The Challenge of Comparative Literature

7/25/2019 The Challenge of Comparative Literature

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Octavia Wulandari (AG1) 40300113001

The Challenge of Comparative Literature (SUMMARY)

Part I

The Emergence of Comparative Literature

Claudio Guillen, an acclaimed comparatist, takes this up as the central

question in his book The Challenge of Comparative Literature, published in 1993. He

is thinking about Comparative Literature at a juncture when it has emerged out of a

series of debates, when it is still shrouded by waves of unresolved dilemma, when it

is threatened to be replaced by disciplines like Cultural Studies or Translation Studies.

Guillen emphasizes that since time writes itself into literature or any other form of

art, the disjuncture of space, the sense of discontinuous time, of a partitioned self, a

collection of heterogeneous fragments of a whole constantly challenge the idea of a

monolithic holistic experience.

Comparative literature (a conventional and not very enlightening label) is

usually understood to consist of a certain tendency or branch of literary

investigation that involves the systematic study of supranational

assemblages. page 3 (Claudio Guillen)

Part II

The Local and Universal

The second part of the book is geared towards the methodologies of

Comparative Literature and a schematic categorization of the directions that this field

of study achieves. Claudio Guillen engages in the already prevailing network of

scholarship and branches of literary Guillen history, subscribing to them, extending

them, challenging them or deconstructing them, in his enterprise of understanding

the discipline from his posited perspective. Relevant to the core idea of Claudio


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Guillens inquiry into comparative Literature is his definition of the comparatist as

one who dares to pester friends and colleagues, not just once but over and over.

This conveys a sense of constant questioning, of working along 29 contradictions that

never allow the walls around the discipline to settle.

In accordance with the focus of the French School, Guillen asserts that

Comparative Literature as an activity is a mode of literary communication. He

attempts to analyze the characteristics of this literary communication, how genres,

themes and forms interact within this channel, and eventually undergo

metamorphosis. He is definitely hinting at contact across cultures, lending

Comparative Literature with not an international characteristic but a supranational

one. The distinction between the international and the supranational is one of the key

issues in Guillens case for Comparative Literature. Supranational as opposed to

international implies a channel of communication that transcends the influence of

borders held by nations rather it emphasizes on a point of departure that is not

pivoted in national literatures, nor in the interrelationship between them. The

supranational identity of literary history signifies a phenomenon in which a dialogue

and mutual illumination of art takes place along a different principle that is beyond

the empirical contact of national identities. This supranational characteristic is

perhaps better explained through the dialectic of the local and the universal that faces

a comparatist. The dilemma between the local and the universal exists in overlaps

with quite a few set of binaries like the particular and the general, the one and the

many, the individual and the system through which one has to approach the

historiography of Comparative Literature.

In Local and Universal, Guillen stated that different and often opposing aims

attract and lure the criticssituation, although the options are reduced to four primary

ones: first, the gap between an artistic inclination (the enjoyment of literature as art)


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and a social preoccupation (the work as an act, a response to the imperfections and

deficiencies of the historical environs of man); second, the difference between the

practical (the interpretation of particular texts) and the theoretical (the explanation

explicit or not, of certain premises and of a significant order); third, the distinction

between the individual (the single work, the in mistakable writer, the originality the

cultivated and written literature makes possible) and the system (the whole, the

genre, the historical configuration, the generational movement, the inertia of

writing); and, finally, the tension between the local and the universal that confronts

comparatist in particular.

LocalNation, region or country

UniversalGeneral

It is also true that comparative do not operate within a sphere of extreme worldliness,

of up rootedness, abstraction, a cosmopolitanism, in distorted view of things that

reflect neither the real itinerary of literary history not the concrete coordinate of

poetic exaction.

