Gretchen G. Velarde

Comparative Literature versus Translation Studies

In a world where specialization on a specific and well-defined field is the primary key to

open doors leading to various career opportunities, the very broad scope and nature of

comparative literature led some academicians and literary experts to consider it as an eclectic

type of academic pursuit and to question the probability of those with Ph.D.s in this field to find

employment in the highly specialized environment of the academe and career markets alike. But

beyond mundane concerns on financial gain and employment opportunities, there is a more

intricate and definitely pressing criticism to comparative literature that has been swung by

literary critiques and scholars from all angles. It is the question of the end-point significance as

well as the importance of comparative literature aside from the notion of satisfying a certain

curiosity in identifying a mediating line that connects all the literary works in the world. Gayatri

Chakravorty Spivak wrote in her collection of essays entitled Death of a Discipline, that the way

forward for a discipline that she perceives to be in decline is to move beyond its Eurocentric

origins, and “to acknowledge a definitive future anteriority, a ‘to-comeness’, a ‘will have

happened’ quality” (Spivak, 6). Spivak’s central argument regarding the so-called requiem of

comparative literature is not entirely about the discipline per se but about the perspective injected

by scholars when studying about the interconnectivity of world literature. To better understand

the current intellectual swordfight about this discipline, one need to first have a retrospective

analysis as to the origin of comparative literature and its objective to contribute a larger and

universal understanding about the differences as well as similarities of literature and other arts

across the globe.

The history of the entrance of comparative literature studies in the academic world is

relatively recent appearing in the middle of the 19th century. Yet, as what literary critiques

observed, the diffuse beginnings of comparative literature have long been present as a more or

less moving motive in the work of individual critics. Frederico Lolice pointed out that the

“Italian nature of much of the best in Chaucer, the Norman and Latin origin of much of

Shakespeare, the English influence on Goethe and the Greek on Lessing have long formed

subjects of special research and elucidation. At length it occurred to someone to combine and

classify these foreign influences on native literatures that certain lines of universal development

might be discerned and the rules of that development codified” (381). In the early nineteenth-

century, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe introduced the notion of Weltliteratur or World Literature

in which he postulated that art and literature should not be separated by cultural or social

differences. Johann Peter Eckermann, Goethe’s secretary and disciple, recorded his remark to a

young Englishman saying, “It is part of the nature of the German to respect everything foreign

for its own sake and to adapt himself to foreign idiosyncrasies. This and the great suppleness of

our language make German translations particularly accurate and satisfying” (Conversations with

Goethe, 27). Although Goethe did not particularly pursue this kind of literary undertaking, he

nevertheless continued to insert his ideas of creating a world where equanimity in the realm of

arts and letters exists.

Comparative literature has been deemed as the study of “literature without borders” due

to its interdisciplinary nature and its necessity to move across languages, time periods, across

boundaries between literature and other arts such as music, painting, and filmmaking, et al. The

interdisciplinary programs of comparative literature places a stress on language skills and critical

thinking particularly because it practices literary criticism on works written in different

languages and/or those hailing from different cultures. For many of comparative literature’s

hostile opponents in national literature departments, they would charge that this discipline is

nothing but merely a whimsical fascination to the idea of an invisible rope that ties up and links

all the literature across the globe regardless of time, culture, and language differences. Frederico

Lolice insightfully wrote that “while a study of comparative literature is recognized by all those

who have undertaken it as one of the most fascinating, its importance, aside from augmenting the

culture of the world, is still a matter of dispute. When the greatest poets, dramatists, historians,

biographers, and storytellers, have been influenced side by side, their formative influences, their

environments, their similarities, and their differences compared, there still remain the lesser light,

who offer quite as attractive work, infinite in variety, but perhaps profitless to pursue to any great

length (Lolice, 382).

