The present study deals with the rise of the Czech and Slovak school of comparative literary studies which were being formed in interwar Czechoslovakia. The comparative method was cultivated, apart from the older positivist generation connected with Slavonic literary studies (represented by Murko, Polívka, Máchal, Horák and others), especially by Frank Wollman (1888–1969) and René Wellek (1903–1995) who as members of the Prague Linguistic Circle were influenced by structuralism. While Wollman became known for his conception of eidology as a comparative literary morphology (Slovesnost Slovanů [The Literature of the Slavs], 1928), Wellek embodied an ideal link between Prague structuralism, German neo-idealism and Ingarden’s phenomenology (Theory of Literature, 1949). Slovak comparative studies, the most significant representatives of which were F. Wollman’s direct disciples and later also collaborators of Bakoš and Ďurišin, moved from genetic-contactological comparative studies towards typology and the application of philosophical stimuli (phenomenology, Viennese neo-positivism, hermeneutics etc.), but always connected the comparative approach with that of literary currents and genres. Contemporary Czech and Slovak comparative studies encompass formalist-structuralist theories to socio-political and cultural research; at the same time they preserve philological links with concrete texts (Wollman). In this context comparative literary criticism is understood as an integral part of the history of literature realized in supra-national relations, the kernel of which is historical poetics in both diachronic and synchronic contexts. In this way they adopt a balanced position in the dispute over whether comparative studies could be defined from the ontological or epistemological points of view, i.e. rather from the institutional standpoint in the sense of a firmly established academic discipline determined by certain research methods, than as comparative studies understood more freely as “comparative”, or as a specific kind of intellectual reflexion linking separate spheres of knowledge in a communicative way. Czech and Slovak comparative studies contributed, above all, to the elaboration of the theory of world (universal) literature and the theory of inter-literariness that Ďurišin, continuing Wollman’s ideas, shifted from structural starting points towards semiotics as a universal methodology of culture, but also towards geography, political economy, reception theory and intertextuality (P. Koprda).
