How to Become a Comparatist

Abstract

To become comparatists, we have to go through a series of destabilizing experiences that call into question our naïve relationship with literature. The first experience is that of the profound otherness of the distant text, as Keats discovered in Chapman’s translation of Homer. The second experience is that of changing one’s mental library, because no work exists on its own: it always stands out in a more or less perceptible background of other works and other texts. If you change your library, you reveal the unsuspected possibilities of a text. This is obviously what happens when we read a text from another linguistic or cultural tradition: it immediately awakens unexpected echoes. The comparatist experience is also a sensitivity to the way in which each work enters into a negotiation with the world from which it originates, and ends up acquiring a new value with historical and cultural distance. The comparison is not only in synchrony, but also in diachrony. To acknowledge one’s ignorance, to recognize an anthropological gap, allowing oneself to be decentred by the work, is the basis of the comparatist approach.