Rey Chow, in his essay entitled In the Name of Comparative Literature, argued that

comparative literature “is not simply a matter of adding or juxtaposing one national literature to

another so that its existence is simply... redundant and superfluous” (Chow, 107). Even though

Frederico Lolice and M. Douglas Power admitted in their latter writings that engaging in

comparative literature is quite cyclical and has a tendency to traverse a plateau path when

everything has already been said and done for many scholars, they still believe that this

discipline is intellectually engaging because it is never still and never content, it continuously

touches various spheres of discipline including history, psychology, sociology, linguistics, and

anthropology. The works of Frederico Lolice published in his book entitled A Short History of

Comparative Literature: From the Earliest to the Present Day is considered as one of the finest

introduction to the study of comparative literature and the worldwide distribution of this

acclaimed work was made possible through the ingenuity, patience, and knowledge of M.

Douglas Power in literature specifically in translation. Lolice emphatically argued that

comparative literature is a never ending process of connecting the dots across multi-variance of

studies in the sphere of arts and letters. Lolice advised those who wanted to pursue this kind of

discipline that “the first essential to a study of comparative literature is that the student must free

him/herself from the limitations of periods both national and universal set by the historian, and

attempt to grasp the ideas of a world-wide civilization founded through a mutual exchange of

language and a diffusion of those ideas and feelings expressed by these languages” (Lolice, 374).

The New York Times in 1907 published a series of critique focusing on the significance

as well as ambiguities posed by the volume of 376 pages of Lolice’s work on comparative

literature. According to the published critique, the book is never wanting of surprises especially

as one becomes more and more emancipated from what is local and national, and freed from the

chains of history. It discusses questions regarding boundaries (time, language, culture, and time

frames, et al.) such as why three centuries should have separated the golden age of Italian

literature from that of England; why the Minnesingers did not produce and mould a national

literature in Germany as the troubadours did in France and Italy; why certain ideas can be

expressed in one language which cannot possibly be expressed in any other; and why each

language has a purpose which is absolutely individual and national. The entire theme of Lolice in

his intricately detailed work is that in the memory of native literatures alone will genuine and

lasting originality remain, and that this originality will be universally transfused when

cosmopolitanism and internationalism will inevitably become the life of the modern mind,

effacing the traditions of a picturesque past which will henceforth belong only to history. In

recent years since the emergence of the decolonization movement and the post-colonial period,

all reputable schools in Europe, the United States, and significant countries in Asia and other

developed continents offer basic as well as in-depth studies of comparative literature. The

massive entrance of this discipline led to the strengthening of criticisms posed by academicians

as to the continuous significance and intellectual importance of comparative literature to the

advancement of literature and progression of equity in the plane of arts and letters.

Comparative Literature and Eurocentrism

Comparative literature, according to scholars, academicians, and critics alike who are not

convinced about the significance of this discipline say that it is too gargantuan a leap to

undertake. They say that the so-called comparatists or the faithful disciples of comparative

literature zero in on familiarization and adaptation of broader literary and aesthetic spectrum that

constitute social sciences and humanities merged into one to create a holistic analysis of two or

more literary masterpieces and finding a binding force that unites these literary works together

are plain romanticists. When one looks at comparative literature using a historical perspective,

the genesis of this field of study was at some point, shaky and unstable specifically because it

was a result of a bandwagon movement in the early nineteenth century Europe in search of the

so-called national literature. As what Susan Basnett, a very active critique of comparative

literature cited, “The origins of comparative literature in the nineteenth century show an uneasy

relationship between broad-ranging ideas of literature, for example, Goethe’s notion of

Weltliteratur, and emerging national literatures. Attempts to define comparative literature tended

to concentrate on questions of national or linguistic boundaries. For the subject to be authentic, it

was felt, the activity of comparing had to be based on an idea of difference: texts, or writers, or

movements should ideally be compared across linguistic boundaries, and this view lasted for a

very long time” (5).

