Thoughts That Do Lie Too Deep for Tears: Comparative Literature Versus World Literature

Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,

She stood in tears amid the alien corn…

—John Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale," ll. 65-67

What difference does it make if you read, teach, or write about a given piece of literature in the context of comparative literature or, alternatively, in the context of world literature? Both comparative literature and world literature tend to presuppose that you understand a given work better if you set it against other works as a means of identifying similarities and differences. Literary study, in my strongly held view, must be focused, above all, on the interpretation of individual literary works. Reading a few poems word by word, carefully, interrogatively, is worth much more than bushels of theory read in a vacuum, in the absence of examples. Literary theory and disciplinary organizations for the study of literature, for example, the theory and discipline of comparative literature as against the relatively new theory and discipline of world literature, are all ancillary to that. Theory and departmental divisions are handmaidens to the real business of reading specific literary works. As a consequence, any theoretical formulations should be anchored on specific examples. Without that, such theoretical formulations might be, as they sometimes are, speculations in the void, without empirical verification. Such formulations are like saying the moon is made of green cheese, or that dark matter is finely powdered carbon. You need to look at some samples of these to see whether these assertions are right. In the case of dark matter, getting a sample has turned out to be rather difficult, to say the least. (Yes, dear reader, I am aware that this paragraph is theoretical through and through. It is a theoretical repudiation of theory's primacy over close reading.)

A new humanities discipline, however, world literature, has recently appeared, both in the United States and in many other countries, as a fresh context for literary study. It is easy to see why this has happened. Comparative literature has tended to be a Western discipline that is strongly Eurocentric. It focuses on comparisons among works in English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Czech, and other European languages, for example, the Scandinavian ones. English has tended to be the dominant language in comparative literature, even when a Czech like René Wellek taught it and practiced it in brilliantly learned books and essays. Globalization and the new digital media have meant that an American, Chinese, German, or South African scholar now has, by way of the Internet, instant access both in translation and in the original languages to literature from all over the world. Voilà: world literature! This means that familiar works in Western literature, for example, Wordsworth's "Immortality Ode" or Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale," have new contexts that change in various ways how we read and value them.

I have written elsewhere about the dangers, as I see them, of world literature: the increased difficulty in identifying truly representative examples of, say, Chinese or Arabic or Urdu literature; the unlikelihood that a single scholar could know all the requisite languages, whereas Wellek knew most Western languages; the danger that world literature will be, in the end, just another example of the hegemony of the English language and of Western ideas of what literature is and what its social function is. World literature is in danger of being just another example of Western cultural imperialism.

In this essay, I want, by way of the word "tears" in a passage in one canonical work in nineteenth-century Romantic English literature, Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale," to see what can be said about reading that word in the context of world literature as opposed to reading it in the context of comparative literature. Here is the passage again: "Perhaps the self-same song that found a path / Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, / She stood in tears amid the alien corn." What is the difference between reading Keats's poem, or, rather, that...