Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age by David Damrosch

Abstract

Reviewed by: Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age by David Damrosch Ian Ellison Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age. By David Damrosch. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2020. x+385 pp. £30. ISBN 978–0–691–13499–4. From What Is World Literature? in 2003, to the co-edited volumes of the Longman Anthology of World Literature in 2004, Teaching World Literature in 2009, and 2011’s Routledge Companion to World Literature, much of David Damrosch’s work to date has concerned the fiercely debated category of ‘world literature’. In his most recent book, however, he returns to the disciplinary purview of his Harvard professorial chair, while striving to retain an ostensibly global perspective. Anthological limitations, pedagogical practices, and interpretative approaches—to say nothing of theoretical wrangling—remain central concerns. Yet though the field of comparative literature may appear as embattled as ever, the outlook is far from bleak. [End Page 109] Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age advertises its pluralism in its title and takes this seriously throughout. Damrosch’s eight main chapters offer a broad historio-geographical survey of comparative literature, paying particular attention to its multiple nodal origins as an academic discipline and its transformations through emigration undertaken by key comparatists. He also delineates a plethora of theoretical, linguistic, and hermeneutical tools of which comparatist scholars may avail themselves. ‘Our global literary aspirations’, Damrosch asserts in the Introduction, ‘need to be matched by greater engagement with the rich variety of comparative scholarship across the past two centuries and in many parts of the globe’ (p. 6). Taking particular aim in several instances at the Warwick Research Collective’s co-authored Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature, Damrosch is not unjustly dismissive of comparative studies that, for all their merits, limit their analytical purview solely to literary works whose political sensibilities match their own, that focus exclusively on male writers, and that make claims concerning global literary systems without citing a single primary or secondary text in a language other than English while discussing multiple foreign-language novels in English translation. It would have been illuminating for Damrosch’s purposes to dwell further on the grammatically varying terms for comparative literature in other languages: ‘littérature comparée’ or ‘literatura comparada’ (‘compared’), versus ‘vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft’ (‘comparing’), for example. Nevertheless, on matters of language most especially, readers of the Modern Language Review will surely find themselves in agreement with much of Damrosch’s fifth chapter which addresses head-on the thorny matter of original-language work, highlighting this as being fundamentally entwined in comparative literature’s philological roots. ‘Every formally trained comparatist’, he argues, ‘should have an excellent knowledge of at least one language beyond their “native” language (if they don’t already grow up with two or three), and some will need an equally good knowledge of at least one more’ (p. 192). Damrosch emphasizes how intrinsic learning foreign languages is to literary study and how this can—and, indeed, should—be a lifelong endeavour: ‘If we need to know more, then it is time to get back into language class—a worthwhile endeavour at any age—or to collaborate with someone who has the language we lack’ (p. 192). Comparatists must nevertheless also have the humility to recognize their own limitations: ‘If neither is an option, the topic is best left for someone else’ (p. 192). Despite his distancing himself from it, the pull of the American planet is at times irresistible and Damrosch devotes several pages to the make-up of ‘comp lit’ programmes and ‘state of the discipline’ screeds from previous ACLA meetings. Nevertheless, knowledge of one’s own history and origins is invaluable and the majority of Comparing the Literatures offers a positively pluralistic and substantial overview of how comparatists from all parts of the world have shaped and reshaped literary analysis over the centuries. The pedagogical need to overcome ethnonationalist tunnel-vision while championing critical and imaginative flexibility is glaringly evident ex negativo in the failures of international politics in recent decades. [End Page 110] Comparing the Literatures helpfully maps the current disciplinary territory, leaving it to us...