E.g.: the comparison between Don Quixote & Orlando Furiosso

Orlando Furiosso was parody of works very much like romances of chivalry,

and focus literature as an art (Local)

Don Quixote focused on pastoral literature, the work as an act. (universal)


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Part III

The One and the Many

In the part III Guillen questioning a premise of comparative studies- the

horizon of the critic and historian this time- a condition of modern culture, a theme

of final reflection. In his previous chapter he explains that the polarity of the local and

the universal is enmeshed with the debate of monoism and pluralism. Comparative

Literature is saddled with the responsibility of being dialectical, of charting a literary

history from the conception of literature that is not a finished premise but a dynamic

process, of literature that is more precisely a body of cultural tools. A defining quality

of Comparative Literature is its inherent methodology that on one hand emphasizes

on dialogue between certain fundamental structures of literatures with distinct

linguistic and national configurations through time and on the other change,

evolution and historicity of literature and society across space. Both the channels

allow themes, genres and images to travel across the temporal and spatial

coordinates. Guillen explains that there are two basic coordinates, the one spatial and

the other temporal will help to determine and define the dialogue of literature.

The experiences of multiplicity in the universe is common and easily observed,

whereas the concept of the universe in its organic and unifying aspect does in fact

appear highly ambition to us as soon as we leave aside the laws of the natural sciences

and instead begin to consider historical events, social or political institutions, cultural

creations, and among these last, literature- whose unity debatable from the point of

view of the majority of those who dedicate themselves to studying it, comparatistincluded.


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Part IV

Romantic Ideals

It is well known that studies of comparative literature in the modern sense

began during the second and third decades of the nineteenth century, most

noticeably in France. A landmark occasion known to all was the series of lectures given

in Paris with great success by Abel Francois Villemain (1790-1870). Abel Francois

Villemain, a noted scholar, engaged with the questions of Comparative Literature in

1828 and 1829. The emergence of this approach coincided with the literary period of

Romantic French poetry. After the Napoleonic wars, the idea of cultural supremacy of

France, its pride in national literature marked the study of Comparative Literature. An

interesting historical paradox emerged from here: As a number of modern literatures

came to be recognized, the idea of a unitary poetics of literature broke. With the steep

sense of the rise of nationalism, an internationalism also marked Comparative

Literature.

Mostly romanticism was characterized by its emphasis on emotion andindividualism as well as glorification of all the past and nature, preferring the medieval

rather than the classical. It was partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, the

aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment, and the scientific

rationalization of nature. It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and

literature, but had a major impact on historiography, education, and the natural

sciences. It had a significant and complex effect on politics, and while for much of the

Romantic period it was associated with liberalism and radicalism, its long-term effecton the growth of nationalism was perhaps more significant.

The movement emphasized intense emotion as an authentic source of

aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as apprehension,


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horror and terror, and aweespecially that experienced in confronting the new

aesthetic categories of the sublimity and beauty of nature. It considered folk art and

ancient custom to be noble statuses, but also valued spontaneity, as in the musical

impromptu. In contrast to the rational and Classicist ideal models, Romanticism

revived medievalism and elements of art and narrative perceived as authentically

medieval in an attempt to escape population growth, early urban sprawl, and

industrialism.

The more precise characterization and specific definition of Romanticism has

been the subject of debate in the fields of intellectual history and literary history

throughout the 20th century, without any great measure of consensus emerging. That

it was part of the Counter-Enlightenment, a reaction against the Age of

Enlightenment, is generally accepted in current scholarship. Its relationship to the

French Revolution, which began in 1789 in the very early stages of the period, is

clearly important, but highly variable depending on geography and individual

reactions. Most Romantics can be said to be broadly progressive in their views, but a

considerable number always had, or developed, a wide range of conservative views,

and nationalism was in many countries strongly associated with Romanticism, as

discussed in detail below.

In literature, Romanticism found recurrent themes in the evocation or

criticism of the past, the cult of "sensibility" with its emphasis on women and children,

the isolation of the artist or narrator, and respect for nature. Furthermore, several

romantic authors, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, based their

writings on the supernatural/occult and human psychology. Romanticism tended to

regard satire as something unworthy of serious attention, a prejudice still influential

today.


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The precursors of Romanticism in English poetry go back to the middle of the

18th century, including figures such as Joseph Warton (headmaster at Winchester

College) and his brother Thomas Warton, Professor of Poetry at Oxford University.

