David Damrosch

Comparative World Literature

World literature is often regarded today as a global phenomenon, sometimes even seen as a
cultural expression of an emerging ‘world system’. More expansively still, world literature can
be considered to be the sum total of the world’s literatures from every period since the invention
of writing. Yet any view of the world is a view from somewhere, and in practical terms, world
literature is experienced very differently in different places. This essay explores the shaping of
world literature in different national cultural and institutional environments, looking at the
United States, India, and China as examples.

We encounter world literature as the body of material that is actually

available to us: works that are assigned in schools, sold in bookstores,
reviewed in our morning paper, and analyzed in our country’s scholarly
journals. In this essay, I would like to explore the shaping of world literature
in different national cultural and institutional environments, looking at the
United States, India, and China as examples. I will argue that the American
and Asian cases show reciprocal possibilities and limitations, located at
opposite ends of a spectrum of inclusion or exclusion of their own national
literature within their study of comparative and world literature. An
understanding of this divergence should be helpful not only to scholars in
these countries but to comparatists elsewhere, who may consider – and
perhaps decide to rethink – their own personal and national place along this
spectrum.1
I will begin with my own country. Though we have become increasingly
attuned to the limitations of the traditional Eurocentrism of Comparative
Literature, American-based comparatists have yet to think through the impact
of our cultural and institutional location, both as a limiting factor and as an
arena of possibility. The question of our standpoint becomes particularly
important as we seek to develop a global literary vision on American
campuses. What national and cultural predispositions define the parameters
of world literature in America today, as it is taught on our campuses,
discussed at conferences of the American Comparative Literature

1
An earlier version of this essay, addressed to American comparatists, was previously
published in the journal of the Southern Comparative Literature Association, The
Comparatist 39 (2009), under the title ‘How American Is World Literature?’
170 David Damrosch

Association, and analyzed in American journals and anthologies? Just how

American, in short, is our view of world literature? How American should it
be? My argument here will be that shadowing the debates over Eurocentrism
is a largely unacknowledged Americentrism, a factor that is at once repressed
and pervasive in American comparatism, even as American literature itself is
largely neglected in American comparative studies.
The relative invisibility of our American standpoint is itself a
characteristically American trait. A peculiarly American feature of literary
study in many institutions in the United States has long been the
subordination of American literature. It rarely enjoys the independence and
visibility of its own department, but has been located at most schools within
the English department. There, American literature has been relegated to
second-class status, with British literature garnering far more appointments,
even though Americanists typically enjoy (or are overwhelmed by) far higher
enrollments. The unusualness of this situation regularly strikes visitors from
abroad. It would be as though the French universities had no departments of
French but only departments of Romance Languages and Literatures, with
the specialists in French substantially outnumbered by those in Italian and
Spanish – reasonably enough at an American university, perhaps, but
unthinkable in the mother country itself.
Within English departments, Americanists have long lobbied for stronger
representation, and over the course of the twentieth century they gradually
developed a range of institutional alternatives in American Studies, often
finding more visibility in association with historians and sociologists than
with professors of British literature. Yet Comparative Literature departments
have rarely been involved in these efforts. Many of our programs took shape
in the 1950s at the hands of European émigrés, and these displaced
Europeans were pleased and relieved to find themselves in universities that
did not give pride of place to a dominant national literature and its cultural
agenda. A good example of this is the perspective of René Wellek, founder of
Yale’s department of Comparative Literature, and a dominant figure in the
disciplinary debates of the 1950s and 1960s. In a 1960 essay called ‘The
Crisis of Comparative Literature’, Wellek clearly views the United States as a
location to look from rather than a culture to look at, a space of separation in
which comparatists could rise free of national entanglements elsewhere. In
his essay, he mounts a strong critique of the nationalistic bent of much
European comparatism, all too often culminating in scholarship showing the
greatness of France – in particular – as radiating influence abroad or
creatively transforming foreign influences. Such crypto-nationalism has had a
long, inglorious history in comparative literature. A vivid expression of this
can be seen in an early lecture by one of the founders of Comparative
Literature in France, Philarete Euphémon Chasles, when he introduced his
new course in ‘The Comparison of Foreign Literature’ in Paris in January of
 Comparative World Literature 171

