Toward a Comparative Cultural Studies

Abstract

Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek proposes in his article, “Toward a Comparative Cultural Studies” the developing of a theoretical and methodological framework for the study of culture and literature. He argues that the discipline of comparative literature has developed in its history many aspects of cultural studies which are considered innovative today. In the first part of the article, he presents selected new work in comparative literature especially from areas of scholarship outside the traditional centers of the discipline, namely American, German, and French scholarship. His argument for a comparative cultural studies can be schematized as follows: 1) To study literature (text and/or literary system) with and in the context of culture and the discipline of cultural studies; 2) In cultural studies itself to study literature with borrowed elements (theories and methods) from comparative literature; and 3) To study culture and its composite parts and aspects in the mode of the proposed “comparative cultural studies” approach instead of the currently reigning single-language approach dealing with a topič with regard to its nature and problematics in one culture only. At the same time, comparative cultural studies would implicitly and explicitly disrupt the established hierarchy of cultural products and production similarly to the disruption cultural studies itself has performed. The suggestion is to pluralize and parallelize the study of culture without hierarchization. The incipient framework of a comparative cultural studies is then introduced in the article by a ten-point draft proposal of how to do comparative cultural studies.