Introduction:Comparative Literature and the Return of the Global Repressed

Abstract

Comparative literature's crisis under globalization is that it has historically defined itself as a study of differences—a system of different literatures and languages—while denying or repressing those literary, linguistic, and cultural productions within that system that it has deemed unequal. Under the guise of literariness, comparative literature has from its beginnings maintained a relation of what we might for now call foreign-ness between itself and subaltern texts and writers working within its self-defined system of languages: in English, French, German, and so on. The discipline's historic aversion to such texts and writers is inextricably related to its current much-lamented failure to embrace inequalities within its self-defined standard of inclusiveness. The rise of postcolonial studies and related projects has begun to expose this problem in comparative literature, as the latter has only in the past decade starting playing a belated game of inclusive multicultural catchup in an area in which it has effectively been trumped—and which paradoxically fit the discipline's self-defined boundaries from the beginning.