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THE COMPARATIST EDrrOR'S COLUMN A publication borrows life and energy from its many contributors, reviewers, readers. The steady expansion ofajournal's circulation and impact signals a healthy relationship with the scholarly community around it. What may not be immediately apparent is the tireless, challenging , never ending work of its editor. The Comparatist has been very fortunate to have Mechthild Cranston in that position for almost a decade. During her three consecutive terms as editor, The Comparatist has grown not only in circulation but also in substance, spanning a diversity of preoccupations and areas, from the study of specific literary influences and relationships, to broad intertextual, intercultural , and interartistic exchanges. The Comparatist has also matured methodologically, encouraging a supple interplay oftheoretical reflection and applied comparative analysis. Having won recognition and an interested readership well beyond its southern roots, The Comparatist can now look forward to a more active participation in the debates and elaborations of our field. The consistent critical and thematic frameworks built by its former editors, allow The Comparatist to enter this dialogue with an already established discursive domain and voice. With its broad range ofareas and approaches, ourjournal presents a successful cross-section ofcomparative studies, while also suggesting some of the lingering theoretical and methodological prob-lems of our field. Over the last quarter of a century, many new methodologies have beenproposed, new notions ofhow cultural messages are produced and disseminated across national and socioculturel divisions. The very nature ofour investigationhas changed, requiring concerted interdisciplinary efforts. The field of comparative literature could not sidestep these changes. Some of the institutional traditions of comparativism have been called to question, its paradigms reoriented in significant ways: the older "influentialist" approach, emphasizing cause-effect relations, has been supplemented with a more flexible "analogist-theoretical " focus that valorizes coincidences, intertextual echoes, contrasts; the search for normative "universale" has been replaced with a balanced study of similarities and difference. More importantly, the hierarchical, unidirectional structure of relationships implicit in the older influentialist paradigm, has been challenged by a polycentric model of culture based on the reciprocal homologation of Western and Eastern, Northern and Southern experiences of literature. Far from breaking up or exhausting itself as a discipline, as pessimists have predicted, comparative literature has reemerged as a legitimate field wherein questions ofidentity and difference, centrality and marginality , norm and deviation are being addressed. The problems, of course, have not disappeared: even in its expanded, "internationalized" form, comparative literature often sacrifices the particularities of literary works or the "otherness" of non-Western and "minor" literatures. The inductive-phenomenological method used in comparative poetics tends to disengage texts and literatures from their sociocultural contexts, seeking a "unification of literary conscience." EDITOR'S COLUMN Therefore, we would like to invite our contributors to share their thoughts on the direction that our disciplines have taken, to explore the effects that recent methodologies and thematic concerns have had in each of our fields. For this purpose, The Comparatist will provide increased space for review essays that evaluate important theoretical and practical concerns in our field, including current questions about the status of comparative literature. In an effort to strengthen and diversify our thematic orientation, we also seek contributions that address both research areas well represented in previous issues of The Comparatist (the study of Western literary and cultural movements, literature and the other arts, EastWest relationships, inter-American exchanges), but also new concerns with third world, Afro-Caribbean, Middle Eastern, and Central European literary phenomena. The study ofcomparative literature can contribute significantly to the outlining of a new cultural order that will not simply absorb "difference," or submit it to "hierarchy and segregation ," but will allow smaller or non-Westernliteratures to reclaimtheir place in a polycentric model of literary culture. One ofthe most exhilarating aspects ofan editor's work incomparative studies is that he or she can never fully predict the next exciting juxtaposition that a particular comparative study or theoretical approach will operate. The 1992 issue of The Comparatist—rereading Anglo-Saxon charms through Bakhtinian poetics, Balzac and Machado through Sterne, Joyce through Joubert's Carnets, Reverdy and Picasso through semiotic theories of interartistic communication, nineteenth -century East European literature through a revised model of "BiedermaierRomanticism...

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