Joseph maintained that invention and imagination were the chief qualities of a poet.

Thomas Chatterton is generally considered the first Romantic poet in English. The

Scottish poet James Macpherson influenced the early development of Romanticism

with the international success of his Ossian cycle of poems published in 1762, inspiring

both Goethe and the young Walter Scott. Both Chatterton and Macpherson's work

involved elements of fraud, as what they claimed was earlier literature that they had

discovered or compiled was, in fact, entirely their own work. The Gothic novel,

beginning with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), was an important

precursor of one strain of Romanticism, with a delight in horror and threat, and exotic

picturesque settings, matched in Walpole's case by his role in the early revival of

Gothic architecture. Tristram Shandy, a novel by Laurence Sterne (175967)

introduced a whimsical version of the anti-rational sentimental novel to the English

literary public.

Part V

The Compromises of Positivism

The first steps of the new discipline are well known. During the Romantic

years, there are two preoccupations that stand out according to Alexandru

Gioranescu: the reestablishment of the unity of literature and the study of the

relations between one nation and another.

At the end of the century comparatists adapted Romantic internationalism and

syncretism in this retreat in order to reconcile the two predominant tendencies of the

time: the insistence on a national character ology and on the prestige of the biological


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sciences. It was believed that every literature exists, breathes, grows, and involves like

a living being, its roots anchored in a certain social subsoil and certain national

idiosyncrasies.

Part VI

Weltliteratur

The term Weltliteraturenunciated by Goethe in 1827 came to be gradually

enhanced. If it is translated as literature of the world, it makes possible the dialogue

between the local and the universal, the one and the many that to this day forms the

basic premise of Comparative Literature. The most important aspect of it is that of

literature which talks of the world, of deepest experiences, of images that signify

nature and sensibilities across cultures. This bestows literature with its essential

supranational quality.

Over the course of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, the

rising tide of nationalism led to an eclipse of interest in world literature, but in the

postwar era, comparative and world literature began to enjoy a resurgence in the

United States. As a nation of immigrants, and with a less well established national

tradition than many older countries possessed, the United States became a thriving

site for the study of comparative literature (often primarily at the graduate level) and

of world literature, often taught as a first-year general education class. The focus

remained largely on the Greek and Roman classics and the literatures of the major

modern Western European powers, but a confluence of factors in the late 1980s and

early 1990s led to a greater openness to the wider world. The end of the Cold War,

the growing globalization of the world economy, and new waves of immigration from

many parts of the world led to several efforts to open out the study of world

literature. This change is well illustrated by the expansion of The Norton Anthology of


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World Masterpieces, whose first edition of 1956 featured only Western European and

North American works, to a new expanded edition of 1995 with substantial non -

Western selections, and with the title changed from masterpieces to the less

exclusive Literature.The major survey anthologies today, including those published

by Longman and by Bedford in addition to Norton, all showcase several hundred

authors from dozens of countries.

Guillen claims that the term Weltliteratur is extremely vague-in positive way

it is too suggestive, and is therefore open to many misunderstandings. He stated that

there are three other groups of meanings. First: the presence of some poets and some

poetries that can be of the worldand for all the world, for everybody. Not limited

to watertight national compartments, literatures can be accessible to future readers

of a growing number of countries. The universality of the literary phenomenon is

increasing. Second: works that in their real itinerary, their acceptance or rejection by

different readers, critics, or translators, have circulated throughout the world. These

necessarily include translations, transits, and studies of reception aesthetics, close to

what the first French comparative studies would become. And the third meaning:

poems that reflect the world, that speak perhaps for all men and all women of the

deepest, most common, or most lasting human experiences: the romantic exaltation

of the poet.

Today the concept of Weltliteratur raises certain difficulties, as we have

already seen. Perhaps the most interesting and suggestive one is the

distinction between the international and the supranational. These two

dimensions implicate each other and should not suppress but rather

foster the encounter between localization and meaning, an encounter

that gives rise to a certain literary impulse, as we pointed out earlier. The

greatest distances, those that most impede communication and

understanding, are perhaps not international but intertemporal.

