Miner 1987 Theoretical Methodological Topics Comparative Literature

Some Theoretical and Methodological Topics for Comparative Literature
Author(s): Earl Miner

Source: Poetics Today, Vol. 8, No. 1 (1987), pp. 123-140
Published by: Duke University Press
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SOME THEORETICAL
AND METHODOLOGICAL
TOPICS FOR COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
EARL MINER
Comparative Literature, Princeton
The phrase "comparative literature" obviously does not im

same things as "Chinese literature" or "French literature." "
tive" is not a language in which one writes but a kind of s
fact "literature" once held such a meaning, as "bungaku" d
Japanese still, as perhaps the characters also do in Chinese
"Department of English" does. The issues have always been w
studies and how. Some have supposed that comparison was
only within a common culture and others that generic study o
ary movements (Romanticism, realism) deserve attention. Ther
reason to dismiss these conceptions but - rightly or wrongl
have not held central interest to recent Western students.
the most striking development in the past fifteen years has b
inclusion of literary theory as a subject for comparative litera
much of what passes for literary theory in the West has little
genuinely comparative.
In fact, the first thing that must be said about comparative
ture is that its present practice is seldom comparative in an
way and that, when efforts are made to compare (for exam
treatment of nature by Wordsworth and Du Fu or Matsuo Bash
results are seldom impressive. Moreover, until recently there h
little effort to incorporate non-Western evidence into West
parative study, just as the Chinese have for centuries ignored t
ature of their neighbors, unless it was written in Chinese. T
many hopeful signs that the old narrow attitudes are yiel
broader views. At the tenth congress of the International C
tive Literature Association at New York University in 198
was unprecedented representation of speakers on Asian liter
though south Asia and even Korea were little in evidence as
tual concerns. In the United States, Indiana University deserves
Poetics Today, Vol. 8:1 (1987) 123-140
124 EARL MINER
for beginning the effort to incorporate Asian literatu

tive study. Indiana was followed by Princeton and S
sities and recently other universities have also sho
making "comparative literature" something other th
literature in European tongues.
Apart from these problems, we are left with intellec
as important or as difficult as identifying important i
are not even sure whether we are comparing what is st
able or not. For example, in traditional Western thoug
tory is divided into "periods" or "movements." In t
on the other hand, literary history is divided into "dy
and "schools." Are these different conceptions real
Do their differences correct each other and lead us
vanced theory? What are we to infer from the fact th
"lyric" and "narrative" are so recent in China and
the West via Japan? What are we to infer from the fa
impossible to define "fu" in English or other Euro
One can only conclude that there are many problem
have not yet succeeded even in defining the important
follows, I shall attempt to put my own ideas at hazard
issues that have concerned me. Discussion of them will lead to a last
concern with problems of what literary comparison may imply.
A. SOME IMPLICATIONS OF DISTINCTIONS BETWEEN

LYRIC, NARRATIVE AND DRAMA
It is a common-sense assumption that these three entities exist, even
if an extended example of any one of them will have elements of the
others. Chinese ideas about lyricism postulate the poet's will or in-
tention, thereby presuming that the poet speaks to someone with
some urgency about actual matters, for although many "intentions"
led to fictional writing, there is no assumption that literature is basic-
ally fictional. The ancient Western views hold that lyricism is distin-
guished by certain prosodies and such a prosodic view would find a
response in many cultures, including the Chinese. The usual modern
Western view has been that a lyric is something "overheard," which
implies something quite different from Chinese stress on will or in-
tention. Some contemporary Western views hold that the distinctions
of lyric, narrative and drama are pointless, because the more radical
distinction between literary and non-literary writing cannot be sus-
tained. I do not subscribe to that view, for reasons that will become
clear. But truly there are difficulties.
Drama is most easily distinguished from lyric and narrative on the
basis of performance by actors impersonating or playing given roles.
(The attributive form of drama, the dramatic, in narrative and lyric
shows, however, that there are problems that the basic distinction
does not account for.) In my view, lyricism is distinguished by inten-
COMPARATIVE POETICS 125
sity and narrative by continuity. The usual versions of lyric

