Editor's Column: Comparisons Within and Beyond a Single Language

??? COMPAKATIST EDITOR'S COLUMN: COMPARISONS WITHIN AND BEYOND A SINGLE LANGUAGE Comparisons between literary works written in different languages were once the distinguishing feature ofcomparative literature, but does that definition ofthe field still hold? Several essays in this issue, as well as an increasing number of submissions, make it clear that several other factors have come into play since the 1960s, if not before. The multilingual criterion long ago expanded to include interarts comparisons (literary works related to aesthetic languages in music, the visual arts, theatre, or cinema). More recently, it has also been extended to interdiscursive ones (literature related to the disciplinary languages of philosophy, history , or science). In addition, the strong identification of comparatists with transnational literary history (Auerbach, Guillen, or Said) or with theory (Jakobson, Barthes, or de Man) seems to have had an unintended side effect. Despite the language credentials of many leading practitioners , these visions ofthe field weakened multilingualism by giving priority to other, more general and ambitious kinds of insight, themselves often historical or philosophical in inspiration. The rise, finally, of multicultural awareness in language and literature departments—for example , Francophone Studies or the emphasis on the multi-ethnic nature of American literature—has given yet another impetus to monolingual comparative work. As a result, anyone who has attended recent conferences in our field, in the U. S. at least, will have noticed a decline in the requirement that comparisons deal with material in several languages. In this issue the essays by Benton Komins, Ronald Bogue, and Amiya Sharma may seem to reflect this trend. Yet on reflection, they display the wider cultural or intellectual dimensions associated with comparative work that goes beyond a single language. Komins, who has written for us about creolization in New Orleans, now treats East German playwright Heiner Müller's rewriting ofa Weimar-era didactic play by Brecht. What takes this comparison beyond the scope of German studies is, first, its concern with larger issues of historical periodization, namely the shift from modernism to postmodernism. The essay also contrasts two stages in the transnational myth ofthe Russian Revolution as embodied in the disciplined Leninist party: from a historical creed thought to offer effective resistance to a Nazifying Germany, it turns into the stale dogmas of Soviet-sphere socialism haunted by a ruthless past. At this level, Komins suggests, his essay's implications reach beyond Germany to situations in France, Russia, and indeed throughout Eastern Europe. To the extent that Bogue explores a link across the century between William Butler Yeats and Samuel Beckett, his essay resembles Komins's and might be construed as a contribution to Irish Studies. Beckett's turn to French in the writings treated here, however, does give the topic an explicit multilingual cast. Nonetheless, it is Beckett's role in fueling French grand theory (here represented by Gilles Deleuze), as well as Vol. 26 (2002): 1 EDITOR'S COLUMN Bogue's emphasis on the migration ofthe image across various arts from Noh drama via Yeats to Beckett's television plays, that make this essay quintessentially comparative. By the same token, Sharma's three-way study ofTagore, James, and Forster might recall essays on "World Literature in English," especially given Tagore's efforts to reach English readers . But although Sharma works with the family-produced English version of The Home and the World rather than the Bengali original, he takes a clear comparatist stance by addressing the field's methodologies in both India and the west, by highlighting inter-regional aspects to his topic, and by informing Western readers of Indian particularities that might be misunderstood or escape notice. Above all, this essay conveys something ofthe reversal proposed in Michael Chapman's opening essay: rather than interpreting the postcolonial periphery in terms ofan imperial center, why not begin with the periphery? Thus, although Sharma aims to unearth psychosexual commonalities beneath cultural differences , Tagore is his benchmark for analyzing James and Forster. Chapman, however, whose Southern African Literatures was favorably reviewed in our 1997 issue, wants to go a step further. Along with relating Indian or South African literary phenomena back to English or American parallels, he argues for comparing points on the so-called periphery...