Comparative Literature in the Low Countries

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When I tell members of the general public, in airplanes or hotel bars, what I do for a living, the most common reply has always been: 'What do you guys compare literature to?' Nowadays I tend to answer: 'With everything else.' If I look at the courses I have given over the years, this is not even an exaggeration – I have taught courses on literature 'And Very Nearly Everything Else': literature and music, literature and the arts, literature and science, psychology, religion, sociology, history, philosophy. The trouble with literature, however defined, is that you cannot even begin to grasp its complexity if you do not fully understand its relationship to, well, everything else. In my personal life this has meant that I have found the perfect academic excuse for an unquenchable thirst forall kinds of information, some more, some less arcane (less charitably it could be argued that this has saved me from having to make up my Kierkegaardian mind about what I really want to do with my life).

There is a clear tension between the interrelatedness of the literary phenomenon with everything else on the one hand and on the other hand the autonomous status that literature as an object of study attained in the two decades after World War II when the New Critics attempted, at least in theory, to cut the links between the individual work and the context in which it had been produced. Strategically, the move of giving the literary object greater autonomy may have been a necessary step in the context of the new post-war universities to ensure a sort of scientific objectivity for the study of literature. But it is certainly ironic that a contemporary and parallel manœuvre by the so-called New Bibliography chose the exact opposite path, committing anew – and programmatically – what New Criticism once decried as the intentional fallacy. In the wake of W. W. Greg and others, the editor Fredson Bowers described the basis of the editing of literary texts as defined by a given author's final intentions, whereas by the mid-seventies John M. Ellis, in his The Theory of Literary Criticism, showed no compunction about defining literary texts as 'those that are used by the society in such a way that the text is not taken as specifically relevant to the immediate context of its origin' [author's italics].¹ Ellis was trying to find a logical distinction between criticism and what he describes as scholarship or literary history, but it is clear that the older comparative literature did not really have an obvious place in the New Criticism, and this is also made clear by René Wellek and Austin Warren in their own The Theory of Literature. The concentration on close readings of individual works made it difficult or at least inconvenient that these works had been produced at a particular historical moment and within a specific national or international context. At the very moment when I began my graduate studies in 'complit' at the University of Toronto, the stage was set for yet another and even more radical change in literary studies with the arrival in North America of French theory. After my own peculiar path (lots of French theory as an undergraduate in Belgium, very traditional and decidedly untheoretical MA-studies in Dublin) my stay in Canada enabled me to look at the exciting and controversial introduction of French ideas in the North-American context from a slightly different perspective than my peers. What I felt as an advantage was the fact that I could distinguish and compare different incarnations of what was indiscriminately called 'theory' at the time. For me 'theory' could be understood fully only when it was taken as specifically relevant to the immediate context of its origin. Without fully realising it until I came to Toronto, I had always been a natural born comparatist, but that was not even something I could really take credit for.

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The Low Countries, like the Alsace, Switzerland or Luxembourg, are 'contact-cultures,' smaller cultural centres where two or more national or linguistic cultures rub against...