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RENA WELLEK
Comparative
Literature Today
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE TODAY
ation at the end of the war and suggests specific reforms for the study of
literature in our universities-among them was the establishment of
departments of comparative literature which should become, we said,
"Departments of General and International Literature, or simply
Literature." We hoped that the Department of Comparative Literature
might "becomethe center for the reform which should, however, be car-
ried out primarily within the departments of English and the other
Modern Languages, the reform which, briefly, demands a Ph.D. in
literature rather than in English, French, or German Philology"
(p. 297).
We were not alone. The New Critics had made the greatest practi-
cal impact on the college teaching of literature, particularly with the
textbook, Understanding Poetry (1938), by Cleanth Brooks and Rob-
ert Penn Warren, which had begun to catch on in the early 1940s. In
Chicago Ronald S. Crane had, since 1935 at least, advocated and insti-
tutionalized the study of criticism and its history. In 1939 the English
Institute, expressly devoted to an examination of the methods of lit-
erary study, had met for the first time in New York. While also con-
cerned with problems of bibliography and editing, the English Institute
soon became a forum for the discussion of critical and aesthetic issues.
In spite of its name and its original limitation to English scholars,
the Institute has had a series of sessions devoted to French and Ger-
man criticism. As early as 1940 the Southern Review and the Kenyon
Review published a symposium on "Literature and the Professors,"
to which some of the best known New Critics, J. C. Ransom, Allen
Tate, and Cleanth Brooks, as well as Harry Levin, contributed trench-
ant criticisms and the most varied suggestions for a reform of the
academic study of literature. Change was in the air and a profound
change was actually effected, not overnight and not in all institutions
uniformly, but gradually almost everywhere. Present-day students
seem completely unable to realize the situation of the early decades
of the century in most English departments. Criticism was taboo, con-
temporary and even American literature was not taught at all, foreign
literatures were largely ignored, texts were studied only as philologi-
cal documents-in short, nineteenth-century positivism reigned un-
challenged and supreme.
I have reviewed these developments and my share in them not be-
cause I want to indulge in autobiographical reminiscences, but be-
cause my personal story reflects the history of literary scholarship in
these decades, the whole "revolt against Positivism" which I described
in my first public lecture at Yale in February 1946-Croce and German
Geistesgeschichte, the Russian formalists, American neo-humanism
328
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE TODAY
and T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis and the New Critics. Thus, when Mr.
Friederich, in the first Yearbook of Comparative and General Litera-
ture (1952) reprinted Jean-Marie Carre's brief introduction to M.-F.
Guyard's little handbook, La Litterature comparee (1951), I felt it as
a challenge to all that had been achieved in this country. Carre, the
first president of the International Comparative Literature Associa-
tion, here restates, in the narrowest terms, the old concept of literary
study and of comparative literature in particular; comparative litera-
ture is a branch of literary history concerned with the "factual con-
tacts" (rapports de fait) between the works, the inspirations and even
the lives of writers belonging to several literatures. Carre, in this pref-
ace at least, expressly excludes "general literature" from our subject
and condemns all comparisons which are not justified by concrete his-
torical contacts as mere rhetorical exercises. I severely criticized the
preface and the little book by Guyard in the next Yearbook (1953),
though I recognized the modest pretensions of a handbook for students
and its dependence on a similar earlier booklet by Paul Van Tieghem
(1931). Still, it seemed to me a dangerous symptom of the survival
of an obsolete methodology and its restrictive legislation. The paper
at the 1958 Congress at Chapel Hill merely restated my objections in
the presence of the European visitors. It was, regrettably to my mind,
understood as a manifesto of an American school of comparative liter-
ature and as an attack on the French school, though it was obviously not
directed against a nation but against a method. I was and am aware
that in France also similar criticisms of academic scholarship had been
voiced for many years. One need only think of the attacks against
Lanson and la critique universitaire before World War I. I know that
there are many critics and historians in France who have struck out
boldly in many directions opposed to the positivistic factualism advo-
cated by Carre. I am also aware that many American scholars are not in
agreement with my point of view, and I have never arrogated for myself
the role of spokesman for American scholarship in general. Myself a
European by birth, I do not relish being put into the odd position of
appearing anti-French or even vaguely anti-European.
I have learned from Harry Levin that Mirabeau is the author of the
aphorism that an audience of foreigners constitutes "a living poster-
ity." I can make only melancholy reflections about posterity from the
amount of misunderstanding and distortion this polemical paper had
to suffer abroad. It was apparently interpreted as a manifesto of
American hostility to scholarship, since, after I gave an erudite histori-
cal paper on the word "criticism"at the Utrecht Congress in 1961, I was
congratulated for being less ignorant and less a defender of ignorance
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE TODAY
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
332
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE TODAY
333
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
duces a "shuffle novel," No. 1, where the pages are loose and unnum-
bered and can be read in any order. All distinctions between art and
reality have fallen. All arts tend toward self-abolition. Some of these
acts or works obviously need not be taken seriously. They are elaborate
hoaxes as old as Dada or as Marcel Duchamp, who submitted under the
title "Fountain" a hospital urinal to the Independent Show in New York
in 1917. I hope I am not suspected of lack of sympathy with modern art,
the avant-garde, or experimentation when I judge that art, in these
symptoms, has reached the zero point and is about to commit suicide.
It is time for us to return to an understanding of the nature of art.
A work of art is an object or a process of some shape and unity which
sets it off from life in the raw. But such a conception must appar-
ently be guarded against the misunderstanding of being "art for art's
sake," the ivory tower, or asserting the irrelevancy of art to life. All
great aestheticians have claimed a role for art in society and thought
that art flourishes best in a good society. They knew that art human-
izes man, that man becomes fully human only through art. It seems
to me time that literary study again recognize the realm of art and
stop being all things to all men, that it return to its old task of under-
standing, explaining, and transmitting literature. Otherwise it will dis-
solve into the study of all history and all life. I know that students-and
not only young students-are often restive with such apparent limita-
tions. Literature for them is simply an occasion or a pretext for the
solution of their personal problems and the general problems of our
civilization. But literary scholarship, as organized knowledge, needs
such limitation. Every branch of knowledge must have a subject mat-
ter. Only through the singling out-which does not mean complete
isolation-of the object can there be advance in understanding and
penetration. The complaints of narrowing are belied by the mani-
fold possibilities of expansion in our chosen field which have increased
enormously in the last decades. Recent comments in the TLS and the
New York Times, assuming an exhaustion of dissertation topics, ridi-
culing the trivialities of literary research which solemnly record W. B.
Yeats' liking for parsnips, are wide of the mark.
Just comparative literature offers an almost limitless number of
new topics and new problems. We have today-looking back only to
the last war-an incomparablygreater number of excellent guidebooks,
bibliographies, dictionaries, and surveys of literary history which
should make it inexcusable for anybody to plead ignorance of authors,
names, and problems. Think of the bibliographies beginning with
Baldensperger-Friederich and ending with the annual MLA bibliog-
raphy which listed 16,089 items for the year 1963. Think of the growing
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE TODAY
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
matter most in the long run. But the feeling of a community of scholars
is a great stimulus to morale. Such a conference can encourage us-
send us, as I hope this one will, "tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures
new."
Yale University
337