translated volume – by Farida Elizabeth Dahab – Comparative Literature Today: Methods and Perspectives (1994) should also be noted as it can serve as a textbook for students of comparative literature in English-speaking countries. As to manuals in the context of pedagogical tools in and of comparative literature, the single English-language volume of recent years of such, we have John T. Kirby's The Comparative Reader: A Handlist of Basic Reading in Comparative Literature (1998). The volume is divided into selected bibliographies of national literatures (further divided into periods), literary and critical theory, various methodologies such as psychological, semiotic, etc., approaches, media and literature including film, postcolonial literatures, and an interesting chapter on the professional and institutional aspects of the discipline of comparative literature. In addition to volumes I already mentioned above, in the USA we also have the 1995 special issue on comparative literature of the journal World Literature Today (1995). In Canada -- a cultural space that may be considered peripheral or as a center, depending -- we have the special issue of the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée (1996) and my own volume, Comparative Literature: Theory, Method, Application (1998, although published in Holland). Last but not least, there is the US where comparative literature has acquired and still has the strongest presence institutionally: for recent work in comparative literature there, see Manuela Mourão's "Comparative Literature in the United States."

In international comparative literature, we have the collected volume of selected and extended versions of papers from the XIVth Congress of the ICLA: International Comparative Literature Association at Alberta in 1994, Comparative Literature Now: Theories and Practice / La Littérature comparée à l'heure actuelle. Théories et réalisations (Ed. Tötösy, Dimić, and Sywenky; see its table of contents at <http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/library/champion.html>). The eight volumes of selected papers from the XVth congress of the ICLA in 1997 at Leiden is (more or less) a continuation of the format initiated with the publication of selected papers from the XIVth congress at Alberta, that is, instead of the ICLA tradition to publish Proceedings with brief papers, mostly full-length and revised papers are published (see D'haen, General Ed.). A volume of limited rigor with brief papers are the proceedings of the 15th Congress of the World Federation of Humanists, entitled Humanism and the Good Life, published in 1998 (Ed. Horwath, Hendrickson, Valdivieso, and Thor).

Last, I elaborate briefly on my fifth observation of the current situation of comparative literature, namely the potential of new media technology and scholarship, that is, specifically the internet and the world wide web and their impact on scholarship in the humanities including comparative literature (see also Grabovszki in the present volume; see also Tötösy 2001c). Here is a quote from a recent article by Robert Lepage, the internationally renown Québéçois-Canadian playwright who recognizes the advantages and positive meaning of a global view for his own plays as well as contemporary Québéçois-Canadian literature as a whole. What he is saying is relevant to my discussion by analogy: the peripheral situation of Québéçois-Canadian literature is similar in concept to the marginalized situation of the humanities and comparative literature in turn within the humanities today. Lepage argues that the world wide web and "its spread is part of the reason why Quebeckers are so abruptly questioning their identity and coming to such new conclusions. New technology leaves no room for xenophobia. How can Quebec sell its Internet products if it continues to have an isolationist image? And if you send me an e-mail, and you don't have all the accents and the c and the little hat [circumflex] -- what is so French about it? So a lot of people decided to write in English. These things may seem trivial, but they are hints of a much bigger shift" (69). There is no doubt in my mind that the world wide web and the internet provide possibilities for the study of culture, including comparative literature and the proposed comparative cultural studies and that, in my opinion, scholars in the humanities must exploit. Unfortunately, there is much Ludditism among scholars in the humanities including comparatists while scholars in cultural studies tend to be more interested and competent (for an example of the discussion of this resistance in the humanities -- and that is not much discussed in the otherwise numerous books on new media and the humanities in English -- see Norbert Gabriel's 1997 Kulturwissenschaften und Neue Medien. Wissensvermittlung im digitalen Zeitalter; for another and more recent volume of new media technology and the humanities, see Domenico Fiormonte and Jonathan Usher, eds.'s New Media and The Humanities: Research and Applications (2001). With regard to the world wide web, the use of new media technology, and the discipline of comparative literature as in full-text and free-access online journals, there are only few of such in existence: there is the Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature at <http://www.brynmawr.edu/bmrcl/> (publishes book reviews only), Surfaces: Electronic Journal / Revue électronique

<http://pum12.pum.umontreal.ca/revues/surfaces/home.html> (in 2001 the last issue published is in 1998), and Literary Research / Recherche littéraire: An ICLA/AILC Bulletin of Book Reviews <http://www.uwo.ca/modlang/ailc/index.html> (it is accessible by password only). In comparative literature and culture there is one such journal in existence to date, print or online, in free access or subscription based, and this is CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture: A WWWeb Journal I founded at the University of Alberta in 1998 and that is published by Purdue University Press since 2000 at <http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/> (for a list of comparative literature and comparative literature oriented journals, see <http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/library/journals.html>).

There is one more point to make here: while I agree with scholars who argue that the reading of literature hypertextually on the web or as in e-books versus in hard copy is as of yet not only limited but that it may also represent a regression in the quality and cognitive processes of reading, what I miss is the a differentiation between the reading of fiction / creative texts in hypertext and the reading of scholarship in hypertext, that is, on the web. In my mind and in my own practice, there is a clear and obvious distinction between the reading of the two types of text and I believe, as I argue in my paper "The New Knowledge Management: Online Research and Publishing in the Humanities" ([2001c]: <http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb01-1/totosy01.html>; for a recent and much needed empirical analysis of literary reading in hypertext, see David S. Miall and Teresa Dobson's "Reading Hypertext and the Experience of Literature" (2001) at ).

