COMPARATIVE LITERATURE:SHARING KNOWLEDGES FOR PRESERVING CULTURAL DIVERSITY - Comparative

Literature And Other Fields of Knowledge: A General Introduction - Paola Mildonian

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND OTHER FIELDS OF

KNOWLEDGE: A GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Paola Mildonian
Ca’Foscari University – Venice, Italy

Keywords: Literary experience and human welfare. literature/culture. text/context.

empiricism. comparative method. taxonomic systems. mathematics. biological sciences.
human sciences. philosophy/philology. positivism. formalism. structuralism.
phenomenology. hermeneutics. historiography. anthropology. psychoanalysis. post-
structuralism. post-modernism. post-colonialism. performance studies.

Contents

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1. Comparison and knowledge

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2. Margins of the crisis

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3. Comparison at the origins of the modern world
4. Comparative literature between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
5. The challenges of positivist comparative literature
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6. New possible worlds
Glossary
Bibliography
Biographical Sketch
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Summary
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Comparative methodology was consolidated between the 17th and 18th centuries in the
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age of the first globalization. It was an offshoot of empiricism and expressed the desire
to give systematic order to the data of scientific experience, whether it be mathematical
logic, biochemistry or the human sciences. This order was intended to replace the
taxonomies of Aristotelian logic and rhetoric.
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However, in having to consider the laws of the unfolding of history, Vico denounced the
inadequacy both of ancient rhetoric and modern science, from whose cooperation was to
rise a new science, philology, capable of assisting the truths of philosophical knowledge
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with its method. Therefore, philology would become the forebear of more recent
comparative criticism.

Traditional comparative literature developed rather in the heart of French positivism on

the model of the other sciences. It had a factual view of literary phenomena. It studied
influences and analogies between documented facts and drew an evolutionary picture of
literary movements, currents and genres.

Introducing the notions of literariness, function and system, the formalists were the first
to try to define the specific nature of the literary fact. But they left two fundamental
problems unsolved, as was immediately pointed out by Tynjanov, Bakhtin, and Wellek:
the problem of history and that of interpretation, which, starting from Nietzsche, is
central to every kind of knowledge. The conflict of interpretations spread through

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE:SHARING KNOWLEDGES FOR PRESERVING CULTURAL DIVERSITY - Comparative
Literature And Other Fields of Knowledge: A General Introduction - Paola Mildonian

reader-oriented theories of hermeneutic-phenomenological, sociological and

structuralist derivation. But it was mainly the contributions of post-Lacanian
psychoanalysis (the rhizomatic theories) and anthropology (particularly performance
studies) that provided a variety of extremely flexible tools for the destructuring practice
of postmodern criticism.

Literary symbolism is now interpreted in an interdisciplinary perspective and

comparative criticism is guided by an aesthetic of complexity that always aims at an
understanding of the Other. These multiple comparisons, which are played out on
differences, have a profound ethical and political significance.

1. Comparison and Knowledge

The general title of the thematic sector: Comparative Literature: sharing knowledge for

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preserving cultural diversity, is an interpretation of the original proposal made by the
EOLSS Commission: The role of Comparative Literature in human life and welfare.

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It is an interpretation – not the only one possible, but certainly the one most deeply
rooted in the current reality of this discipline. Its use is intended to restrict the vast
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ethical, political and philosophical perspective opened up by the notion of human life
and welfare. The positive role of that part of literary criticism that goes under the name
of Comparative Literature consists in working in accordance with the diffusion of
knowledge, respecting the diversity of cultures which should find one of its most
complex and nuanced manifestations in literary languages. This proposal, although
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epistemologically sustainable, does not entirely resolve the deontological instance

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which involves life and well-being − that is, the happiness of man. This disturbing and
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intriguing object remains in the background.

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Indeed, a reflection can be made on how and what is compared, but why we compare is
taken for granted. This second question (why) is in the hypothesis of comparative
criticism, but is not assumed directly in its theses.
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Nevertheless, recognizing that comparative criticism has a primacy in the field of

linguistic and literary disciplines and at the same time emphasizing the importance of
literary knowledge at a time of profound crisis, some questions of substance (1) and
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method (2) arise:

(1) They concern:

a. The nature and role of the literary experience and its controversial ethical and
educational responsibility, already present in platonic philosophy;
b. The means (media, institutions and persons) of which comparative criticism can
avail itself for a diffusion intended to ensure the multiple diversities of a mixed,
highly mobile, multi- and trans-cultural world that also (and not contradictorily)
conforms more and more to a global perspective;
c. The consequent need to redefine the role of tradition, not as an abstract notion, but
through the dynamics of the most diverse cultural traditions in their relationships
with these four elements: diversity, sharing, preservation, diffusion.

