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Is Comparison Still Relevant to World Literature?

Since the rise of World Literature from 2000 as the new Comparative Literature, debates about comparison have ceded to discussions of what ‘world’ means. The key question of what and how to compare is often taken for granted. This poses the question of whether comparison is still relevant to World Literature, which I address by arguing with an emphatic ‘no’.

This critical shift is due to two consensuses: 1) World Literature is already inherently comparative, which pre-empts the question of comparison; 2) haunted by past comparisons that were premised upon imperialist and colonial suppositions about non-Western cultures, scholars see comparison as a deeply problematic method that makes different literatures all too translatable, decontextualised and comparable in wrong ways.

I'll re-examine the above two theses by considering two concrete examples: one on contemporary French poetry inspired by the Tang Chinese poet Wang Wei; another on the Chinese translation of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.

Comparative Methodologies is a research group that considers what it means to work comparatively in the humanities and the methodological foundations of comparatist work. 

RSVP .