The strongest point of scholarly and academic criticisms that were strewn at comparative

literature and, according to them, could lead to the eventual demise of this discipline is its long-

running tendency to embrace the concept of Eurocentrism. Simply put, Eurocentrism is a way of

looking at the world from a European perspective and with an implied belief, either consciously

or subconsciously, in the pre-eminence and superiority of European culture. This term has been

coined during the so-called de-colonization movement during the late part of the twentieth-

century and has been since used as a tool for criticism on various aspects of political, social, and

literary analysis. During the postcolonial movement in humanities and social sciences,

mountainous amounts of researches poured in focusing on the injection of a Eurocentric

perspective in judging and assessing the collected works in literature, accounts in history, and

criticisms of art whether visual, filmic, musical, or whatever. This undeniable use of European

eyeglasses in looking at the world is very much apparent in comparative literature as well as

post-colonial translation. In the realm of translation and multilingualism, Maria Tymoczko wrote

an essay entitled Post-Colonial Writing and Literary Translation pointing out that when a

literary translator works on a written text; he/she is translating a culture and not a language. In

line with this, she further said that, though translation is seen as a harmless transfiguration of one

language to the other, there are still important factors that a translator considers when translating

a text. One is the audience and the second is inevitably, patronage. “The demands of patronage

are intertwined with questions of audience, which is an important element in translation norms

and strategies... Issues about intended audience are often deceptive; for example, paradoxically

translations are at times produced for the source culture itself when, say, a colonial language has

become the lingua franca of a multicultural emergent nation or of a culture that has experienced a

linguistic transition of some sort” (31).

During the seemingly perpetual occupation and colonization of European empires such as

Portugal, Spain, and later, France and Great Britain, the manipulation of translation and

translation studies where evident on the prejudiced notions that were incorporated on the text.

According to Tymoczko, in the nineteenth-century, an English translation tradition developed, in

which texts from Arabic from Indian languages were cut, edited, and published with extensive

anthropological footnotes. She therefore postulated that “the subordinate position of the

individual text and the culture that had led to its production in the first place was established

through specific textual practices. The Arabs, Edward Lane informed readers in notes to his

popular translation of the The Thousand and One Nights, were far more gullible than educated

European readers and did not make the same clear distinction between the rational and the

fictitious…Both these translators were spectacularly successful, but when we start to examine

the premises upon which their translation practice was based, what emerges is that they clearly

saw themselves as belonging to a superior cultural system. Translation was a means both of

containing the artistic achievements of writers in other languages and of asserting the supremacy

of the dominant, European culture” (Tymoczko, 6). Simply put, translation, specifically post-

colonial translation is not merely a process of transfiguring a text from one language to another,

but a persistent inculcation of a dominant and superior culture to an inferior nation which were

mostly once, victims of colonization by these superior nations.

Susan Basnett cited a flawless example of a prejudiced Eurocentric perspective in judging

the practices and spiritual beliefs of the natives whose land were conquered and grabbed by

European colonizers. This is about the infamous concept of Anthropophagy or commonly known

as cannibalism: a practice that is sacred rather than inhumane and derogatory to the members of

the Tupinamba tribe. This historical account which tells about a Catholic priests devoured by

members o f the tribe was horrifying for the people of Portugal and Spain and prompted them to

deem it as the ultimate taboo in European Christianity. Subsequently, the term cannibal was born

referring to a person engaging in heinous and horrendous act of eating another human being.

This term, originally referring to a group of Caribs in the Antilles was associated with the

Americas, and entered the English language definitively in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED)

of 1796, meaning ‘an eater of human flesh’ and naturally passed into other European languages.

The eating of the priest was not an illogical act on the part of the Tupinamba, and may even be

said to have been an act of homage, although this perspective was never entertained by the early

Europeans and definitely even by most people of today’s generation. In the end, what was

created was a name of the tribe and the name given to savage peoples who ate human flesh fused

into a single term. This association has a subconscious or subliminal meaning to those

generations of people who, until the present time, are still using the term to describe an act that

was once viewed upon as holy and spiritual.

Vicente Rafael sharply pinpointed the profoundly different meaning that translation held

for different groups in the colonization process—that is the colonizers and the colonized. A sharp

critic of colonization, Eric Cheyfitz, boldly said that translation was the “the central act of

European colonization and imperialism in America” (104). This is the basis of the so-called

European Original wherein Europe was regarded as the great Original, the starting point, and the

colonies were therefore copies, or ‘translations’ of Europe, which they were suppose to

duplicate. The colony, by this definition, is therefore less than its colonizers, its original (Basnett,

4).

