Continuity and Rupture: Comparative Literature and the Latin Tradition

Abstract

Studies of the Latin tradition played a major role in the formation of Comparative Literature as a discipline. In spite of their shared origins, the disciplines of Neo-Latin studies and Comparative Literature are today rarely brought into dialogue with one another. This article argues that such dialogues can be mutually productive, and that Neo-Latin literature exemplifies, and itself engages with, some of the key problems at issue in the latest dispensations of Comparative Literature. Ideas of cosmopolitanism and transnationalism, of bilingualism and the dynamic interactions between languages, energized Neo-Latin writing (and energize Neo-Latin studies today). Writers in the post-classical Latin tradition devoted great efforts to working through many of the problems and dichotomies that interest comparatists today: from defining the ‘literary’, to asking what it means for literary forms and a literary language to cross historical, cultural, and national borders. Using the classical theme of recusatio (‘refusal’) as a case study, I explore the ways in which Neo-Latin writers thematized in their writing a sense of the continuity and universality of literature which was nevertheless always threatened by rupture and fragmentation.