Queer from the Very Beginning

Abstract

The field of comparative literature has been the site of an intensifying struggle for both self-definition and validation. This struggle can best be observed in the dialogue in two collections of essays published under the auspices of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA): Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization (2006) and Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism (1995) (see Saussy; Bernheimer). While each provides an ACLA ten-year report on the state of the discipline, the latter prints three reports to the ACLA and a range of responses to them. Any discussion of the history and definition of comparative literary studies must begin with Henry Remak’s famous definition of the field: “Comparative Literature is the study of a literature beyond the confines of one particular country, and the study of the relationships between literature on the one hand and other areas of knowledge and belief, such as the arts (e.g. painting, sculpture, architecture, music), philosophy, history, the social sciences, religion, et cetera, on the other. In brief, it is the comparison of one literature with other spheres of human expression” (3). Jonathan Culler essentially dismisses the latter part of this formulation, suggesting that comparative literature should be concerned precisely and only with literature, rather than “with the other spheres of human expression.”