have affective, emotional elements that may range to the
ironic. The usual version of narrative continuance is sustaine
tially in plot, by which I mean the progressive, causal and co
sustaining of relations between characters, times and pla
emphasis, in the sustaining, on temporalities, on the sign
place and above all on defined, developing characters in
the other two elements. In different literary traditions
varies considerably on elements deemed important. For
connection with song has seemed significant, especially in
societies and in their earlier stages. Much later, the expr
became a dominant Western concern and therefore origin
to be a criterion of value. In Japan, for centuries the
audience wvere held crucial and, with them, the conception o
mind, spirit (kokoro) was deemed a crucial element along wit
topics and subjects (kotoba). In China, somewhat differen
was given by emphasis on intention (xi) and emotion (xi
be clear that concepts of lyricism (as well as narrative and dr
become lost in local emphases and terminology.
The comparative problem therefore becomes one of iden
issue bearing on lyric, narrative and drama common to vario
tures in identical theoretical terms. There must be many way
fining useful issues. In what follows, I shall take one way
pose for our present concerns is to show that the distin
tween lyric, narrative and drama are valid. My thesis is that
use of these concepts enables us to understand the emer
critical systems, something that I have argued previously.1 T
has two subordinate claims: a literary system involves a c
of literature as a distinct cognitive entity and the emergenc
cit ideas about literature.
Anthropologists have shown that, in early societies or in primitive
societies in our time, the elements of literature, religion, economics,
politics, etc. do exist but in undifferentiated form.2 As long as that is
the case, we have a proto- or Ur-conception of literature rather than
a distinct one. Such thought differs from our own thinking and prac-
tice. One need only consider the departments of a modern university
or the arrangement of books in a library to see the difference. Of all
the signs that a concept of literature has been gained, the first defini-
tive one seems to be giving a name to the author of a work consider-
1. The rest of the present first section is largely based on Miner 1979b. This study is a re-
vised version of a paper presented at the first Sino-American symposium on comparative
literature in China during the summer of 1983.
2. The most familiar account of primitive thought is probably that of Levi-Strauss 1966,
which posits the presence in such thought of the elements of later thought. He does not say
so, but it is implicit throughout that the presence involves non-differentiation. For an expli-
cit discussion, see Konishi 1984, pp. 111-200, 266-306.
126 EARL MINER
ed sufficiently a discrete entity to be honored s

tragedies were by civic festivals or as specific forms
cation became devised. (Painters and musicians ar
only after poets.)
My thesis about the emergence of a critical system
quires the encounter of a gifted critic or critics with
genre, by which I mean lyric, drama or narrative.
as we usually understand today may exist without
to account for it. In Greece, the poems of Homer
ideas of literature but no general poetics existed to
when they were composed. Systematic Western th
ture begins with Plato's Ion, Phaedrus and Repub
the poet, the rhetorician and the philosopher are riv
tent that only one can be valid (the philosopher
Only with Aristotle's Poetics do we have a properl
tion and, as we all know, he brought his powerful
defining literature in terms of drama. His incidental
rative are not adequate and he has precious little t
Out of Aristotle's encounter with one genre, dram
gedy), came the Western understanding of literature
tematic mimesis.
Any complete theory of literature seems to me to require at mini-
mum a set of concepts posited in literary terms: the world, the poet,
the (poet's) work, a text (or physical coding), a reader and the (read-
er's) poem. For a fully adequate view, we would also require a con-
ception of language and the social conditions for literature: perfor-
mers in some cases, scribes or printers and social means to sustain
writers and ensure circulation of their works. Although Plato had a
semiotic system of phenomena and noumena, it is not clear to me
that he articulated a comparably subtle conception of language. And
neither he nor Aristotle were able to posit the reader and affectivism
as a distinguishing feature of literature. The reader and affectivism
could not be differentiae for literature because they were shared with
philosophy and rhetoric, as the Phaedrus well shows. So it was that
the Western system did not become complete until Horace. He ad-
vanced concern with words or language and, by encounter with his
own practice in lyric odes, satires and epistles (many of them satiric,
like his epodes), he gave the West its full sense of the reader and the
reader's affective response - "dulce et utile," etc. For centuries there-
after, albeit with many vicissitudes and counter-claims, it was com-
monly held that imitation was the means of literature, with teaching
and delight its ends.
The emergence of systematic poetics in China, Korea and Japan
seems quite different. For one thing, the term usually translated as
"literature" included certain kinds of history as well as lyric. I shall
not attempt to honor adequately the inclusion of those kinds of his-
tory, since lyric poetry was taken as the purest exemplar. B

