Editor's Column: Transitions

Comparative literature, it has often been noted, is perpetually in crisis or in question, if not pronounced dead. Following Voltaire's remark on the Holy Roman Empire, one could observe that the field is often configured as neither comparative nor about literature. And yet, as the American Comparative Literature Association's most recent ten-year report shows,¹ the discipline survives, even triumphs, not by consensus but by diversity. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that comparative literature is in a perpetual state of transition. Transitions begun in recent years continue: from close reading of literature in original languages to theory to cultural studies; from Eurocentric to multicultural to global; from a comparative to a "world" perspective and, perhaps, back; from a focus on cultural production to one on literature, if in a newly defined space. The essays published in this volume discuss in various ways notions of transition, while also reflecting the discipline's transitional nature.

One of the more prominent controversies in the field in recent years—prominent because it affects not so much specialized research as teaching, from introductory to advanced levels—has been the relationship between the fields, or ideas, of comparative and world literature. John Pizer confronts this controversy, offering first an historical analysis of the terms Weltliteratur, littérature universelle, littérature générale, and "world literature." Whereas the latter term, almost exclusively American, refers to an academic subject, the French and German terms have evolved as heuristic postulates on the nature of literature. Yet Pizer argues that the Goethean paradigm, moved beyond its original Eurocentric focus as a means of gaining insight into foreign cultures and traditions, may be profitably adapted to the pedagogy of world literature. He traces the history of the relations between the notions of Weltliteratur and comparative literature in Germany and of comparative literature and world literature in the United States and also takes on controversies sparked by the 2004 ACLA report. Arguing for what he calls a "universal-particular dialectic" in the world-literature classroom and emphasizing both the universality of literature and the particularity of cultures, Pizer is ultimately optimistic about the possibility of an ongoing productive relationship between comparative and world literature.

Transitions are effected by translations in Julie Singer's original perspective on Boccaccio's tale "Andreuccio da Perugia." In a continuation of The Comparatist's tradition of publishing essays dealing with intersections between the visual and the literary arts, Singer uses literary, historical, and artistic analyses to construct her argument. Reminding us that one of the original meanings of the word "translation" involved moving a body from one place of interment to another, Singer relates the plot element of the transferral to his family chapel of the remains of an Italian archbishop to Boccaccio's translation, in the linguistic sense, of a French fabliau inserted in the first half of his story. The architectural analysis of the tombs, along with the literary one of Boccaccio's translation/transformation from the French, illuminates a transition from the hegemony of French cultural values to the affirmation of native Italian ones.

A different concept of translation underlies Simona Livescu's essay on negativity in autobiographical writing. Drawing on the medieval Scholastic notion of apophatism, or the impossibility of knowing or naming God, Livescu examines the expression of the impossibility of "translating" experience into text. Augustine's Confessions serves as a model for autobiographical writing that presents the difficulty of writing the self through literary strategies such as substitution, omission, and paradox. She then examines what she terms "the negative-apophatic understanding of the self " in the autobiographical writing of two contemporary Francophone writers, Assia Djebar and Annie Ernaux, pointing out the importance, across cultural differences, of the role of the maternal in female autobiography. The act of attempting to translate impossibility results in linguistic innovation: the creation of "an apophatic differential language."

In the texts treated in Patricia Ferrer-Medina's "Wild Humans," transitions take the form of transformations. She first examines the wild human as a liminal figure, moving back and forth between the human an animal world, and a long-standing...