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in her collection of essays titled Death of a Discipline

passionately discussed about the hovering problem of a Eurocentric perspective in hindering the

furtherance of comparative literature as a discipline. She obstinately stands on the belief that

there is a politicised dimension to comparative literature. In similar vein, Rey Chow deliberately

said that “of all the prominent features of Eurocentrism, the one that stands out in the context of

the university is the conception of culture as based on the modern Europe notion of the nation-

state. In this light, comparative literature has been criticized for having concentrated on the

literatures of a few strong nation-states in modern Europe” (109).

Resolving Eurocentrism

The basic argument of the proponents of the decline and inevitable demise of

comparative literature as what has been mentioned on the first part of this research is not the

notion that comparative literature is dead, per se. It is the argument that the old version, the old

concept of the New World, the Eurocentric perspective of the commonly existing comparative

literature should be replaced by, what Linda Hutcheon and formerly supported by Haun Saussy

the congenitally contrarian. Rey Chow, on his essay titled, In the Name of Comparative

Literature advised the comparatists or disciples of comparative literature that “the active

disabling of such reproduction of Eurocentrism…should be one of the comparative literature’s

foremost tasks in the future (109). Haun Saussy stated that “a comparative literature department

without confrontations is a collection of inert elements” and that comparatists are deemed

fortunate to “inhabit a multi-polar profession” in a unipolar, globalized world.

The common challenge to comparatists and practitioners of comparative literature is to

face head-on the need to go beyond its roots and to broaden the linguistic and cultural scope of

its work to include the rest of the world: the East as well as the West, the South as well as the

North (Hutcheon, 225). Rey Chow for this matter said that “the critique of Eurocentrism, if it is

to be thorough and fundamental, cannot take place at the level of replacing one set of texts with

another set of texts—not even if the former are European and the latter are Asian, African, or

Latin American. Rather, it must question the very assumption that nation-states with national

languages are the only possible cultural formations that produce “literature” that is worth

examining. Otherwise we will simply see, as we have already been seeing, the old Eurocentric

models of language and literature study being reproduced ad infinitum in non-European language

and literature pedagogy (109).

One of the most extreme critics of comparative literature is Spivak and who of course

wrote about the Death of Discipline citing that comparative literature needs to be radicalized and

it should steer away from its Eurocentric origins. “A new comparative literature will need to

‘undermine and undo’ the tendency of dominant cultures to appropriate emergent ones (Spivak,

100). Susan Basnett expounded this idea by saying that a just comparative literature should move

beyond the parameters of Western literatures and societies and reposition itself within a

planetary context (Basnett, 3). “The original enterprise of comparative literature, which sought to

read literature trans-nationally in terms of themes, movements, genres, periods, zeitgeist, history

of ideas is out-dated and needs to be rethought in the light of writing being produced in emergent

cultures” (Basnett, 3). It is in this line that Spivak proposed the idea of planetarity in opposition

to globalization which she argues involves the imposition of the same values and system of

exchange everywhere. Planetarity can be imagined from within the precapitalist cultures of

planet, outside the global exchange flows determined by international business.

Crucial to the destruction of a Eurocentric perspective is the formulation of the idea

called polyphony or plurivocality as opposed to an earlier model, promoted by the colonial

powers, of univocality. Spivak is envisioning a world where other voices can now be heard,

rather than one single dominant voice. Lucia Boldrini supported the proposals of other defenders

of the continuous existence of comparative literature in her published essay entitled Comparative

Literature in the Twenty-First Century: A View from Europe and the UK. She contradicted the

point of Basnett about the demise of comparative literature saying that the focus of Basnett’s

criticism was for a discipline born out of the European nineteenth-century, with its emphasis on

national literatures, its redefinition of the nature of literature itself, its focus on a direct

relationship between literature and (national) identity, and which now would give way to a new,

more open, lively, politically aware understanding of the discipline beyond its Eurocentric

historical definition, and its relocation in the wider field of the study of intercultural processes of

which translation studies would furnish the principal model (to the point that comparative

literature become for Basnett a sub-section of translation studies) (Boldrini, 13). Boldrini’s

stance regarding the survival of comparative literature is in similar vein with the rest of the

discipline’s supporters. She said that “a decolonising of the European mind needs to take place

not only in relation to its history of imperial domination over other continents, but also in

relation to the entirety of Europe and the historical relationships between its different

geographical and geopolitical areas” (15).

