A Comparative Frame of Mind

Abstract

In this paper, I suggest a shift of focus from the logic of expansion and extension towards a reflective reconsideration of the very notion of comparison by way of responding to the seemingly perpetual state of disciplinary crisis in comparative literature. I argue that comparative literature ought to be viewed as a practice of engaging and realizing ideas through a comparative frame of mind. My notion of comparison is an analytics as opposed to an operation on comparable or incommensurable objects. Comparison as an analytics does not entail an act of interpreting the similarities or differences between literary or cultural objects, but recognizes instead that any work is inherently comparative. A comparative frame of mind also takes seriously the arbitrariness of the object itself, and as a result does not privilege the literary object as such. What this implies is that the practice of comparison entails situating any cultural object in relation to whatever else there is. Neither invested in the intrinsic connections between cultural or literary objects, as traditional practitioners of comparative literature aimed to accomplish, nor attempting to disclose the incommensurable differences, as postcolonial comparativists have done, a comparative frame of mind looks for meaningful patterns in whatever literary object or cultural archive one happens to study.