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE:SHARING KNOWLEDGES FOR PRESERVING CULTURAL DIVERSITY - Comparative
Literature And Other Fields of Knowledge: A General Introduction - Paola Mildonian

The diversity/sharing, preservation/diffusion pairs are complementary: they lead to

centrifugal and centripetal processes rooted in the reality of the globalized world;
enunciating them, however, is not enough to resolve the contradictions of a discipline
that is expected (if possible) to reassign a socio-cultural role to the literary experience.

(2) But questions of no little importance also arise on the level of method. They concern
the specificity of the ‘comparison’ in the context of literary criticism, philology and
linguistics, but also the human sciences and information and communication
technologies. Comparison can refer to extremely generic or rigorously specific
cognitive processes. So the difficulty in the term comparative literature has always lain
in the qualifier ‘comparative’, and certainly ignorance of this difficulty or uncritical
adoption of the label have not improved the knowledge and growth of the discipline.
Thus, the rapid (albeit controversial) development of comparative literature in recent
decades does not exempt field scholars from continually considering its interpretive

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procedures − in didactics and in research − or from questioning the reason for its past
and present epistemological choices.

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It is no easy task. If comparison is not to be considered as a generic activity but as one
method among others to produce knowledge, comparative criticism must take on
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different methodological models: it must face the 'reality' of 'literature' and renounce all
specificity of criticism: in short, comparatists must engage themselves in a practice of
suspicion that is as profitable as it is troublesome.

Some difficulties deriving from typical interpretive procedures also extend to the study
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of national literatures; today not only comparative literature, but also national literatures
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are still indebted to positivist historicism and/or idealist historicism, historical
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materialism and the sociology of literature, formalism (Russian, but not only) and
structuralism, post-structuralism and post-colonialism, the hermeneutics of reading and
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understanding and its multiple applications, from the phenomenological proposals of the
aesthetics of reception (Iser, Jauss) to the more behavioral and sociological reader-
oriented analysis (S. Fish), from genetic to rhizomatic theories (Deleuze and Guattari
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Mille Plateuax, 1980).

All these critical readings are based on comparison, or rather, on different (often
opposing, and in any case not always assimilable) comparative methods. If the
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awareness that comparative literature has developed in their analysis seems livelier, this
is due not only to the variety of the texts it examines, but also to the more extended and
prolonged methodological comparison it engages in with other disciplines (linguistics
and philology, but also philosophy, the exact sciences, the natural sciences and the
human sciences) and with other languages and other aesthetic experiences in the
domains of music, figurative arts and, more generally, visual arts.

Comparing is not only a very common and widespread human activity nor the free
choice of a point of view. The comparatist does not stop at textual analysis, but always
questions what goes beyond the literature, the articulations of the context and the
cognitive result that is produced by the comparison of different epistemological
environments and between different languages. He/she consequently proposes tools that
are more suited to a radical interpretation of the ‘crisis’ of literature in the current world,

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE:SHARING KNOWLEDGES FOR PRESERVING CULTURAL DIVERSITY - Comparative
Literature And Other Fields of Knowledge: A General Introduction - Paola Mildonian

in its relations with the sciences, technologies and arts. He/she emphasizes the need to
profoundly renew and decipher definitions, positions or counter positions, starting from
the most changeable, such as the literature / culture pair that was so active up until 20
years ago (A. Marino Comparatisme et théorie de la littérature, 1988); this pair has
now become extremely complex and intriguing, but not so much to the benefit of a
dialectic clarification of the two terms, as to their necessary retreat from postmodernism
and their necessary development into what has been called post-literature.

The post-modern in its interest in parody, pastiche and mimicry has been exercised in
the specific discourse of the various visual arts, in the rhetoric of literary discourse and
in the breaking of the paradigms of musical discourse. What now goes under the label of
post-literature expresses the needs of a period marked by an aesthetic of complexity and
profoundly implicated in the interdisciplinary dialogue. It is a world that moves between
multiple contingencies, multiple languages and multiple means of diffusion and

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communication; it is marked by plasticity, metamorphosis and comparison between
different and interfacing disciplines, and it continuously demands a synthesis between

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text and context, body and mind that can be verified only in an empirical environment.

Two basic aspects of comparative literature are confirmed in it: empiricism and the
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necessary broadening of research into the relations between text and context, the
emphasis of contextual roles. The history of comparative literature as a discipline shows
that it has always been open to these solutions.

2. Margins of the Crisis

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(1) Since a plurality of semiotic systems governs our knowledge and our individual and
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collective imagination, literature no longer occupies the heart of cultural polysystems,

and certainly does not seem the most suitable tool for ‘globalizing’ the knowledge,
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dreams and thoughts of contemporary man. Numerous languages and stimuli, multiform
and in constant change, tend to undermine the specificity of the literary field that was
clearly defined by the sociology of literature in the mid-1970s, and had been active
since the 19th century in the context of the dialectic pertinences of the different artistic
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fields (Bourdieu Les règles de l'art, 1992). The languages of communication, along with
those of persuasion and pleasure, have long ceased to belong to literature. Literature has
difficulty retaining its place even in the educational system, which is moreover one of
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the most conservative, besieged as it is by technological knowledge and action. On the

other hand, some of these observations could also be extended to the exact sciences,
which in turn are forced to cede the field to technology.