Granted, there are some infrastructural problems which affect the situation of the web and the internet in general and there are two such problems of major impact: one is the obvious problem of different technological development and availabilities among regions of the world and the second one is the infrastructure of telephone line providers and its economics. Countries in Europe are as of yet still handicapped in the development of the internet in comparison with the US and Canada, for example, for the simple reason that local calls are expensive in Europe while they are much less to minimal in the US and Canada. Clearly, in Europe the monopoly of the state telephone companies will have to be modified and this has started to begin: whether it will evolve to similarly easy access to telephone lines or other ways of web access -- such as cable TV -- remains to be seen. And there is also the perception of scholars in the humanities of the emergence and significance of web journals. It is true that some web journals do not have a comparable scholarly content traditional hard-copy journals offer. But this can be changed and the time constraints and financial constraints hard-copy journal suffer under will make it ultimately imperative that knowledge transfer and scholarly communication will demand the switch to e-journals and the internet. That an online journal in the free-access mode has much potential is already observable in the case of the said CLCWeb. Of interest here is that in the first available period of statistical analysis of the CLCWeb's access and online use, 13-30 April 1999, the journal received 1,950 hits. This means 108 hits per day on the average and for an esoteric subject such as comparative literature and culture this shows high-level and involved use. The statistics also show – among many aspects of the ways, length, precise use of specific sections of the journal, various technical aspects of access, etc. – that CLCWeb has been accessed from a large number of countries, including many countries outside of North America and Europe. Interestingly and contrary to my expectations, the relatively large traffic on CLCWeb has not subsided and it drew over 400 per day in 2001 and, by 2005, it draws on the average 7000 hits per day, with the correspondingly high numbers and lengths of page views, etc. (for ongoing statistics of web use and traffic, go to the journal's sub-page "web traffic" off the index page).

In closing my observations on new media and comparative literature (and on work in the humanities by extension), I would like to refer briefly to an aspect of institutional policies which have some impact on the situation of not only comparative literature but on scholarship in the humanities in general (see, in more detail, Tötösy 2001). Briefly put: how is it possible that, for example, the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada (SSHRC) to date refuses to even consider funding of an online journal in the humanities precisely because it is in the free-access mode? After several attempts of explanation, I received the final decision by an SSHRC official that because CLCWeb does not have minimum 200 paid subscribers, it is ineligible for funding. My explanations that the CLCWeb is in free access and thus does not have paid subscribers was not accepted and the large web traffic with the journal -- which clearly shows that the CLCWeb is being used by the scholarly community -- did not make an impression either. Obviously, this particular government agency is still stuck to a traditional mindset and its policy makers -- who include academics -- have not followed the developments made possible by the new web culture of scholarship. In my opinion, scholarly communication and knowledge transfer on the world wide web should be facilitated by open and competitive funding by government agencies, just as are other types of scholarly activities. Online journals should be able to compete for such funding because government agencies use taxpayers' money in the first place and this way some of that money is returned to the taxpayers, just like in other areas of scholarly activity. Unfortunately, the present policies of the SSHRC have not followed the emerging situation of scholarship in the humanities where online journals perform the said meaningful service for the scholarly community and where they perform knowledge transfer on an international scale previously unheard of as well as impossible to enact. The said policies are short sighted and counter productive and I hope that the SSHRC will rather sooner than later consider changing its policies of funding online journals in the free-access mode.

Last but not least I would like to touch briefly on a most contentious issue, namely on the comparative study of "Other" literatures and cultures, here with specific reference to East/West comparative literature. The still dominant aspect of the national paradigm and its position with regard to comparative literature and its claim of inclusion is a most important issue in the politics of comparative literature. As I have argued in a previous paper, "A Report on Comparative Literature in Beijing, October 1995 / Rapport sur la littérature comparée à Beijing, Octobre 1995" (1995), for a Western comparatist the inclusion of the Other is problematic at best. But here as always, I argue that it is the "how" and not the "what" that determines scholarship. I quote from my paper: "I took issue with [the] ... notion that Orientalism can be successfully studied only by an Oriental. This notion, as often as it occurs under the generic notion of "appropriation" in North American scholarship in particular, leads in my opinion to the doctrinization of scholarship and counter-acts the very notion of dialogue, scholarly or other. Cultural communication prescribes dialogue about perception and view from whichever locus one speaks from. If the notion ... is correct then its logical conclusion is that Orientals should not study the Occident either. Surely, this is an untenable position of either side. Of course, if an Occidental scholar studies Oriental works, any correction of his/her analysis by an Oriental scholar should be welcome and seriously considered. The argument that the post-colonial base of power disqualifies an Occidental to study the Oriental becomes a tool of harm if implemented" (11-12). More recently, Takayuki Yokota-Murakami, in her book Don Juan East/West: On the Problematics of Comparative Literature (1999), argues that comparative literature and its claim of and for inclusion is a priori marginalization and exclusion. Yokota-Murakami argues that comparative literature is in principle and throughout its history Eurocentric and its claim of inclusion is an unsuccessfully disguised attempt to "universalize" humanity as expressed in literature but from the said Eurocentric point of view and power. I fully agree with the author that Western humanities and comparative literature in particular "included" the Other from its own Eurocentric locus. But as forceful and insightful Yokota-Murakami's description and arguments are, she does not offer a solution and implicitly we would end up with the untenable situation as I describe in my quote above.

Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek

Halle-Wittenberg Univesität

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