Editor's Foreword: Comparatism in Polysystemic Perspective

THE COMPAKATIST EDITOR'S FOREWORD: COMPARATISM IN POLYSYSTEMIC PERSPECTIVE Comparative literature, Charles Bernheimer has reminded us recently , "is anxiogenic" ("Introduction" 1). A befitting definition, coming as it does from the leading author of the 1993 ACLA Report which had raised our level ofawareness and anxiety with its vision of"Comparative Literature at the Turn ofthe Century." Bernheimer's subsequent review of the controversy this report has stirred is more sympathetic to our worries. To begin with, he admits that we have aU embraced an impossible discipUne in which we are expected to know more than our "peers in the national Uterature departments-more knowledge oflanguages, more reading of literatures, more expertise in theory-but it is not clear that [we] wiU benefit professionaUy from aU this extra work" (Introduction 1). We are being urged to branch out into increasingly complex theoretical and multicultural territories, but our interdisciplinarity is not appreciated in the fragmented intellectual and poUtical climate of most literature departments. How are we to respond to these anxiogenic pressures? With the polarized reactions of"old-style fencing" vs. "renovative permissiveness" that the Bernheimer debate has triggered according to Mary Louise Pratt (60)? Such polarization of opinion would only confirm our "pervasive anxiety . . . about how our discipline should position itself on the shifting sands [of] the academic terrain" (Fox-Genovese 134). It would make more sense, therefore, to adopt a both-and rather than an either-or approach: reusing our theoretical-analytic resources, both old and new, towards an imaginative reconfiguration of our field. My own experience as a third generation East European comparatist (a "delayed" third generation, I might add, in view ofthe difficulties we had to overcome in our training, publishing, and transplantation to the West), has proven the advantages of such a pragmatic approach which pursues a creative synthesis ofresources. Most of my intellectual training in the seventies consisted of a comparative exploration of East European and Western theoretical developments (the reading phénoménologies of Ingarden or Iser and the deconstruction of Derrida and Deleuze, the Tartu school of cultural semiotics and Foucault's archaeologies, the Uterary sociology of György Lukács and the cultural sociology of the Frankfurt School). I found both my "theoretical" and my "comparative anxieties" helpful in expanding my horizons, challenging official views of literature and culture. I welcomed the hermetic vocabularies associated with these theories as coded languages which could create breaches in the dominant cultural ideology of Romania. At the same time, my generation had plenty to learn from its "non-theoretical" predecessors: these philologicaUy -oriented comparatists had refined the field of literary studies with their creative close readings and nondoctrinaire approach to comparison, moving away from a strict "influentiaUst" approach to a study of analogiVoI . 20 (1996): 1 EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION cal patterns, and from a Eurocentric emphasis to an inclusive transcultural poetics. A simüar cross-fertAization has taken place in Western Uterary studies, integrating the contributions of several generations of theorists and comparatists. The stronger rereading/rewriting tools offered by the postwar phénoménologies, structuraUsms, feminisms, and new historicisms have aUowed us to rethink our basic critical concepts and practices. We have aU become more suspicious not only ofenclosed national visions, but also of all-embracing internationaUst ones, which, under the claim of covering the "Uterary world in its fundamental unity" (Jost xi), have often promoted partial visions (Eurocentric, "continental," and so on). We have discovered instead new "spaces of comparison" (Lionnet 170)postmodern , feminist, postcolonial, postcommunist, borderland-that is, hybrid spaces which have stretched our comparative imagination. We have also grasped the "importance of Unguistic hybridity and code switching" in these "spaces of the slash" (Higgonet 162), which redefine cultural identity as dynamic and "comparative." In view of this evolution, it is perhaps a pardonable hubris to claim that comparative literature can offer a powerful heuristic and communicational model in the post-Cold War era of multicultural relations. Mary Louise Pratt goes as far as to declare comparative literature "an especiaUy hospitable space for the cultivation of multilingualism, polyglossia , the arts ofcultural mediation, deep intercultural understanding, and genuinely global consciousness" (62). This may aU be true, but is the current poUtical and cultural climate...