According to Boldrini, there are models which can help in the reconfiguration of the

study of comparative literature, models which will embrace with new openness the richness and

variety of its cultural, literary, and linguistic heritage. One such example is the literary-historical

comparative model described by Linda Hutcheon and Mario J. Valdes in their Rethinking

Literary History, where literary history is rethought ‘away from the concepts of nations and

nationalism’ through the concept of nodal points , where different cultures come into contact,

and from which different historical, artistic, cultural forces irradiate. Sometimes these nodes are

cities, whose nationalities have changed through wars and subsequent border changes, or

sometimes they are people, or sometimes they are geographical forces. Boldrini suggested that

because comparative literature is the study of different literary works across cultures and across

nations, it is only proper that comparatists should have a sufficient knowledge of several

languages for them to achieve a certain level of objectivity when they compare two or more sets

of works of art (written, filmic, visual, musical, et al).

The concept of multilingualism and multiculturalism is also supported by Rey Chow

saying that comparatists should enforce a multilingual discipline citing a suggestion by Mary

Louise in “Comparative Literature and Global Citizenship” that we should desist from thinking

of non-English languages as “foreign” languages. He although threw some kicks afterwards

when he said that multilingualism does not necessarily free one from bigotry. This is in line with

the belief that expertise in various languages does not immediately erase the fact that the existing

framework of literature is still entrenched in the murky realm of Eurocentrism. Chow said that “a

multilingualism that was ‘Eurocentric’ before could easily incorporate within it the dimensions

on non-European languages without coming to terms with the Eurocentrism of its notions of

language and knowledge. Because of this, the sheer enforcement of multilingualism cannot

ensure that we educate our students about the power structures, hierarchies, and discriminations

that work as much in the “others” as in “us” (Chow, 111). This quite cynical assessment of Chow

regarding multilingualism as not the answer to the Eurocentrism of World literature and

comparative literature is also agreed upon by Spivak.

In the case of Spivak, she proposed that it is the intervention into dominant discourses of

multiculturalism traversing the arts and sciences, confronting a stubborn humanism that

continues to organize cultural studies. Spivak’s works were concentrated on her argument that

“literary comparison performs a kind of looking (at cultural others) which instantiates and

reinforces the origin of the look, i.e., the comparing subject or culture. The interest of

comparison in cultural otherness not only generates knowledge and facilitates cross-cultural

interaction. It enacts “the West” as a boundary that does not exist prior to comparison”(130).

Spivak radicalizes this now pedestrian critique of comparative ethnocentrism and cultural

essentialism by observing that while cultural analysis readily acknowledges the way comparison

reifies the distinction it analyzes, there is a tendency for this reification to endure without

troubling the narcissism of the comparative gaze. This persistence makes apparent an underlying

humanism common to liberal multiculturalism, “muscular Marxism,” and social scientific

rationalism. Spivak’s purpose, in short, is to suggest the literary practices of reading and

translation as counter-measures, instruments for dissimulating and disfiguring the self rather than

assimilating the other (Waggoner, 130).

Susan Basnett, a figure frequently mentioned and quoted when it comes to criticism of

comparative literature wrote in her essay that “a fundamental question that comparative literature

now needs to address concerns the role and status of the canonical and foundation texts that

appear to be more highly valued outside Europe and North America than by a generation of

scholars uneasy about their own history of colonialism and imperialism (5). In a book edited by

Susan Basnett and Harish Trivedi entitled Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice, it

cited a concept on how to decolonize comparative literature and along with it, post-colonial

translation. It is about the metaphor dealing with the question on how the colonies could find a

way to assert themselves and their own culture without at the same time rejecting everything that

might be of value that came from Europe. To shed light on this, Oswald de Andrade’s Manifesto

Anthopofago, which appeared in 1928, was dated 374 years after the death of Father Sardinha,

the cannibalized priest, proposed the metaphor of cannibalism as a way forward for Brazilian

culture. “Only by devouring Europe could the colonized break away from what was imposed

upon them. And at the same time, the devouring could be perceived as both a violation of

European codes an act of homage” (5).