Claudio Guillen.


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Part VII

The French Hour

Taking it up from here, how does the French School feed into the study of

Comparative Literature? Claudio Guillen rather calls it the French Hour signifying a

period of time stretching from the nineteenth century to the end of Second World

War when the French comparatists dominated the field of Comparative Literature.

They, distinctively, focused on the study of connections between national literatures,

the phenomenon of influence, transmission and communications. They were majorly

concerned with the study of images (imagology), study of reception as

communication and the study of international literary relations with of course France

as either the giver orthe receiver. The role of intermediaries became important

during the French Hour as the focus was directed towards reception studies.

Thus came forth the theoretical distinction between the fortune and success-

the influence, readership, sale were identified as the writers fortune while success

was understood as a quantitative category of fortune measured by the number ofeditions, adaptations, translations of work. Lacunae like the positivist conception of

literary influences i.e. looking only at the uninterrupted flow of one component into

the other, atomism i.e. isolating a singular work as the sufficient object of study of the

French Hour allowed for the American Hour to set in after the Second World War.

In this chapter Guillen explains that the opposition between the French

schooland the American schoolin comparative literature is only too well known.

And the conventional labels are as rudimentary as they are inadequate. Theoretically,

we find ourselves confronted by two opposing models, one international and the

other supranational: but in practice, the two models are intertwined. The French hour

allowed space for investigation of very different types, but the studies were based on


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national literatures-on their preeminence-and on the connections between them.

Major emphasis was placed on the phenomena of influence, transmission,

communication, transit (passage), or the link between activities and works belonging

to different national spheres.

Guillen had just mentioned in this chapter that the existence of that gateway

to comparative studies, which is the intermediarys knowledge and his different

personifications. At the same time, comparatist investigated what was called la

fortune dun ecrivain (a writers luck, or fortune). Instead of looking for the gateway,

they went looking for the exit. The intermediaries made possible the passage of a text

A to certain textsB, C, and D, before B, C, and D were published, by means of a factor

i. A diagram of this process would then be:

AiB, C, D.

After the appearance of D, the final balance sheet of the consequences of a

work---its influence, effect, success, diffusion, readership, and sale --- was the writes

fortune. The diagram then becomes:

AiB, C, D,fof A.

The fortune or success of a writer, genre, or movement is a process that

follows the publication of a literary work. The extent of this process can be calibrated,

measured sociologically. (The editor is perhaps a sociologist without realizing it, but

only up to certain point, if it is a question of writers in fashion.) For quite a few years

now, fortunes and reputations have taken on strange shapes. At times, the

unpredictable, capricious, and tangled events connected with literary influences lead

the comparatist to ponder the complexity and peculiar character of the history of

literatures.


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There were three principal deficiencies, that Guillen have already mentioned,

that existed alongside the preeminence of national literatures. The first one concerns

the positivist conception of literary influences. Mental or imaginative events, like

physical, chemical, or biological ones, were thought to obey the principle of

conversation of matter, of the transmutation of certain elements into others

organized differently. Second, the earlier interest in influences was not a

manifestation of the obsession genetica that appears to us so typical of the nineteenth

century. In third place, the tendency to isolate a singular work, converting it into a

unique or sufficient object of study, has been called atomism.

Part VIII

The American Hour

Contradictory to the French hour, the American Hour gathered scholars from

different origins to work on the same soil .It focus on the universal humanizing nature

of literature and the other arts added a much needed orientation to the study of

Comparative Literature. The Second World War had devastated European civilizationsand thus confines of narrow nationalism began to be refuted. Interdisciplinary

studies, an equivalent of the dominant cultural phenomenon of the melting point

theory acquired primary focus Following the Second World War and the dominance

of the American School of Comparative Literature the major directions or

classifications of the field of Comparative Literature became vivid.

