Comparative Literature and Social Sciences

Abstract

Although the object of comparative literature has been defined in many different ways so as to include “literature and the other arts”, “postcolonial literatures” and even “culture” as a whole, the relationship between the different comparative sciences (law, sociology, politics, etc.) has sofar been omitted. This regrettable gap is probably due to the fact that comparative literary critics have never been really interested in methodological questions. For them it seems to be more important to draw the boundaries of their discipline as generously as possible. – However, a sustained dialogue between comparative literature and comparative social sciences seems inevitable, if the methodological basis of comparison is to be broadened and strengthened at the same time. – 1. The first section of this article deals with the methodological contributions of comparative literature to the dialogue mentioned above. The basic idea is that the literary discipline deals with multicultural and multilingual contexts and could therefore be of some help whenever intercultural problems and problems of translation occur. Political scientists, sociologists and lawyers are, after all, sporadically confronted with culturally specific meanings, divergent semantics and translation problems. They cannot afford to ignore comparative literature and translation studies altogether. – 2. The second section brings about an inversion of perspectives. Instead of asking what the social sciences could learn from comparative literature, it asks how the latter could improve its methodology by observing sociological, political or legal comparisons. In this context, especially the analogic and contrastive, the vertical and the horizontal dimensions of comparisons in the social sciences seem to be relevant since they contribute to a better understanding of typological and genetic comparisons in comparative literature. – 3. The third and last section examines the sociological underpinnings of a new type of comparative literature which defines itself as socio-semiotic. It takes seriously the formalist and structuralist idea that literature and society ought to be linked by language and language analysis.