Many points were cited about the limitation and the dead-end fashion of comparative

literature and many has bemoaned its certain demise in the world of arts, letters, and especially

the academe. But in the end, there seems to be a perpetual head-on collision between

comparative literature and translation studies specifically post-colonial translation. It is the

question of whether comparative literature exists symbiotically with translation studies or if they

are two separate schools of thought that always traverse two parallel paths—existing side by side

but would never meet and merge. This academic jousting of which is superior and which one is

the underdog in literature had been constantly featured in the writings of Susan Basnett who kept

on lamenting about where comparative literature is going and if it is indeed walking in circles

and kept on coming back to its point of origin. Basnett’s argument provoked intellectual

arguments among literary figures and academicians alike and it initiated the outpouring of essays

and researches to either support her or counter her point. Basnett went further to juxtapose

translation studies and comparative literature appealing to people engaged in literature “to look

upon translation studies as the principle discipline from now on, with comparative literature as a

valued but subsidiary subject area” (Basnett, 6).

Comparative Literature versus Translation Studies

Susan Basnett’s Reflections on Comparative Literature in the Twenty-First Century is a

fearless revelation of her so-called struggle with comparative literature all her academic life. She

admitted that “engaging with the idea of comparative literature has not been easy nor, as we

move forward in this new century, is it at all clear where the discipline will move to next. In her

1993 book on comparative literature, she argued that the subject was in its death throes. She

clarified by saying that “the basis of my case was that debates about a so-called crisis in

comparative literature stemmed from a legacy of nineteenth-century positivism and a failure to

consider the political implications of intercultural transfer processes.”

Susan Basnett, although she agrees with Spivak’s proposition saying that it works for

anyone approaching the great literary traditions of the Northern Hemisphere from elsewhere, she

still has some criticisms regarding the feasibility of her propositions. She stated that the

paradigm offered by Spivak is particularly helpful for those who have as a starting point one or

other of those great traditions. But her reservations lie on the question that remains as to “what

the new directions in comparative literature there can be for the European scholar whose

intellectual formation has been shaped by classical Greek and Latin, by the Bible, by the

Germanic epic, by Dante and Petrarch, by Shakespeare and Cervantes, by Rousseau, Voltaire

and the enlightenment, by the Romanticism and post-romanticism, by the European novelists of

the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, by generations of writers who have borrowed, translated,

plagiarized, and plundered, but whose works run inexorably to some degree through the

consciousness of writing today (Basnett, 5).

Lucia Boldrini from the University of London wrote an essay entitled Considerations on

the Historical Relationships between Translation and Comparative Literature which highlighted

the differences and similarities between translation and comparative literature. She started by

saying that “the relationship between comparative literature and translation has always been

much debated, whether the primacy of the one or the other is declared, or their inextricable

relation is asserted, or maybe their incompatibility” (Boldrini, 1).

In the case of the argument posted by Susan Basnett, she initially stood on the academic

belief that comparative literature is on the gradual process of dying. However, this argument did

not linger because in one of latter essays, she stated that despite the decline of this discipline in

the West, comparative literature elsewhere in the world, albeit under other labels, was

flourishing. With her extensive research on post-colonial translation, it was inevitable that she

publish a work which contrasted comparative literature with translation studies where the latter

was put in the pedestal while the other was relegated to a lower position. She said, “Comparative

literature as a discipline has had its day. Cross-cultural work in women’s studies, in post-colonial

theory, in cultural studies has changed the face of literary studies generally. We should look

upon translation studies as the principle discipline from now on, with comparative literature as a

valued but subsidiary subject area” (161).

