What Is Left of Comparative Literature and World Literature? Notes on International Literature, Its Concrete Universality and Enigmacity

The names, and eventually the notions, of world literature and comparative literature are often contrasted, although they share fields of research. Today, these terms should be first viewed as academic labels designating literary studies that address international and/or interlinguistic and/or intercultural issues with no restrictive references to languages, nations, cultures and continents. Both notions are somewhat outdated. World literature, which cannot be disassociated from Goethe's Weltliteratur, referred to the ontology of Romantic literature and the expansion of the book trade, which began the universalization of literatures. The ontology of literature and the rise of the book trade were not considered contradictory: Goethe and Romantic critics thought that due to the ontological status of literature, world literatures would be read according to a progressive unity that was to be associated with the universalizing power of the book trade. The qualifier comparative in comparative literature was linked to the epistemic background of the beginning of the nineteenth century and its broad references to comparative sciences such as, for example, comparative linguistics or comparative zoology. In today's context, globalization partially explains the revival of the notion of world literature, although literary works in our globalized world should be conflated neither with literature-universal, nor with a kind of geographic cohesion of literatures. The enlightening initial opposition between Jean-Jacques Ampère's early studies in comparative literature and Goethe's Weltliteratur can form a supplement to these short historical remarks. For the former, a literature can be the distinct counterpart of another literature, whatever relations connect these two literatures. For the latter, the other literature, translated, displaced, is simultaneously a surprise and what can be inserted in his own world and literature, then augmented, modified; this alliance of the Same and the Other is the first condition for the development of Weltliteratur. This early opposition between Ampère and Goethe and the implications of both designations or notions, comparative literature and world literature, correlate with a fundamental question that we still entertain and comment upon: can we bring to any large unification of literatures the same kind of understanding brought to bear on the acts and works of individuals—writers, readers—or limited writers' or readers' groups, or broader ensembles—nations and, eventually, regions? The answer to this question should paradoxically lead to a minimal characterization of literary works and consequently to an equally minimal approach to comparative literature and world literature, or to what is left of them. This article's tentative minimal requalification of both disciplines will rest on cursive readings of the subtext of one canonical work of comparative literature, Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, and of the book that provoked the return to the notion of world literature in North America, David Damrosch's What Is World Literature?

This fundamental question seeks to define the challenges and contradictions of comparative literature and world literature. Both disciplines presuppose the diversity and cohesiveness of literatures; in other words, they offer totalizing images of literatures that should not be confused with the image of the totality of literatures. As a result, they call for new descriptions of the ways we identify links and quasi-wholes among literature and assess their universality. We remain attached to the recognition of this universality, which we consider a condition of our international/intercultural readings. Consequently, although this article recalls the most dominant approaches to comparative literature and world literature, it does not reiterate the current world literature/comparative literature debates, which some critics view as analogous to those between the Moderns and the Ancients, or between less and more Eurocentrism (see e.g. D'haen 35, 42, 44, 135), nor try keeping an equidistant approach to both disciplines, contrary to René Etiemble, who is today often referred to by world literature critics. Etiemble defended a critical practice that he named "littérature vraiment générale," precisely equidistant from comparative literature and world literature. In order to define both disciplines' challenges and contradictions, this article aims at designating their locus communis, the foundational ideas they share: the multiplicity of...