1835. Opening his lecture with the figures of Cervantes and Shakespeare,
unappreciated in their lifetime by their own countrymen, Chasles announces
that his course will study the influence of great minds beyond their own
borders – and above all, in France. This focus, he tells his students, simply
reflects the fact that ‘France is the most sensitive of all countries’, receptive
to the passionate advances of all nations. Contemplating his homeland’s
charms, Chasles falls into an extended erotic reverie:
She is a sleepless and restless country that vibrates with all impressions and that
palpitates and grows enthusiastic for the maddest and the noblest ones; a country which
loves to seduce and be seduced, to receive and communicate sensation, to be excited by
what charms it, and to propagate the emotion it receives. […] She is the center, but the
center of sensitivity; she directs civilization, less perhaps by opening up the route to the
people who border her than by going forward herself with a giddy and contagious
passion. What Europe is to the rest of the world, France is to Europe; everything
reverberates toward her, everything ends with her.2

And so on. Infinitely receptive as Chasles’s France is, she carefully controls
her own borders: she will go out for a mad fling when and where she pleases,
but for her foreign lovers, a Green Card is not in the cards. Scholars today are
perhaps a little less bold in their claims for the beauties of their national
tradition, but Chasles has a more sophisticated descendant in Pascale
Casanova, whose 1999 book La République mondiale des lettres
programmatically asserts that Paris has for centuries been the sole center of
international literary circulation, the capital of ‘the world republic of letters’
from the Renaissance until World War II.
René Wellek wanted none of that sort of higher nationalism. In his essay
on ‘The Crisis of Comparative Literature’ he asserts that
We still can remain good patriots and even nationalists, but the debit and credit system
will have ceased to matter. Illusions about cultural expansion may disappear as may
also illusions about world reconciliation by literary scholarship. Here, in America,
looking from the other shore at Europe as a whole we may easily achieve a certain
detachment, though we may have to pay the price of uprootedness and spiritual exile.3

In this essay, Wellek does make a passing reference to Washington Irving as

a possible source for a Pushkin story, but other than that, his only mention of
any American authors is negative: he criticizes a nationalist history of
American literature that ‘blithely claims Dostoevsky as a follower of Poe and

2
Chasles qtd. in Comparative Literature: The Early Years, ed. by Hans-Joachim Schulz and
Philip H. Rhein (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973), pp. 21-22.
3
René Wellek, ‘The Crisis of Comparative Literature’ (1960). Reprinted in Concepts of
Criticism, ed. by Stephen G. Nichols, Jr. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), pp.
295.
172 David Damrosch

even of Hawthorne’. Fortunately, Wellek remarks, such cultural jingoism has

been relatively rare in the United States, ‘which, on the whole, has been
immune to it partly because it had less to boast of’ (Wellek, p. 289). In the
body of his essay, Wellek’s attention is focused squarely on the literatures of
France, Germany, Italy, and the British Isles, whose authors he mentions by
name thirty times, along with references to three Russians and two classical
Greeks.
The politics of comparative study were the subject of an essay by Werner
Friedrich from the same year of 1960, based on a conference on the teaching
of world literature held at the University of Wisconsin. A Swiss émigré,
founder of the Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, Friederich
criticized American world literature courses for their heavy emphasis on the
literatures of a few European great powers:
Apart from the fact that such a presumptuous term makes for shallowness and
partisanship which should not be tolerated in a good university, it is simply bad public
relations to use this term and to offend more than half of humanity. . . . Sometimes, in
flippant moments, I think we should call our programs NATO Literatures – yet even
that would be extravagant, for we do not usually deal with more than one fourth of the
15 NATO-Nations.4

The limited focus of the era’s comparative study was all the more apparent to
scholars in Asia. A few years later, writing in Friederich’s Yearbook of
Comparative and General Literature, the Japanese comparatist Sukehiro
Hirakawa used a still more pointed military-political analogy to advance a
parallel critique:

It is true that great scholars such as Curtius, Auerbach and Wellek wrote their
monumental scholarly works in order to overcome nationalism. But to outsiders like
me, Western Comparative Literature scholarship seemed to be an expression of a new
form of nationalism – the Western nationalism, if I may use such an expression. It
seemed to us an exclusive club of Europeans and Americans. It was a sort of Greater
West European Co-Prosperity Sphere.5

In his critique of the emphasis on Western European literary ‘great powers’,

Werner Friederich emphasized the need to move outward to study of non-
Western literatures; at the same time, his essay rather closely resembles
Wellek’s in a virtual silence concerning American literature itself.
There are signs in recent scholarship of a change in the longstanding
occlusion of America in American presentations of world literature, as we