Part IX

Litterature Generale and Literary Theory

Outdated though it may seem to us today, it is worthwhile to recall the old

argument that gave rise to the idea of literature generale, and not simply because it

still surfaces from time to time. Comparative literature would donate the study of


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relations between two or more literatures; binary contacts-between work and work,

work and author, author and author- would assure these connections.

The study of genres or genology, the formal proceeding or morphology, the

study of themes or thematology, the study of literary relations or internationality and

the historical configuration or historiology may be listed as the primary

methodological tools of Comparative Literature. Genres form a categorizing unit of

literary studies, looked upon as models with particular markers that can be placed

with literary systems or poly systems to understand the evolution of different forms.

What fuels the evolution one genre from another, or the dominance of a particular

genre at a moment in history?

Guillen notes that a writer might find the existing genre to be inadequate for

his creative sensibility or may be his sensibility finds home in a structure that existed

much before in historical time. These structures of feeling stretch the boundaries of

an existing genre or makes a previous genre evolve according to the artistic need. A

structure might also have certain elements that can be recovered by significant

elements, characters, behavior or emotional attitude. Again each genre has its

efficacy pivoted to a historical time that is in turn characterized by specific lived

realities and modes of expression. These currents crisscross to form a literary genre

or make one disappear. One may be able to categorize literature from a diachronic

perspective through the journey of genres. It is important to note that when we

talking about the evolution of genres and their disappearances across time, we are

considering the process of contact and contract across time.

For almost thirty years, literary theory has obviously enjoyed an astonishing

boom- uncomfortable and disturbing for many. It is important not to mix up the

property of the term theory with the occasions that arise to use the adjective

theoretical. Thais is, the profusion of theoretical writings that we read-writings that


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contain an intense theoretical charge, like so many electrified, objects- is inversely

proportional to the actually quite small number of produced or developed theories.

There is little doubt that comparatists learn a great deal from no comparatists.

Certainly quite a few comparatist have maintained a conservative stance, and the

most recent theoretical ideas usually come from other fields. But conservative or

conformist, it would be rash to adopt and reflect immediately the actual status quo,

no matter how innovative it might be. In addition, this hasty adoption puts us in

position of incoherence, in a chaos of perspectives, in an out-and-out marginal state.

Comparativism at least knows the problems it faces. In comforting them, it is

imperative that present-day comparatist admits that the theory of literature is a

challenge for them at least as fundamental and necessary as general literature was

for their predecessors. In sum, the, the internal structure of our discipline is the

tension or polarity that exists between grades of theoreticity.

Part X

Three Models of Supranationality

Guillen classified three models of supranationality that are presented to

students of comparative literature.

1. The most recent model is the study of phenomena and supranational

assemblages that imply internationality, that is, suggest either genetic

contacts or other relations between authors and processes belonging to

distinct national spheres or common cultural premises.

E.g. the picaresque novel and the theme of Don Juan.

2. When phenomena or processes that are genetically independent, or belong to

different civilizations, are collected and brought together for study, such an


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examination can be justified and carried out to the extent that common

sociohistorical conditions are implied.

E.g. the development of the novel in eighteenth-century Europe and in

seventeenth-century Japan.

3. Some genetically independent phenomena make up supranational entities in

accordance with principles and purposes derived from the theory of literature.

This model has the highest grade of theoreticity, since the conceptual

framework, instead of being pragmatic or merely adequate in the face of the

observable facts, usually provides a point of departure for the investigation or

for the problem to be resolved.

Part XI

Taxonomies

In the past many comparatists have arranged and classified their materials and

fundamental objectives by proposing taxonomies, hierarchies, and other subdivisions

of their field of study. In a 1943 article Renato Poggioli concluded that at the end ofthe nineteenth century there were four primary directions of investigation in

comparative literature: first, the thematic, or the study of folkloric themes, the origins

and transmigrations of legends and medieval tales. Second, the morphological

direction, or study of genres and forms, which at that time meant above all the

Darwinian theory of evolution des genres. Third, the identification of sources, or

crenologia, from the Greek Krene spring); and fourth, the examination of thefortuna

(luck) of a writer, which in turn meant paying attention to intermediaries involved inthe fortuna-journals, translations, and so on.

