The New Humanities: The Intercultural, the Comparative, and the Interdisciplinary

This essay is a proposal for the rejuvenation of the humanities, that is, proposals of how to make the study of literature and culture socially relevant in today's world. The proposed framework, "comparative cultural studies," is a field of study where selected tenets of the discipline of comparative literature merge with selected tenets of the field of cultural studies, meaning that the study of culture and culture products—including but not restricted to literature, communication, media, art, etc.—is performed in a contextual and relational construction and with a plurality of methods and approaches, based on an ideology of interculturalism, practiced in interdisciplinarity, and, if and when advantageous, including team work, as well as employing the advantages of new media technology.