4
Werner Friedrich, ‘On the Integrity of Our Planning’, in The Teaching of World Literature,
ed. by Haskell Block (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960), pp. 14-15.
5
Sukehiro Hirakawa, ‘Japanese Culture: Accommodation to Modern Times’, Yearbook of
Comparative and General Literature 28 (1979), 46-50 (p. 47).
 Comparative World Literature 173

can see in Gayatri Spivak’s recent book Death of a Discipline – which,

appropriately, began life as the 2000 Wellek Library Lectures at the
University of California at Irvine. In her book, Gayatri Spivak includes
discussions of Toni Morrison, Gertrude Stein, and W.E.B. Du Bois along
with her (admittedly, more extensive) analyses of works by Joseph Conrad,
Virginia Woolf, Mahasweta Devi, and Tayyib Salih. She prefaces her book,
moreover, with a sardonic glance at the development of new American
collections of world literature:
Between the presentation of the lectures in May 2000 and the final revision in May
2002, the discipline of comparative literature in the United States underwent a sea
change. Publishing conglomerates have recognized a market for anthologies of world
literature in translation. Academics with large advances are busy putting these together.
Typically, the entire literature of China, say, is represented by a couple of chapters of
The Dream of the Red Chamber and a few pages of poetry. Notes and introduction are
provided by a scholar from the area commissioned for the purpose by the general editor,
located in the United States. The market is international. Students in Taiwan or Nigeria
will learn about the literatures of the world through English translations organized by
the United States. Thus institutionalized, this global education market will need
teachers. Presumably, the graduate discipline of comparative literature will train those
teachers.
The book you are about to read is therefore out of joint with the times in a more serious
way than the Wellek Library Lectures of May 2000 were. I have changed nothing of the
urgency of my call for ‘a new comparative literature’. I hope the book will be read as
the last gasp of a dying discipline.6

On this view, world literature is fast becoming a creature of American

conglomerate capitalism, an export trade in English translation purveying a
superficial view of the world’s literary cultures. For Spivak, the whole
project ultimately become little more than exercises in American-style
multiculturalism – the ‘multi-culti’ trendiness that she criticizes throughout
her book.
The situation is probably less dire than Spivak here suggests, if only
because the American anthologies are not in fact, so far as I know, marketed
in either Taiwan or Nigeria. This is not because the American publishers
shrink from selling their wares anywhere they can, but because world rights
for translations are prohibitively expensive, and so the publishers only
acquire North American rights for these anthologies. But it is certainly true
that for their American audiences, the American anthologies provide a
distinctively American-based view of world literature. They are created
largely by editors based in America and their contents are tailored for use in
classrooms in the United States and Canada, so that the selections offered are

6
Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press,
2003), p. xii.
174 David Damrosch

fundamentally shaped by the wishes of potential adopters in these two

countries.
However deathly our discipline may be, it is important to bear in mind
that Spivak is talking only about comparative literature in America, at least at
the start of the passage just quoted; by the end of the passage, as elsewhere in
the book, a quiet slippage or expansion has occurred and she seems to be
referring to the discipline as a whole. Yet Comparative Literature has never
been practiced exclusively in the United States; there are dozens of
Comparative Literature associations around the globe, and there are sixty
comparative literature programs in China alone. In a review essay on Death
of a Discipline, the French comparatist Didier Coste expressed his
bemusement that even as she champions ‘planetarity’, Spivak should be so
resolutely American-centered in her disciplinary discussions. In his essay,
Coste comments on Spivak’s fidelity ‘au milieu universitaire étasunien’,
arguing that:
Dès les premiers paragraphes du livre nous apprenons que les choses changent à toute
vitesse dans la Littérature Comparée aux États-Unis, par exemple entre 2000 et 2002 (le
11 septembre étant, cela va de soi, la cause de ces bouleversements). Dans une
perspective moins myope et moins anhistorique, il serait tout aussi frappant de constater
que presque rien n’a changé dans la conception de la discipline en France depuis des
dizaines d’années. Ce qui est construit en événement capital par l'idéologie américaine
et qui est toujours récent (chute de l’Empire soviétique, attaques terroristes à New York
et à Washington) déplace le moins recent, et occulte les logiques de long terme dans le
passé comme dans l’avenir. (From the very first lines of the book, we find out that
things change in full speed in the U.S. Comparative Literature, for instance between
2000 and 2002 (9/11 being obviously the cause of this upheaval). In a less short-sighted
and ahistorical perspective, it would be just as striking to observe that almost nothing
changed in the conception of the discipline in France in years. What is turned into a
capital event by the American ideology and is always very recent (the fall of the Soviet
Empire, terrorist attacks in New York and Washington) replaces the less recent and
hides away the long term logic in the past as well as in the future.)7

