Comparative Literature and Comparative Cultural Studies

The Culture of the Context:Comparative Literature Past and Future

58 The Culture of the Context: Comparative Literature Past and Future Jan Walsh Hokenson On the brink of the new millennium, as we look back over literary history and the recent past of comparative literature as an academic discipline , it seems timely to ask: What have we learned, in Mario Valdés’s words, about “literature in the context of the culture it represents”? How will those lessons shape literary histories in the next millennium? Having recently, often nervously moved along the Great Divide between theory and text, most comparatists have struggled to keep the discipline’s traditional emphasis on literary history at least visible on the horizon. Meanwhile, it often seemed that the figure of Theory loomed so large as to blot out mere text, and literary history—not to mention aesthetics—seemed lost to literature; then Culture shouldered Theory aside and emerged as equally immense, ahistorical , and aesthetically numb. Between text as Foucauldian, authorless discursive construct and text as Geertzian, authorless cultural artefact, literary history as a history seemed to splinter into discrete freeze-frames, sliced for theoretical consumption. Some of the most brilliant work of recent years (by such diverse figures as Hayden White, Stephen Greenblatt, Richard Terdiman, Stephen Kern, Lydia Liu) seems like preparatory spadework, providing the tools for re-envisioning literary history rather than the thing itself. Just as early Structuralism had such difficulty getting beyond the paragraph, so perhaps we are in an early stage of historico-cultural work that cannot yet get beyond the delimited period or even generation, in order to attain the perspective of the overview of “literary history ” that was once basic to comparative critical training and study. Now, as we scan the horizon, adjusting our many, many lenses for viewing local historicities, shall we be forever in the trenches? Can we, and indeed should we ever hope to regain the panoptic view? We do know that literary history is a dynamic and fluid sequence, spilling over centuries and over national borders and languages, presenting each young writer with a blueprint of the genre and the formal tradition in which he or she then invents. By way of approaching the burdens and challenges of literary history in the next millennium, I should like to focus for a moment on one particular kind of critical problem—cross-cultural intertextuality—that has always characterized comparative study and that suggests the sorts of problems and new directions that comparatists will face in the coming epoch of global life and art. I. CULTURAL INTERTEXTS Many writers who have in part shaped Western literary history (Cervantes, Goethe, Balzac, for example, or Joyce, Proust, Mann) wrote texts intensely conscious of the full sweep of European literary history which they critiqued, synthesized, and redefined. Balzac drew upon the long history of French prose fiction since Rabelais but also relied heavily on Dante and Shakespeare —Italian and English summas of their respective national literary traditions —to reconfigure French literary history, and reflexively critique French culture of 1830–50; accordingly, Proust so used Balzac, plus Tolstoy and Dostoevsky , even as Joyce was invoking Homer to write the modernist national epic of Ireland and Mann was using the Bible to construe the German tradition since romanticism. At one time, to study such issues was to undertake “comparative authors” or “sources and influences,” terms that became anathema in the postmodern, authorless decades. Now, still on our brink, how do we describe the literary-historical context of this cultural wedge—Dante-in-Balzac, say, or Japanese Noh in Yeats or négritude in Modernism: Is there a critical category of analysis which, now moving beyond outworn forms of author-based studies, can embrace all that we have learned about discursive moments in time and cultural fields in social space? It is already clear that this sort of cross-cultural borrowing, which Earl Miner and others are beginning to theorize as comparative poetics, will become The Culture of the Context: Comparative Literature Past and Future 59 more frequent and more global in the coming era of globalization. Concerning these few examples I have mentioned, how do we historically and culturally contextualize them? As a “history” of intertextualities? Surely not. They are intersections that, on our brink, we cannot yet insert in “culture” or any satisfactory locus of comparative cultural “context.” When Wellek and Warren unfurled the banner of intrinsic criticism in the 1940s, such textual intersections...