These observations are concerned with the quality of life in the globalized world, with
human welfare, which is not only an ethical, political and economic problem, but also
an anthropological one and closely concerns the fate of man and the planet. It is no mere
chance that many leading economists − in particular those from the south of the world,
such as Amartya Sen, Jagdish Bhagwati, Néstor García Canclini, André Urani, Hassan
Zaoual and Alvin Y. So − attribute to culture (and consequently to literature) a
fundamental role in an integrated economic project. For some time international control
bodies have no longer been rating the progress of a country on the sole basis of its GDP,
but on various parameters that contribute to social happiness and quality of life (Zupi

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE:SHARING KNOWLEDGES FOR PRESERVING CULTURAL DIVERSITY - Comparative
Literature And Other Fields of Knowledge: A General Introduction - Paola Mildonian

2004). The economy is now inclined to value the dynamics of the non-profit and
extends its attention to the role played in society by sentiments like affinity, compassion
and cooperation. Emotions and affections that have always not only been represented,
but have an active function in the aesthetic experience of literature, music and the arts,
are found to be far from extraneous to the dynamics of economics. After all, this has
been shown since the eighteenth century in the tradition of economic studies: Adam
Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments is now cited by many economists, in particular the
Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, as much as, if not more, than the Wealth of Nations.

(2) Nevertheless, in its specificity, be it methodological or disciplinary, comparative

literature also reveals its own peculiar ‘weakness’, which must however be regarded as
promising: the territory of comparative criticism seems less and less defined, but also
less circumscribed. Comparison with the human sciences makes the tools of literary
comparison more complex and more refined, but also helps us to penetrate the more

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obscure areas of aesthetic experience. The frontiers between literature, visual arts and
music are redefined, but so are the functions and purposes of anthropology, psychology

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and historiography. And not only is the relationship of these fields with human language
critically reviewed, thanks to the complexity of the linguistic act on which literary
practice rests, but so are the rules of their individual descriptive languages. This is,
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moreover, an experience that in many cultures comes from afar and enjoys an openness
that allows it to be adopted in a dialectic and productive form in the multiculturalism of
the current world.

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Bibliography

Ashcroft B. Griffiths G. Tiffin H (Eds.) (2008) Post-colonial Studies. The key Concepts. London New
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York: Routledge [A thorough, in-depth guide.]

Ashley K.M. (Ed.) (1990) Victor Turner and the construction of Cultural Criticism. Between Literature
and Anthropology. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. [A comprehensive collection
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Bendix R. (1984) Force, Fate, and Freedom: On Historical Sociology. Berkeley: University of California
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE:SHARING KNOWLEDGES FOR PRESERVING CULTURAL DIVERSITY - Comparative
Literature And Other Fields of Knowledge: A General Introduction - Paola Mildonian

Bial H. (Ed) ( 2004) The Performance Studies Reader. London and New York: Routledge. [A collection
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(1983) “ 'Structuralisme et poststructuralisme'. Entretien avec G. Roulet” in Dits et écrits IV, Paris,
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Guillén C. (2001) Entre el saber y el conocer. Moradas del estudio literario. Valladolid: Universidad de
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Biographical Sketch

Paola Mildonian Chair Professor of Comparative Literature at Ca’Foscari University (Venice) from
1980. She has written over a hundred essays on the following topics: methods and issues in comparative
literature; classical tradition in modern and postmodern literature; theory and history of literary

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE:SHARING KNOWLEDGES FOR PRESERVING CULTURAL DIVERSITY - Comparative
Literature And Other Fields of Knowledge: A General Introduction - Paola Mildonian

translation; travel literature and chronicles of discoveries; relationships between Near Eastern and
Western culture; fictional diary; contemporary poetry. Among her most recent works, there is the
monograph Alterego. Racconti in forma di diario tra Otto e Novecento, Venezia 2002; the editing of the
volumes Parodia, Pastiche, Mimetismo, Roma 1997; La Porta d’Oriente. Viaggi e Poesia, Lisbona 2002;
Comparaciones en vertical. Conflictos mitológicos en las Américas, Venezia 2009; the CD A partire da
Venezia: Eredità, Transiti, Orizzonti. Cinquant’anni dell’AILC, Venezia 2009. She was a Founding
Member of SICL (Società Italiana di Comparatistica Letteraria), Member of the Executive Council, then
Secretary General and Vice-President of AILC/ICLA (Association Internationale de Littérature
Comparée/International Comparative Literature Association). She has participated in several research
programs and has chaired various administrative committees within the same international association.

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