Comparative Literature and Globalism: A Chinese Cultural and Literary Strategy

In recent years, intensive debate concerning globalization has become academic fashion among Chinese scholars of the humanities and social sciences, especially when globalization can be associated with comparative literature studies. It is true that ours could be defined as an age of globalization, which manifests itself not just in economy, but more apparently in some other aspects of our cultural life and literary works. It is not surprising that the issue of globalization or globality has been interesting not only to economists and politicians, but also to intellectuals and scholars of comparative literature and cultural studies. Obviously, the advent of globalization is regarded by many as merely a contemporary event, especially in the Chinese context, but if we trace its origin in the Western context from an economic and historical point of view, we could find that it is by no means a twentieth-century phenomenon: It is a long process that began at least several centuries ago. Globalization has already affected research in literature and culture, especially in the field of comparative literature that is undoubtedly a consequent result of such a process in the latter part of the nineteenth century, but which is now suffering from the strong forces of cultural and linguistic globalization. I will, in the present essay, first trace the origin of globalization before exploring its positive and negative effects on comparative literature studies as well as on contemporary Chinese cultural and intellectual life.

Traveling Globalization: from the West to China

In the current Chinese critical and theoretical circles, Edward Said has frequently been mentioned, largely for his famous "traveling theory."¹ Obviously, as so many Western critical concepts and cultural and theoretical trends have traveled far away from the West to China since the early 1920s, why not globalization as well? For many Chinese intellectuals, globalization is merely something imported from the West, which is undoubtedly a consequence of global capitalization and a function of transnational corporations. This affirmation is true insofar as China is still relatively poor compared with developed Western countries like the United States and Germany. This supports the assumption that globalization could not have naturally arisen on this poor soil, although the Chinese economy has been developing by leaps and bounds in recent years. So in this part of my essay, I will first define our present age as that of globalization, which manifests itself in various aspects far beyond economy and finance. Globalization is no doubt a traveling process from the West to the East, functioning both at the center as well as the periphery. Just as William J. Martin describes, the world we now live in is an "electronic global village where, through the mediation of information and communication technologies, new patterns of social and cultural organization are emerging."² That is, in such an age of globalization, along with the fast floating of capital (both economic and cultural) and information, people's communication becomes more and more direct and convenient. The terrorist attacks on New York and on Washington, D.C. on September 11^th in 2001 immediately appeared live on TV screens before hundreds of millions of TV viewers all over the world without any technical difficulty. And such a high-tech transmission of video pictures and information even makes people hardly believe that this tragic event really happened in the open air. The compact state of time and space thus makes it possible for people at home to know everything that has happened in the world. It is indeed a fact that globalization, especially in the humanities, is stubbornly resisted by another strong force: localization and various types of ethnicism or regional nationalism. We must recognize that globalization is an objective phenomenon haunting our memory every now and then and influencing our cultural and intellectual life, as well as our way of thinking and our academic study. Under the impact of such ghost-like globalization, cultural and literary markets have been shrinking more and more. The humanities and social sciences are severely challenged by the over-inflation of knowledge and information. Transnational corporations have long transgressed the boundaries of nations...