what is a comparative literature.pptVIP

Preface It can almost be argued that anyone who has an interest in books embarks on the road towards what might be termed comparative literature: reading Chaucer, we come across Boccaccio; we can trace Shakespeares source materials through Latin, French Spanish and Italian; we can study the ways in which Romanticism developed across Europe at a similar moment in time, follow the process through which Baudelaires fascination with Edgar Allan Poe enriched his own writing, consider how many English novelists learned from the great nineteenth-century Russian writers (in translation, of course), compare how James Joyce borrowed from Italo Svevo. When we read Clarice Lispector (Brazilian writer) we are reminded of Jean Rhys (Dominican writer), who in turn recalls Djuna Barnes (American writer) and Ana?s Nin (French writer). There is no limit to the list of examples we could devise. Once we begin to read we move across frontiers, making associations and connections, no longer reading within a single literature but within the great open space of Literature with a capital L. At this juncture, one could be forgiven for assuming that comparative literature is nothing more than common sense, an inevitable stage reading, made increasingly easier by international marketing of books and by the availability of translations. But if we shift perspective slightly and look again at the term “Comparative literature”, what we find instead is a history of violent debate that goes right back to the earliest usage of the term at the beginning of the nineteenth century and continues still today. Critics at the end of the twentieth century, in the age of post-modernism, still wrestle with the same questions that were posed more than a century ago: What is the object of study in comparative literature? How can comparison be the object of anything? If individual literatures have a canon, what might a comparative canon be? How does the comparatist select what to compare? Is comparative lite