Later on however, Basnett herself criticized the above statement saying that it is ‘flawed’

owing to the fact that translation studies has not developed very far at all over three decades and

comparison remains at the heart of most translation studies scholarship. She went as far as saying

that her above statement was deliberately provocative and was as much about trying to raise the

profile of translation studies as it was about declaring comparative literature to be defunct.

Basnett’s self-criticism however did not lead to her return to the studies of comparative

literature. Rather, a different epiphany occurred to her wherein neither comparative literature nor

translation studies claimed academic victory. She subsequently concluded that comparative

literature and translation studies should not be deemed as a discipline or a field of study but

simply as a wagon that could transport readers to a path of literary enlightenment. “What I would

say...is that neither comparative literature nor translation studies should be seen as a discipline:

rather both are methods of approaching literature, ways of reading that are mutually beneficial”

(6). Her main reason as to why she did not perceive comparative literature as a discipline sprang

from her diagnosis of a crisis derived from excessive prescriptivism combined with distinctive

culturally specific methodologies that could not be universally applicable or relevant. She said

that “the act of comparing thus takes place both in terms of the ways in which individual scholars

approach the same topic and then, most significantly, in the reading process. Individual essays

may make comparative points, but the actual comparison comes through the juxtaposition of the

diverse contributions and through the response of readers to that juxtaposition (Basnett, 7).

Basnett further criticized the varying approaches in comparative literature such as the so-called

French school of comparative literature in the twentieth-century and the approaches of

comparatists in the United States saying that both of these schools of thought struggled with the

idea of comparison itself, getting caught up in definitions of boundaries.

Her concern with the nature of prescriptivism of the currently existing practice of

comparative literature led her to focus more on the reading process itself and with it, the

experience of readers when they languish on a text at hand. She stated, “Where the subject starts

to make sense and where it offers a genuinely innovative way of approaching literature is when

the role of the reader is foregrounded, when the act of comparing happens during the reading

process itself, rather than being set up a priori by the delimitation of the selection of specific

texts (Basnett, 7). She highly recommended that a historical perspective should be given

emphatic importance when analyzing texts for this can radically change the reading and alter the

whole notion of comparison. She exemplified her argument by using the collected poems of Ezra

Pound entitled Cathay. She said, “The significance of Ezra Pound’s translations, if they can be

called such, of Chinese poetry that resulted in his Cathay lies in how the poems were read when

they appeared and in the precise historical moment when they were published” (8). Hugh Kenner

pointed out the same thing about Cathay saying that “the poems may have started out as

translations of ancient Chinese verse, which is what Pound intended them to be, but in the way

they were received; they were transformed into war poems that spoke to the generation coping

with the horrors of the trenches in Flanders” (Kenner, 202). Basnett supported Kenner by saying

that the object of the comparative literature scholar is therefore to see these poems in a context

and to compare them with other kinds of war poetry being produced at the same time. With the

citation she made on Cathay, she went on to use it to fortify her claim about translation as a field

of study to attend to. She said that “Cathay is interesting because it highlights the way in which

translation can serve as a force for literary renewal and innovation. This is one of the ways in

which translation studies research has served comparative literature as well; whereas once

translation was regarded as a marginal area within comparative literature, now it is

acknowledged that translation has played a vital role in literary history and that great periods of

literary innovation tend to be preceded by periods of intense translation activity. Basnett wanted

to elevate translation to higher plane because it can serve as an eye opener to people living in a

highly globalized world to achieve a point of understanding of cultures that were once deemed as

exotic and even obscure.

The final point of Basnett against comparative literature is that she is suffering from what

she calls a plague of uncertainty. In the first place, she is not certain on how to classify

comparative literature or what terminology to use when speaking about this topic. Is it a subject,

a discipline, or a field of study? She advised comparatists and comparative literature scholars

“that rather than seeing comparative literature as a discipline, it should be seen simply as a

method of approaching literature, one that foregrounds the role of the reader but which is always

mindful of the historical context in which the act of writing and the act of reading take place...