It appears that American-based comparatists remain in something of a double

bind: Americentric in disciplinary terms, and yet in literary terms often
Amerifugal – fleeing America, ignoring the situation at home.
Taking seriously the idea that we must begin from where we stand, the
solution to this double bind can best be found by a double movement, both
inward and outward. We need to do more to connect our comparative work to
the literary culture in which we live, and at the same time we need to enlarge
our disciplinary horizons to take far fuller account of the varieties of
comparatist practice around the world. Far from being incompatible, these

7
Didier Coste, ‘Votum Mortis’. Published in the online journal Fabula at
www.fabula.org/revue/cr/449.php.
 Comparative World Literature 175

two movements rapidly start to come together if we do look at comparatism

abroad.
Here I will take examples from the study of world of literature in Asia,
where comparative literature has developed within institutional contexts that
have privileged their national literary traditions far more than has been the
case in the United States. To begin with India, the leading Indian universities
typically have several departments devoted to Indian languages and
literatures, including one for Sanskrit, one for Hindi, and whichever other
language or languages are dominant in the particular university’s region.
Comparative Literature has evolved in India in symbiosis with these national
literature departments, even as they have reached out to European, American,
and East Asian literature and theory.
The nature of this symbiosis can be seen in the tables of contents of the
JadavpurJournal of Comparative Literature, published by India’s premier
comparative literature department. Issue 28, for instance, from 1989-90,
consists of eight articles on the theme of ‘Cultural Relativism and Literary
Value’. Five of the eight essays are explicitly concerned with one or more
Indian literatures, only sometimes in relation to non-Indian works. Typical
titles are Jasbir Jain’s ‘Cultural Relativism and Perspective: Naipaul
Chaudhuri and Forster’, C. T. Indra’s ‘Cultural Relativism and Tamil
Fiction’, and Gurbhagat Singh’s ‘Search for a Common Denominator:
Western Structuralism and Indian Dhvani’. The issue’s focus is not
exclusively Indo-centric; it includes an essay by the Nigerian writer Gabriel
Okara, ‘Towards the Evolution of an African Language for African
Literature’, and there are more general essays on Orientalism and on cultural
otherness.
Fifteen years later, issue 41 (2003-04) shows a comparable Indian
emphasis. There are two exceptions: a comparative study of Hemingway and
Walcott, and an article by Didier Coste on American global comparatism.
The issue’s ten other essays all have a clear (and often exclusive) Indian
basis, starting with an article by Amiya Dev, “Between the One and the
Many: Rethinking Indian Literature,” and continuing with articles centered
on Gujarati, Kannada, Bengali, Oriyan, and Assamese works among others.
In the issue’s closing article, ‘Multiculturalism: Forced and Natural’, Swapan
Majumdar discusses the rise of cultural studies abroad and makes a plea for a
continued literary emphasis in India. Interestingly, Majumdar takes as a given
that ‘the rise of Comparative Literature in France, Germany, Italy, the East
European Slavic countries and the US […] was most certainly dictated by the
compelling natural necessities of their literature’.8 It is a little surprising to
see the United States in this list, since it is surely a range of institutional and
8
Swapan Majumdar, ‘Multiculturalism: Forced and Natural, A Comparative Literary
Overview’, Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature 41 (2003), 139-144 (p. 140).
176 David Damrosch

cultural-political factors, rather than compelling literary necessities that led to

the frequent ‘neglect’ of American literature in American comparatism. But
broadly speaking, it has usually been the case that comparative literature has
developed in most countries in direct dialogue with the national literary
traditions.
A comparable situation can be seen in China as well, as shown in a wide-
ranging article by Zhou Xiaoyi and Q. S. Tong, ‘Comparative Literature in
China’, published in the Canadian-based electronic journal Comparative
Literature and Culture in 2000. In that article, Professors Zhou and Tong
argue that comparative literature in China has always been closely bound up
with national needs and preoccupations, throughout the twentieth century,
starting with the early comparative work of Hu Shih and particularly from the
field’s establishment as an academic discipline at Tsinghua in the 1920s.
They note that
in the early decades of the twentieth century, comparative literature in China was
preoccupied with literary and cultural encounters between China and three major
cultural sites: India, Russia, and Europe […] In Chinese comparative literature
concerning Indian and Chinese literature and Russian and Chinese literature, it is
noticeable that much of the scholarly attention is focused on how Chinese literature and
Chinese culture have been influenced by inspirations drawn from India and Russia,
respectively, and comparatively. In contrast, critical inquires into the encounters
between Chinese literature and European literature have been largely centered on
China’s influence on Europe, in particular on English-language literature.9

