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Comparative Literature?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

David Damrosch
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Extract

In recent years, North American literary studies has been marked by a double movement: outward from the Euro-American sphere toward the entire globe and inward within national traditions, in an intensified engagement with local cultures and subcultures. Both directions might seem natural stimuli to comparative study—most obviously in the transnational frame of global studies but also in more local comparisons: a natural way to understand the distinctiveness of a given culture, after all, is to compare it with and contrast it to others. Yet journal articles and job listings alike have not shown any major growth in comparative emphasis in recent years. Is the comparatist doomed to irrelevance, less equipped than the national specialist for local study and yet finding the literary globe expanding farther and farther out of reach, accessible only to a multitude of, again, local specialists?

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Information
PMLA , Volume 118 , Issue 2 , March 2003 , pp. 326 - 330
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2003

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