The history of comparative literature lies in jettisoning attempts to define the object of study in

any prescriptive way and in focusing instead on the idea of literature, understood in the broadest

possible sense, and in realizing the inevitable interconnectedness that comes from literary

transfer... That history involves translation as a crucial means of enabling information flow,

hence the need to position the history of translation centrally within any comparative literary

study (Basnett, 9-10).

Conclusion

The provocative statement of Susan Basnett regarding the inevitable demise of

comparative literature is indeed flawed, misled, and a bit careless especially coming from a

scholar and academician who spent a considerably large amount of time practicing, scrutinizing,

and dissecting a discipline that she once believed on and defended herself. Although there are

widely respected critics and scholars alike who also expressed their discontent and lost of faith in

the discipline, there are still more literary masters who are marching behind comparative

literature and with all their might, pushing it upward, forward. Spivak who blatantly used the

word death in describing the future of comparative literature did not also conclusively stated that

the discipline is indeed dead. She merely said that if comparative literature wanted to survive and

progress, it should shift its perspective and inject a less prejudiced tone in comparing texts and

other forms of artworks. The common denominator among those who are against and for the

continued existence of comparative literature is their criticism towards Eurocentrism.

Spivak, Chow, Boldrini, Hutcheon, Bermann, and even Basnett herself all directed their

efforts in creating concepts, notions, theories, and academic suggestions to create a comparative

literature that has a stable sense of universality which encompasses all native languages as equal

and belonging to an even plane. In the writings of Bermann, she admitted that majority of works

collected about comparative literature mostly have not shown equanimity to literature across the

globe. “It is true of course that comparative literature has not always shown quite such a

welcoming face to other literatures—particularly non-European ones—or to other fields...

Comparative literature generally takes as its topics genre, language, and period, and the

explorations of those topics are limited to European literatures, with occasional readings in the

literatures of China and Japan” (Bermann, 435).

A more hard-hit criticism of comparative literature came from the great Italian critic

Benedetto Croce who was highly sceptical about the discipline, believing it to be an obfuscatory

term disguising the obvious: that the proper object of study was literary history. “The

comparative history of literature is history understood in its true sense as a complete explanation

of the literary work, encompassed in all its relationships, disposed in the composite whole of

universal literary history (where else could it ever be placed?), seen in those connections and

preparations that are its raison d etré (Croce, 222).

But the continuous flow of literary works in comparative literature created a stronger

sense of grip as to the supposed importance and significance of comparative literature as a

discipline and as a field of study. A radicalization as well as democratization of comparative

literature is what comparatists should work on to ensure that the discipline will not stay as an

obsolete perspective in looking at world literature in the twenty-first century. And as what was

added by Susan Basnett, “Hopefully, literary scholars will follow where they lead, and will

abandon pointless debates about terminology, and definition, to focus more productively on the

study of texts themselves, mapping the history of writing and reading across cultural and

temporal boundaries” (10).

Works Cited

Basnett, Susan. “Reflections on Comparative Literature in the Twenty-First Century.” Edinburgh

University Press, 2006.

Basnett, Susan & Trivedi Harish, Eds. “Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice.” London

and New York, 1999.

Bermann, Sandra. “Working in the And Zone: Comparative Literature and Translation.”

University of Oregon, 2009.

Boldrini, Lucia. “Considerations on the Historical Relationships Between Translation and

Comparative Literature.” University of London.

Boldrini, Lucia. “Comparative Literature in the Twenty-First Century: A View from Europe and

the UK.” Edinburgh University Press, 2006.

Chow, Rey. In the Name of Comparative Literature. John Hopkins, 1995.

Eckermann, Johann Peter. “Conversations with Goethe.” Strich, 1835. 27.

Hutcheon, Linda. “Comparative Literature: Congenitally Contrarian.”

Kenner, Hugh. “The Pound Era.” London: Faber, 1972.

Lolice, Frederico. A Short History of Comparative Literature: From the Earliest to the Present

Day. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1907.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Death of a Discipline.” New York: Columbia University Press,

2003.

Waggoner, Matt. “A Review of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline.” New York:

Columbia, 2003.