The taxonomy for the study of translation is intended to serve as a theoretical

framework to be applied in the study of translation including applied studies of single


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as well as several texts in translation. The study of translation has been traditionally

an area of comparative literature and thus translation studies is accorded focus in the

field of "comparative cultural studies," a field that combines traditional comparative

literature with new knowledge in both comparative literature and cultural studies:

Comparative cultural studies is a field of study in the humanities and social sciences

where tenets of the discipline of comparative literature are merged with the field of

cultural studies. In comparative cultural studies the objects of study are culture and

culture products including literature, the visual arts, media, performance, ritual, etc.,

and extending to such areas of culture as the history of communication (e.g., the

history of the book, etc.)

According to A. Owen Aldridge (1969) he list five principal areas of

investigation.

1. Literary criticism and theory,

2. Literary movements,

3. Literary themes,

4. Literary forms,

5. Literary relations.

Guillen already mentioned that comparative literature has been and is an

intellectual discipline characterized by the posing of certain problems that only

comparative literature is in a position to confront.


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Part XII

Genre: Genology

The matter of literary genres is one of the essentially contested concepts that

has played a leading role in the history of poetics since the time of Aristotle. Guillen

pointed the six aspects of literary genres.

1. Historically, genre were thought of as occupying a terrain whose components

evolve over centuries, as ever changing models for which we must find a place

in a literary system or poly system that sustains a definite moment in the

evolution of poetic form. (E.g. in nineteenth-century Russia, the letter, the

personal diary, and the serialized novel). In addition, the formalist perspective-

historical-evolutionist and agonistic-encompassed not only the genres, the

methods, styles, and even the concept of literature itself but also the premises

on which we base our reader; and therefore, even the study or the science of

literature.

2.

Sociologically, literature is not only an institution but genres as well:subgenres, or istituti, as some Italian critics say. Guillen not referring to

sociology of literature, but to the components and classes of literature itself

considered as established and conditioned social complexes.

3. Pragmatically, genre implies not only contact but contracts. The reader has

expectations of certain genres. If these are popular, oral, or commercial

artistic forms- the story, the epic poem, the detective novel, the horror movie,

the western-the matter is very clear. The innovative writer understands thisand often relies on it to fabricate his surprises.

4. Structurally, genre has been considered not only as an isolated element but

also as part of a whole-that is, of a complex of options, alternatives,

interrelations. Confronting the ideal space of the models of an era, the writer


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chooses a particular genre from the range of models available at a certain

time. Some genres are contragenres or works whose origin is contageneric. In

sum, the concept of function links not only the single work but also the genre

with the whole, evolution with the continuity, and the critics historical and

structural perspectives.

5. Logically, the genre acts primarily as a mental model. This ideal or conceptual

aspect of genre is what the critic loses sight of as soon as he limits himself to

saying s book is a novelor Ys work is utopian. From this point of view, it

becomes necessary to confront the problem posed by geneta mixtafar from

scarce in the history of literature.

6. Comparatively, the examination of necessity comparative in nature, of the

range of a genre is both delicate and decisive. Even though a critical reading

of a single work from the point of view of the genre or genres to which it

belong can be very effective, genology clearly cannot be limited to that one

procedure.

Part XIII

Forms: Morphology

The modalities that extend the markers of a genre are also based in story of

reception, in which the structure of feeling of the time and the horizon of expectation

of the readers implicate the genre. So a genre, like the European novel of the

nineteenth century, is not an isolated entity but it is part of a whole- part of a complex

web of alternatives, options, confrontations of models, and an assimilation ofelements across time. For a comparatist, the a study of genre may thus reveal how it

travelled across literary models embedded in time, why it drew upon certain

formalistic elements for the creative expression of its sort, how a similar genre that is

marginal in one culture is dominant in another. This also widens the field of literary


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study, not just restricting it to the study of European models. It is a plurality of

paradigms.