and Japan, the dominant poetic system did emerge from
encounter with lyrics and narrative histories of prized kind
nese instance involves the prefaces to the Classic of Song
Here is an articulated -view of the nature of literature as ly
could only have been the more influential because that a
not termed simply a collection but a classic.
The Japanese evidence is better known to me. It is quite
lyrics existed in pre-historical Japan. And in the great eight
collection, the Man'yoshi, there are over 4,500 lyrics or
a hodge-podge of various principles of native or Chinese
tion. For that matter, the Japanese had earlier collected p
had been composed - as best its authors could - in Chines
struction by resident Koreans. But there was as yet no
poetics, none till the compilation of the first of twenty-one
lections, the Kokinshi (ca. 905-15). What effected the
systematic poetics was the Japanese preface to the collec
by Ki no Tsurayuki (884-946).3 Tsurayuki uses the cruci
mentioned earlier: kokoro (heart, spirt or mind) and koto
topics or subjects). The significant thing is that he defined a
sive (the words, etc.) and affective (heart, etc.) poetics ou
ism. The poet writes on being moved by encountering som
nature or by experiencing something in love, travel, death a
human events. When the moved poet writes in words, the ex
may in turn move someone to whom the poem was sent
another poem, or a reader centuries later. In a particularl
way, Tsurayuki holds that animals may also be moved t
the range of those affected may be lovers, warriors or invis
When the Chinese and Japanese literary systems are the
of comparison, they seem different on many counts. For
although the Japanese held to affectivism more radically th
Chinese and, although the Chinese emphasized expressiv
the Chinese emphasized moral affectivism in a way seldo
Japanese criticism. Or again, lengthy fictional prose narrativ
earlier absolutely in Japan than in China (and relatively f
and history quite distinct from lyric is more important in C
in Japan. Yet, when we compare these (and Korean) liter
and practices to Western ones, the East Asian views seem mu
and opposed to the Western. The Asian affective-expressiv
is unlike the varieties of mimesis and affectivism in the West
idea of mimesis is difficult to present in East Asian lang
3. Tsurayuki's cousin, Ki no Yoshimochi (d. 919), provided a brief preface in

certain pointless debate concerns the priority of the Japanese or the Chinese
men were educated in Chinese learning and, as cousins, would have talked thr
ters they were presenting for the first time to readers of Japanese poetry.
128 EARL MINER
subordinate emphases also vary. In Asia, one of