Zhou and Tong go on to show that in more recent years, great attention has
been paid to comparative poetics and to the application of Western literary
theory to Chinese works. They conclude that ‘Chinese comparative literature
as a critical practice may thus be considered a product of China’s pursuit of
modernity in the twentieth century’.
A good expression of this nationally-oriented comparative study is found
in the journal Comparative Literature in China (Zhong Guo Bi Jiao Wen
Xue). A typical issue (2008, number 3) begins with an essay on current
developments in American Comparative Literature and then proceeds to
articles on translations into and out of Chinese, with articles on the
translation practice of Qian Zhongshu, English translations of Guan Zhui
Bian, and Chinese translations of Doris Lessing. Then comes a section
devoted to ‘Overseas Chinese Literary Study’, including Chinese literature in
South-East Asia, analyses of Zhang Ailing and of Ah Qi, and the reception of
Rainer Maria Rilke in China. One article discusses British Romantic poetry,

9
From the electronic journal Comparative Literature and Culture 2:4 (2000);
http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb00-4/zhou&tong00.html. Repr. in Comparative
Literature and Comparative Cultural Studies, ed. by Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek (West
Lafayette: Purdue U.P., 2003), pp. 268-83.
 Comparative World Literature 177

but the other articles all concern Chinese literature abroad or foreign
literature in China.
Both the Jadavpur Journal of Comparativce Literature and Comparative
Literature in China, then, display almost an inverse proportion to what is
typically found in American journals such as Comparative Literature and
World Literature Today – originally founded in 1927 under the title Books
Abroad; a typical recent issue includes poems, articles, and interviews
involving exciting new writers from Algeria, Catalonia, Israel, Portugal, and
Lebanon, but no discussion of any American writers either at home or
abroad.
This brief survey suggests that it would be well worthwhile to undertake a
comparative study of world literature as it is construed in differing locations
around the world. It could help scholars everywhere to think directly about
the relations between their national traditions and their presentation of the
wider field of world literature, whether these relations are symbiotic or
hegemonic, whether they are unusually close or unusually disjointed. A fuller
sense of the range of possibility might keep scholars from falling unwittingly
into nationalistic patterns in the construal of global literary relations. Perhaps
in time only a third of the essays in the Jadavpur Journal of Comparative
Literature and of Comparative Literature in China, instead of most of them,
would center on a single Indian or Chinese author abroad, or a foreign
author’s reception in India or China.
American comparatists, on the other hand, seem clearly to be at the far
end of the range of continuity/discontinuity. For too long, we have accepted a
degree of uprootedness and internal exile that had a certain logic for the
émigrés who taught us or our teachers; this makes less and less sense for our
field today, even for foreign-born scholars. There are encouraging signs of a
budding rapprochement between American and comparative literary studies,
seen for instance in a valuable recent collection edited by Wai Chee Dimock
and Lawrence Buell, Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World
Literature (Princeton, 2007). It is symptomatic, though, that both editors are
based in English and American studies departments rather than comparative
literature. They and their contributors are seeing the benefits that can accrue
to American studies by taking a fully comparative and global perspective.
More departments of Comparative Literature, in turn, need to accept the
converse realization, that a vital comparatism can best thrive in creative
symbiosis with its home traditions as well as those of the wider world.
A comparative study of different national approaches to world literature
should also help us all to do a better job of construing the world’s literary
traditions, whether to move beyond an overemphasis on a few literary great
powers, or to avoid either overemphasizing or undercutting our own national
tradition. The study of world literature in many parts of the world will gain if
we attend more closely to the varied ways in which world literature is
178 David Damrosch

construed in different countries and regions, bringing a global perspective to

our scholarship as well as to the literature we study.

WORKS CITED

Block, Haskell, ed., The Teaching of World Literature (Chapel Hill:

University of North Carolina Press, 1960)
Hirakawa, Sukehiro, ‘Japanese Culture: Accommodation to Modern Times’,
Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 28 (1979), 46-50
Majumdar, Swapan, ‘Multiculturalism: Forced and Natural, A Comparative
Literary Overview’, Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature 41
(2003), 139-144
Schulz, Hans-Joachim, Philip H. Rhein (eds.). Comparative Literature: The
Early Years (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973)
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorti, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2003)
Wellek, René, ‘The Crisis of Comparative Literature’ (1960). Reprinted in
Concepts of Criticism, ed. Stephen G. Nichols, Jr. (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1963)