Guillen qualifies genres as conventional models that comprise the thematic

as well as the formalistic elements. While the form is always in dialogue with the

content, the study of forms is designated as morphology. He suggests certain stylistic

literary devices such as dialogue, digression, defamiliarization as elements of a form.

A digression may purposefully signify something or signify nothing in a narrative

.There is no pure form because he emphasizes that a narrative always has an interplay

of forms. While examining forms there are several enmeshed levels of stratification

like that of the phonic, the grammatical, the prosodic, the poetic, the theatrical and

others.

The study of themes or thematology is intrinsically linked to genology or

morphology. Thematological study is relevant to the comparatist depending on the

historical panorama available to him and the significance of intertextuality that allows

him to connect representations of similar themes in other texts. Themes in their study

are identified either as structuring theme, significant theme orinciting theme.

A conceptual understanding of the terms like theme, motif, image, situation, type,

topoi and commonplaces form the bulk of thematology. Images are explained as

significant visual entities like, the whiteness of Moby Dick that is a code in the

narrative.

There are certain symbolic scenes or situations like the decent to the

underworld in epics, the flattery of the seductress that are lined to genres acrosscultures. Then there are moral, social or professional types like the fool, the miser

with specific narratives and characteristics. The themes are thus active or passive: that

what the writer draws from the world and then modifies, transforms or overturns to

say what she wants to say. There has been a debate over the concepts of primary


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theme and principal motif. Scholars like Trousson claim that motif precedes theme.

Thus the situation of a man between two women, conflict between two brothers is

the basic situation or motif. An individualization, particular expression of this motif is

theme. Frenzel names it in the opposite direction. What comes out of it is a passage

from the general to the particular, how a preliterary sketch, an idea is aesthetically

treated in literature. Thus, the journey of the theme of rebellion to the motif of

Prometheus or vice versa.

All of these methodologies call forth the domain of literary relationship or

internationality. How genres interact across historical time, how a themes travel

across cultures, how literary systems flow into one another is a matter of influences

and literary relations. Pertinent to the study of comparative Literature are questions

of what makes the diffusion of a work possible, what is the object of study in

intertextuality? The concept of intertextuality is not just a detailed study of external

influences, presence of biographical evidences but rather implies resonances of a

deeper structure. Thus, while talking about literary relationships Claudio Guillen re-

asserts that every text isan intertext. It contains a number of texts at the level of

social language, cultural codes, formulas, rhythmic models and literary systems. Thus

translation is a process within this chain of literary contact, a channel of

communication. The last appendage co-related to each of these is the narrative of

continuities and discontinuities of genres, themes and forms- we are moving towards

the concept of historiology.

Literary history is based on the fundamental concepts of periods, currents,

school, movement and etc. The obstacle is to move out from the confines of specific

countries and look at it from a holistic perspective. An overarching dilemma facing the

field of study is the distinction between the history of literature and literary history.

Perhaps re-iterating a few questions evoked by Guillen is a mode of launching into


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this discussion. What are the intertemporal forms that determine the continuities and

discontinuities? What narrative tactics do literary histories draw upon? What do they

have in common with fictitious or invented histories? Two contrasting models

respond to the dilemma. One is the model of discontinuity that stresses on how

principle characteristic dominate one literary period for a certain number of years and

then fade. The other model stresses on continuity, the flow of time, the plurality of

styles, themes, genres that emerge out of contacts and disagreements as well. Thus

two aspects of literary periodization become specific

a) It is a horizontal model based on diachronic study

b) A literary period is a structures interrelation in which constituents flow from

an earlier period, modify and evolve towards the future.

The dynamism of this structure relates to Claudio Guillens point of departure

in understanding the goal of comparative literature. He says the goal of

comparativism is to identify, order and study supranational and diachronic

structures. Structures because they present a plethora of alternatives, options, sincethey evolve from the examination of more than one civilization or from an exploration

of divergent cultures. The responsibility thus rests on Comparative Literature to

constantly evolve models of alternative models of literary history that are not euro-

centric.

Documents

The Challenge of Comparative Literature