Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Behdad, Ali

Titel

The history of comparison matters

Ist Teil von

• Cambridge journal of postcolonial literary inquiry, 2018-09, Vol.5 (3), p.266-273

Ort / Verlag

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2018

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

ProQuest_Literature Online_英美文学在线

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• 4 Citing a footnote in Moretti’s article to the works of African scholars Emmanuel Obiechina, Abiola Irele, and Ato Quayson, on whose scholarship Moretti relies to advance the claim that the evolution of the novel in the non-Western world depends on “a comparison between a western formal influence (usually French and English) and local materials,” 5 Slaughter contends that Moretti’s “distant reading” exemplifies “how the dominant literary critical institutions still treat [non-Western] scholars . . . as informants rather than theorists.” The space of comparison today involves comparisons between artistic productions usually studied by different disciplines; between various cultural constructions of those disciplines; between Western cultural traditions, both high and popular, and those of non-Western cultures; between the pre- and post- contact cultural productions of colonized peoples; between gender constructions defined as feminine and those defined as masculine, or between sexual orientations defined as straight and those defined as gay; between racial and ethnic modes of signifying; between hermeneutic articulations of meaning and materialist analyses of its modes of production and circulations; and much more. [...]though the 1965 Levin report correctly identified the establishment of the field of comparative literature in the United States in the National Defense Education Act, which provided material support for foreign language instruction and for the systematic introduction of programs and courses in great books to help a younger generation of Americans understand and engage more effectively with international cross-currents in the postwar years, the report nonetheless advocated a non-historical, Eurocentric approach to comparison by proclaiming that only universities with strong European language departments and large libraries were suited to pursue comparative literature. 31 That more recent scholars such as Melas, who have followed in Said’s footsteps to fashion a “postcolonial comparison,” have similarly called only for bringing non-European literary traditions “into relation [with their European counterparts] over a ground of comparison that is in common but not unified” 32 speaks to the profound challenges facing what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o called “the quest for relevance,” that is, a “liberating perspective” that would allow non-European literary traditions to form the bases of comparison and not an afterthought. 33 I have offered this brief history of literary comparison in response to the important questions Slaughter raises in his presidential address, namely: “Does it matter who compares?” and “Does it matter where we are com(par)ing from?” 34 By underscoring the historical conditions that have enabled the dominance of Eurocentric and formalist approaches to literature, I contend that if we continue to use the comparative method without fully attending to the cultural and ideological assumptions that undergird it, literatures from the Western periphery will continue to remain in an essential sense marginal in comparative literature—even as these texts come to be incorporated into the field.