is technical competence, practice, use of mode
subsidiary emphasis must surely be expressionism,
and weakens intermittently until its great day in
ern expressionism carries the burden of origina
being new. The Asian version carries the burden o
pressed, the danger of not being traditional, of
the standard of valued prior expression.
To return to the main point, the systematic d
be based on a definition of literature in terms o
drama (as in the West). To the best of my know
views of literature are founded on crucial engag
and all other systems presume definition out of
out narrative).5 If so, it is a matter of special inte
what a poetic system based on narrative might b
dence is particularly interesting on this score. T
another literature for the greatest national wor
that appeared within about a century of the defin
tic poetics out of lyric. The work is of course The
ji Monogatari) by Murasaki Shikibu (978-1016
author reports that her work was read at co
would there be, we may wonder? It seems tellin
read aloud, Ichij6 (r. 986-1011) associated it with
The Chronicles of Japan (Nihongi).6
Both the author and the sovereign appear to
prose narrative shared in the lyric affective-exp
also to have thought that narrative dealt with v
reality. That later became the general Chinese
for fictional narrative. It also seems likely that
early emergence of great fictional prose narra
much to Buddhism. This may seem strange bu
exempla or parables in Buddhist scriptures such
which gave respectability to fiction, Buddhist t
found effect wherever it was accepted. In China
was important, not so much perhaps for imme
on kalpa, as for a teleology at odds with Chinese
4. See Liu 1962, pp. 77-80, a rare explicit attention to assump

Much else in that book bears on this study, as does much in Liu,
cal requirement is represented in terms of style or manner (sama)
practice (tenarai) and especially emulation of exemplary poems (
5. I am not wholly satisfied on the latter point with respect to
dian definition of literature is not from drama treated as lyric for
status) of individual lines, India may represent a very different, s
6. Although the Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters) treats mu
Nihongi (or Nihon Shoki) and is more esteemed today, it was ver
Shikibu's time.
the teleology was fused with the Japanese sense of the heig
moment.) Whether these speculations fully hold, it is clear
Japan and China great prose fictional narrative first eme
literature tinged by Buddhism.
Although the evidence from various cultures is not easily mast
it does seem clear that fundamental differences occur when
critics initiate a critical system by defining it in terms of ly
drama. Similarly, if lyric is thought hospitable to narrative,
sults again differ. Such comparative historical evidence confir
theoretical assumption that lyric, narrative and drama are meani
entities (whether those be termed genres or whatever).
B. LITERARY COLLECTIONS
It must be impossible to find an example of a literate cult

collections. Two motives seem universal: the desire to
the desire to honor the especially valued. The motives are
dictory but the second often leads to veneration appr
status of religious canonicity. The Judaeo-Christian Bible
ly two collections of works that are themselves compos
elements. The Buddhist sutras are much the same, subje
and amalgamation in collective units and groups. Chine
especially useful in this matter. As we have seen, in ad
lections proper, there are "classics" (the character use
nates sutras) that are collections specially honored as work
canonical worth. In addition to their manifestations of the two mo-
tives of preservation and honor of what is valued, collections logically
involve conceptions of the individual literary entity and of the col-
lective whole. If the elements compiled do not have a separable
individual status, it becomes impossible to distinguish a collection
from, say, a novel or play, since any lengthy work is necessarily a
composite. And if there is no collective whole definable, there is no
identity to discuss. The two versions of the Greek Anthology differ
considerably but each is a distinct collection of individual poems.
The preservation of what is esteemed and the collecting of literary
integers may take various guises but, by obvious logic, all the indivi-
dual items cannot be presented at once. That is, some principle of
ordering is implicit in the conception of a collection. In modern
times, Western collections are usually organized on chronological
principles. Anonymous works or those by known authors will be
arranged successively according to their historical sequence. And
within a single author's selected (or complete) works, the order will
be similarly chronological. But that is a modern and especially West-
ern presumption.7
7. This present section is largely founded on Miner 1985.
130 EARL MINER
Western collecting begins in late Greek or Alexan

