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  • Introduction
  • Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman

This issue of New Literary History raises questions about the epistemology, aesthetics, politics, and disciplinary histories of comparison. To what extent do all modes of thought rely on implicit, if not explicit, forms of comparison? What are the limitations of comparisons based on lists of similarities and differences and what other methods of comparative thinking might we envision? Is comparative analysis compatible with the acknowledgment of singularity or even incommensurability? Can comparison decenter or unsettle our standards of measure rather than reinforce them? Can we think of literary texts as agents of comparison as well as objects of comparison, modeling alternative forms of relational thinking? How do we rethink structures of comparison in order to do justice to past and current postcolonial and global contexts? How do the new spatial modes of analysis based on interrelations, conjunctures, networks, linkages, and modes of circulation draw on or enrich comparative thinking? What are the contributions of different disciplines and interdisciplinary fields to the archive of comparative scholarship?

As cultures are forced into ever greater proximity through the dissemination of new media and escalating patterns of migration, as global flows of texts, ideas, and persons traverse traditional borders and boundaries, acts of comparing seem ubiquitous and inescapable. Yet the idea of comparison is frequently spurned as old-fashioned at best, retrograde at worst. Comparison, it is often said, is never neutral; it develops within a history of hierarchical relations. Scholars of comparative literature and of anthropology, especially, are often anxious to disavow their disciplines' entanglement in comparative methodologies, citing the complicity of these disciplines with colonialism and Eurocentrism during their formative years. Comparison, in this light, is seen as a homogenizing process rooted in the encyclopedic ambitions and evolutionary models of nineteenth-century thought—an approach that distorts the uniqueness of the objects being compared, reduces them to variants on a common standard, and relies on a downgrading of certain cultures in relation to others.

The renunciation of comparison, however, seems neither possible nor desirable. Comparison is a mode of thinking, an analogical form of human cognition, that is indispensable to understanding and creativity and that depends upon principles of relation and differentiation. Not [End Page v] just a cornerstone of analytic thought, comparison pervades everyday life as one of the fundamental ways in which we organize and make sense of the world around us. Forms of comparison are built into the deep structures of language and constitute the basis for ubiquitous figures of speech such as metaphor, simile, and analogy. Intertextuality, with its insistence on the relational and interdependent nature of meaning, underscores that comparison is an inevitable, rather than optional, form of thought. Moreover, the political stakes of relational thinking call for more extensive consideration. Comparisons can indeed be insidious, buttressing complacent attitudes in individuals or cultures while inculcating feelings of inadequacy or shame in others. But acts of comparing are also crucial for the registering of inequalities and for struggles against the unjust distribution of resources. Comparison is central to the analysis of world systems, transcontinental connections, and interculturalism, not only in the current phase of globalization but throughout human history. Moreover, comparison does not automatically authorize the perspective of those doing the comparing, but can also serve as a jolt to consciousness, initiating a destabilizing, even humbling, awareness of the limitedness and contingency of one's own perspective.

"Why compare?" asks R. Radhakrishnan in the opening essay, using the example of his friendly sparring with an autorickshaw driver in Chennai to set the stage for a wide-ranging meditation on comparison. Radhakrishnan zeroes in on questions of epistemology as well as politics, elaborating the philosophical complexities of a self-other problematic that troubles any notion of comparison as a neutral activity and that inevitably transforms the objects being compared. His subsequent turn to A Passage to India underscores the centrality of comparative thinking to the making of literature as well as theory. While aspects of Forster's conception of India seem befuddled or benighted, his novel also allegorizes and reflects on the perils and the promise of cross-cultural recognition. While Radhakrishnan retains a qualified skepticism in the face of pragmatist...

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