In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

THE COMPAUATIST THE FRAMING OF LITERARY STUDIES, OR, IS COMPARATIVE TO LITERATURE AS CULTURAL IS TO STUDIES? Elaine Martin In April 1995 I had the good fortune to view a unique exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam entitled "In Perfect Harmony: Picture and Frame 1850-1920." Suggesting the wider implications of the topic, Ronald de Leeuw and Klaus Albrecht Schröder have written that the period represented in this exhibition "was an epoch in which the various and fascinating aesthetic possibilities embodied in this link between the fiction of the painting and the reality of the wall were explored. "In Perfect Harmony" is an exhibition not only of tangible objects, but also of immaterial relations—that between picture and frame, which is in fact more than the sum of its parts" (Mendgen 7). It would be difficult to have experienced this exhibition, I think, without having one's way of looking at pictures changed forever. But one is also led to ponder the relationship between "the fiction" of all creative works and "the reality" of the culture in which they are both created and consumed. This unique visual experience—dare I say epiphany?—at the Van Gogh Museum led me to consider quite specifically the relationship between literary studies and cultural studies, and to question whether the connection between them might also be one offraming. In answering this question, one thinks first perhaps of literature as the textual equivalent of the work of art and cultural studies as its frame, but what if cultural studies rather than relating to, enhancing, or contextualizing literature has actually displaced it, thus functioning not as a frame, but as the agent in a frame-up? The underlying flaw, however, in this approach is its binary "picture/frame" or "literature/culture" assumption. As de Leeuw and Schröder make clear, we are dealing not with a duality but with a triad: picture, wall, and mediating frame. Even more interesting —perhaps because more elusive—is the intangible connection or "immaterial relations" suggested by de Leeuw and Schröder, between the artistic fiction and its culture-bound reality. That is, we clearly see the painting, the wall on which it hangs, and the interposed frame, but what is the result of their interaction? And in what ways does this interaction transcend "the sum ofits parts"? In literature we are also dealing with a triad, a fact that has received little recognition in the general discussion ofliterary and cultural studies to date. In our preoccupation with the literary equivalent of the painting, we have failed to see the frame (and/or the wall); or if we saw it, we were unable to recognize its importance; or at times we have conflated the frame and wall, failing to see their distinctiveness. Michael Holquist points out that in "traditional comparative studies, the basic unit comprised two things that were then Vol. 20 (1996): 25 THE FRAMING OF LITERARY STUDIES put into a meaningful relation to each other through an act of comparison . . . . [T]he active role of the subject making the connection between them was obscured by the invisibility of the subject, whose presence was always assumed but not stated. The dualism enabled by this hidden subject in turn made possible the fiction of objective science" (8). HoIquist identifies the crisis in comparative literature as "only one aspect of a larger dilemma that . . . began to emerge: a shift in the space of interpretation" (7); and it is precisely this new "space of interpretation" that signals a shift in the relationship between the art work, its frame(s), and its wall. In this essay I explore the somewhat problematic development of comparative literature and then consider possible ways of construing its relationship with cultural studies that bear on the most recent "crisis" in comparative literature. Many comparatists seem to experience acute uneasiness when required to define comparative literature, because the act of defining itself is perceived as limiting, delimiting, and ultimately opposed to the openness supposedly characteristic of the field. And yet, even without definitions we all seem curiously to have a sense of what comparative literature is. On the other hand, even though we know what it is...

pdf