Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction (review)

THE COMPAnATIST ing if she has not opened the door to a fascinating, enduring aesthetic that is at work, for example, in Dante's sublimation ofhis beloved Beatrice in // Paradiso, in Goethe's resurrection ofthe Gretchen he could not save in life in Faust, or even in Sophocles' steadfast exaltation ofan Athens that was being destroyed both by inner corruption and the advancing Spartan armies as he wrote Oedipus at Colonus. Jeanne J. Smoot North Carolina State University SUSAN BASSNETT. Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction. Oxford UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1993. 183 pp. At the 1994 Southern Comparative Literature conference, James Rolleston made a remark that cast some light on our field's recent history. When Duke University decided to launch its version of comparative literature, Rolleston recalled, the academic climate ofthe early 1980s made the adjective seem irrelevant . The result was the soon-to-be-famous "Ph. D. in Literature." For someone who had just read the Bernheimer report (reviewed in this journal by Rick Livingston) in an enlarged book-length format, this anecdote seemed to pinpoint the swing in attitude, even the reversal which marks that report. For Bernheimer criticizes the field for being too literary, yet admires its urge to cross cultural, linguistic, and disciplinary borders, thereby reviving the force of"comparative." Over the past decade, apparently, the seesawing fortunes of our two-word label have encapsulated the larger shift in humanistic research from literary theory to cultural studies. Whatever the value ofthis insight, Susan Bassnett's critical introduction to the field, written from a British perspective, proposes to go one step further—to abandon the term entirely. Such a drastic step is needed, she contends, because "Comparative literature as a discipline has had its day" and we "should look upon translation studies as the principal discipline" (161). Bassnett, of course, is not a neutral observer, since along with André Lefevere she is a pioneer in translation studies, an example ofwhich (Romy Heylen's Translation, Poetics andthe Stage) was reviewed by Philip Cranston in the 1995 Comparatist. But despite the new field's strengths, her proposal is not entirely persuasive. For one thing, to the extent that Bassnett stresses "the manipulative process of intercultural transfer and its ideological implications" (160), she makes "translation " serve much the same purpose that "comparison" does for Bernheimer. To do herjustice, however, her term has useful semantic links with such key cross-cultural concepts as "transformative" and "transnational." And ifwe can look past the comparatist shibboleth of"mere translation," the word's overtones ofmotion might add a valuable element of dynamism to our sense of disciplinary mission. Bassnett's case against comparative literature becomes more troubling when she somewhat skews its history. In particular, by sharply criticizing the simplistic binarism of Van Tieghem and the French school (22-30), but then rapidly passing over the accomplishments of the American school in the 1950s and 1960s, she makes the field seem narrower and less adventurous than it really was. The spirit ofAmerican comVcH . 20 (1996): 209 BOOK NOTES parative literature emerges much more clearly both in Gossman and Spariosu's Building a Profession and in the relevant chapter from Guillen's The Challenge of Comparative Literature. Finally, even Bassnett's title betrays a certain confusion. For if comparatists really are "dinosaurs from a liberal-humanist prehistory" (5), why the need to invoke the much-discussed and often criticized name ofour field? Clearly the term still exerts a certain magnetism; and given this continued attraction, it makes more sense to concede that inquiry into the significance ofcultural differences in literary study requires a cluster ofapproaches and associated labels. These approaches all overlap to some degree without losing their separate identities, leaving room for both comparative literature and translation studies, as well as for related topics like multiculturalism, postcolonial studies, world literature, cultural theory, and multiethnic national literatures. These reservations aside, however, Bassnett's lively and wide-ranging book should prove useful in method and theory courses for both advanced undergraduate and early graduate students. For until she makes her provocative case for translation studies in the final chapter, Bassnett herself follows the cluster approach recommended above. Thus she surveys several recent trends that enlarge or...