Comparative Literature Today – and Tomorrow?
Keywords:
comparative literature, literary science, cultural studies, contextual interpretation, literarinessAbstract
The paper begins with a short description of the polemics on the role, essence and future of comparative literature as it developed around “The Bernheimer Report” in the mid-nineties on the North American continent between the so-called “contextualists” and “non-contextualists”. The former are of the opinion that under the influence of contemporary methods and theories, comparative literature should cease to see literature as the predominant focus of its research and, above all abandon the critical study of literariness; those who object point to the fact that the specifics of literary discourse still leave room for research, primarily regarding the linguistic composition of the text. The author of the paper argues for a comparative literature which follows the tradition of focusing on expressly literary issues, while complementing them with the findings of new theories; following the definition of Fokkema (and taking into account the research of interliterariness in Márian Galík and literariness as a textual effect in Marko Juvan), he suggests researching literariness as an invariant, in each case culturally conditioned. In the second part, the paper first of all rejects the notion that the crisis which generated Bernheimer Report and the subsequent polemics is crucial mainly for traditional centers of comparative literature, and goes on to cite the example of Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek and the “comparative cultural studies” he proposes to demonstrate the fatal consequences the discipline suffers in view of the efforts by those members of the profession, who would like to take comparative literature closer to cultural studies. In the changed circumstances, comparative literature certainly needs to be pragmatic; however, the paper attempts to show that the final consequence of such efforts for its social legitimization, as well as the introduction of “exact” scientific methods as the only adequate and valid methods, will be the cancellation of comparative literature itself. In conclusion, the paper points out the prospects for the development of comparative literature in the future.References
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