Contemporary french comparative studies: issues and methods

Abstract

The paper presents a review of the main issues and methods of studying modern French literature and comparative studies.
 The authors outline the diferences between European approaches, now taken with focus rather on all-European common principles than cultural distinctions, and American tendencies that reflect the priority of feminist and post-colonial methods of comparative studies. Attention is paid to the French peculiarities concerning the replacement of the term ‘influence’ by ‘intertextuality’, and to the role of intermedial and interdisciplinary comparative studies.
 Among the outlined concepts and issues are research ethics in comparative studies; non-essential writers and genres (F. Lavokat); relation of comparative studies to the concepts of European and world literature (A. Tomiche); the role and place of comparative studies in literature and culture (F. Toudoire-Surlapierre), accuracy and universality of defining the discipline (B. Franco), the study of links between literature and art (G. Steiner).
 Attention is also paid to the discussions on the concept of ‘world literature’ (in particular to the views of P. Kazanova) that concern the term ‘world literature’ as it is interpreted by American researchers and ‘European literature’ used by French ones. Other issues are the concept of ‘cultural transfer’; the content of hermeneutic practice in comparison; the role of analysis and ‘defamiliarization’ (introduced by V. Shklovsky); comparison as an object of criticism, a tool of analytics, and methodological necessity; the transversality as the coexistence of diferent comparative methods. The comparative approach has been shown as ontological and culturological vision, a special method of research with a basis in comparison and opposition of the interconnected systems covering translation studies, mythology, imagology, geocriticism, post-colonial and gender studies, research of cultural transfer specified as multicomparativism.