Comparative Literature in French

Abstract

Abstract: In her article “Comparative Literature in French” Anne Tomiche presents the current situation of comparative literature in France, institutionally and pedagogically, as well as intellectually. She stresses the most recent changes that have happened in the field, focusing on the evolution of the discipline within the academic curriculum, on the evolution of research organization, and on the evolution of academic and scholarly domains of research in comparative literature. Finally, without claiming any bibliographical exhaustivity, she refers to recent scholarship that has marked the evolution of the discipline in French with emphasis on works published in the past fifteen years. Further, although she focuses on comparative literature in France, Tomiche presents aspects of French-language comparativism in Belgian French, Swiss French, and Quebecois Canadian scholarship. Without devoting too much space to the pre-history of French comparative literature—already well-documented (see, e.g., Brunel, Pichois, Rousseau; Chevrel, “Litterature (generale) et comparee”; Pageaux)—it might be worth recalling that while the first French textbook using the expression “comparative literature” in its title was Francois Noel's Cours de litterature comparee which merely juxtaposes French, English, and Italian “lectures,” the true initiators of the discipline were Abel Villemain (whose 1828 lectures at the Sorbonne focused on the reciprocal influences of France and England over each other and on French influence in Italy in the eighteenth century), Jean-Jacques Ampere (whose inaugural lecture at the Sorbonne in 1832 dealt with medieval French literature in its relations with foreign literatures and who promoted what he called the “comparative study” of literature), and Philarete Chasles (who dedicated his inaugural lecture at the Parisian Athenee in 1835 to la litterature etrangere comparee ).