Editor’s Column: Comparative Constructs

This year’s issue of The Comparatist centers around two thematic clusters. The first cluster grows out of a panel offered two years ago at the American Comparative Literature Association annual meeting. It addresses the relationship between Comparative Literature and the reinvigorated field of World Literature. It continues a discussion, begun last year in these pages by David Damrosch who also participated in that panel. The papers collected here (Kadir, Soderlund, Foster, Figueira, and Sondrup) reflect the theoretical and pedagogical concerns involved in, to quote Djelal Kadir, the worlding of literature and the role such a process assumes with regard to Comparative Literature.

Kadir and Soderlund take as their point of departure the notion that Comparative Literature and World Literature need not be considered in counterpoint. Kadir proposes that they be viewed as correlative processes. He questions whether literature is not itself inevitably comparative. However, he notes the extent to which such disciplinary constructs arise out of our particular performative interventions as scholars. Soderlund, like Kadir, questions whether there is any purpose or meaning to seeing Comparative Literature as antithetical to World Literature, rather than something complementary. She takes the notion of the comparatist as bricoleur and questions whether the metaphor of the guerilla and maquisard might be more appropriate. Soderlund brings us into the “translation zone.” She questions how the translator has been valorized in the configuration of world literature. John Burt Foster, Jr. continues this discussion on translation by sharing his recent experiences in the classroom and in developing new World Literature initiatives. How has World Literature actually been configured in the classroom? Is there an emphasis placed on works subsequent to 1900 that lend themselves to a certain homogenization? Should the production of the West be minimized in the World Literature curriculum in order to introduce students to more distant literary traditions? Can one better teach World Literature in conjunction with other contextualizing humanities courses? These practical issues feed nicely into the contributions of Figueira and Sondrup who raise the issue of the institutionalization of World Literature in disciplinary entities such as English departments or Comparative Literature programs. I look at the resurgence of World Literature as one of several institutionalized means of dealing with alterity, with theory and pedagogy working in tandem to effect diversity mandates. Sondrup, using Goethe’s conversation with Eckermann regarding Weltliteratur as a point of departure, teases out some of the implications involved in the institutionalization and marketing of World Literature.

This issue also contains a cluster that developed from a panel on German orientalism held at the annual meeting of the German Studies Association. In a comprehensive introduction to this cluster, the panel’s organizer, Robert Cowen, offers a Forschungsbericht on the study of the German reception of India, situating the work of young scholars in the context of previous scholarship in this domain. I leave the introduction of this cluster to him in his essay contribution.

In addition to these two thematic clusters, we also present an article by Rajini Srikanth that brings to a close the cluster on collecting that appeared in last year’s issue. Srikanth examines efforts at collecting the world’s literature and exposing it in an internet initiative as objects exposed in museum exhibits. She questions the problems that such a processing of literature translated into English entails. Can web design be understood as a form of curating and what does such a conception mean? What kind of reading do we want from translations?

Also appearing in this volume is an article by Adrian Switzer that grew out of a paper presented at the annual meeting of the Southern Comparative Literature Association. Switzer examines Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas through the optic of Deleuze and Guattari’s schizo-analytic framework, i.e. less as a moral tale and more as a text about texts. He deals with the stylistic and interpretive peculiarities of Kleistian modernism where texts appear as figures confronting power relations.

This issue represents the best of the scla as an organization and its journal. We continue our project of publishing the work of senior scholars in the field of Comparative Literature as...