Comparative Literary History as an Elitist Metanarrative

Abstract

It is an ambiguous comfort to know that we are still debating the grand issues that were in the foreground when the International Comparative Literature Association was founded half a century ago as an offshoot from the Federation Internationale des Langues et Litteratures Modernes. FILLM’s Fifth Congress in 1951, focusing then exclusively on the European, considered modern literatures “in their relations with the fine arts” over a series of supposed great cultural and/or stylistic periods starting from the late Middle Ages. FILLM’s Sixth Congress in 1954, the birth year of ICLA, dealt with “Literature and Science” over a comparable series of supposed epochs in intellectual and technological history. Noticeable on the methodological front in 1954 are the decline of positivistic historicism and, in juxtaposition, the triumph of newer psychology and anthropology plus the first inroads of linguistic structuralism. FILLM’s Ninth Congress in 1963 grappled with the task of relating “Literary History and Literary Criticism”, pursued all the basic epistemological questions therefrom resultant, and introduced the comparison of Asian and European approaches, while giving some consideration to the particularities of other regions. This expansion of horizons by FILLM occurred just four year’s before the daughter organization ICLA approved the creation of the series A Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages. Does all this sound familiar? And here we are again, in the aftermath of postmodernism and poststructuralism, and constructivism, various -isms and post-isms which have meanwhile come and gone; but we are generally unable to believe in the death of literature, the arts, history, or even science – dyings often proclaimed in recent decades in European and Euro-American circles. ICLA has sailed on despite America’s and Europe’s postmodern and other doubts and pioneered the investigation of huge intraand inter-regional complexes of cultural and literary life; and the CHLEL series has acted as the ice-breaker of the ICLA flotilla, ploughing forward to demonstrate how much can be achieved in actual practice. But despite evident pride in these advances we do feel certain misgivings. Scholars involved in the CHLEL series are perhaps foremost among