Reflections on Comparative Literature in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

3 I have been struggling with Comparative Literature all my academic life. I use the word ‘struggle’ advisedly; engaging with the idea of comparative literature has not been easy nor, as we move forward in this new century, is it at all clear where the discipline will move to next. True, on the one hand there is a flourishing international comparative literature association, with daughter branches in dozens of different countries, there are journals and conferences and graduate programmes and all the panoply of academic organisations that testify to the existence of a solid field of study. But on the other hand, the concerns that were expressed in the latter decades of the twentieth century remain unresolved. Recently, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has published a collection of essays entitled Death of a Discipline, in which she argues that the way forward for a discipline that she perceives to be in decline is to move beyond its eurocentric origins, and ‘to acknowledge a definitive future anteriority, a ‘to-comeness’, a ‘will have happened’ quality’. A new comparative literature will need to ‘undermine and undo’ the tendency of dominant cultures to appropriate emergent ones (Spivak, Death, p. 100), in other words it will need to move beyond the parameters of Western literatures and societies and reposition itself within a planetary context. The original enterprise of comparative literature, which sought to read literature trans-nationally in terms of themes, movements, genres, periods, zeitgeist, history of ideas is out-dated and needs to be rethought in the light of writing being produced in emergent cultures. There is therefore a politicised dimension to comparative literature; Spivak proposes the idea of planetarity in opposition to globalisation, which she argues involves the imposition of the same values and system of exchange everywhere. Planetarity in contrast can be imagined, as Spivak puts in, from within the precapitalist