examples may be offered. The odes of Pindar were
the order of the historical institution of their occasio
winners of various games, and since the Olympian
first to be ordained, his Olympian odes come first, th
etc. When a major collection of the tragedies of Eu
the organization was alphabetical by titles, just as t
were constituted by books (some scholars have spe
divisions were made in a thitherto undivided poem
twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet in their se
The Romans were more compulsive and complex in
The Odes of Horace appeared first in but one book c
As he continued to compose these poems, a second
added, each carefully ordered and in fact making a
the first book. Later a fourth book was published b
with the first three. Virgil's Eclogues have been caref
elaborate analysis has produced theories of bala
groups of poems reflecting various themes and mo
less accepted that Virgil introduces an acrostic ver
Some have argued for numerical patterning.
Leaving aside evidence from the European Middle
naissance there are numerous sonnet sequences, mo
obvious terms of plot. But John Donne has a sequ
called La Corona. In a "corona" or "crown" like his
one sonnet is repeated as the first line of the next an
the final sonnet is the same as the initial line of the f
bert's collection, The Temple, begins with "The Ch
is followed by a poem whose title might be translat
step" of "The Church," the title of the main body
The next poem is "The Altar," the object a devout
first attend to on entering the church. Various lin
progressions finally lead to a climactic poem, "Lov
tian holy communion. Later in the seventeenth cen
den devised a collection of mostly translated and
poems, Fables, with links from one poem to the next
tegrated chiefly by recurrent concerns: love; war,
striving; the nature of art and the artist; and histo
result is an integrated collection twice as long as
Lost. In short, chronological, alphabetical, themat
numerological and related schemes characterize We
Relatedness of whatever kind and pleasing variety
central principles.
Chinese conceptions appear to differ considera
early times, collections were made, at first (sixth
the principle that the songs or poems exemplified
fects of sovereigns. By the third century A.D., auth
topics were specified, using aesthetic rather than pure

teria. Some writings we might consider collections we
special Chinese status of classics. By the time of the c
The History of the Tang Dynasty, an order emerged th
for many other "histories." There were four parts: cla
philosophy and poetry in collections. Other kinds of
emerged in the Tang. They might be ordered by poeti
vs. fu; by chronology; or by imputed quality. An ind
might issue more than one collection, ordering poems by
ject. The heirs or followers of a poet might reprint poem
had ordered them or reorder them along different li
changing the arrangement from kind to chronology. Som
might decree collections and very popular poets might
tions of their poems made in their lifetimes. By the S
collections were often programmatic to justify the practi
dividual, a school or a critical position. Chinese practi
other principles but most of the important ones have bee
In the Chinese collecting of literary works, we seem
pure or simple version of the human desire to collect: pre
what is thought to be of value. So much so that the co
the air of compendia. The first Japanese poetic collecti
in Chinese), the Kaifuiso, preserves some 120 Chinese p
is natural that it follows Chinese guidelines - to a poin
are sixty-four poets represented, the average is only abou
per poet, which seems unlike Chinese collections after e
The smallness also seems unusual in Chinese terms. Later collections
of exemplary prose stories (setsuwa) seem more like Chinese collec-
tions. The Konjaku Monogatari is certainly integrated but the effect
is very much in the style of a Chinese omnibus collection, as if the
effort were primarily to preserve all the good stories available. This
feature is not conspicuous amongJapanese literary productions.
The two most prominent features of Japanese collections are their
numerousness or centrality and their integration. We may begin with
the first system of writing used to representJapanese. That employed
Chinese characters in two ways: to represent meaning and to repre-
sent sound. Because Japanese is an inflected language (unlike Chinese
but closely like Korean), sounds were necessary to represent particles
and inflections of verbs and adjectives. This system might have been
called kojikigana, after its first principal used in the Kojiki (Record
of Ancient Matters), or kudaragana (Kogury6 writing), after the
Koreans who were almost certainly the ones who devised it. In fact,
it is called man'y6gana after the first collection of Japanese poems,
the Man'yashi (last datable poem 759). So strong is the Japanese
sense in collections that define the Japanese nature of Japanese
literature, that the first writing system was named after a collection,
in spite of the system's having been used earlier.
132 EARL MINER
The Man'yoshu was compiled in stages and by d

a collection made from previous collections and
grated. In Book 2, there is a run of poems that
argued to be a sequence and in various books we s
according to principles of likeness. Great as muc
however, its collective integration is rudimentar
of the first of the twenty-one royal collections
905-15). Thereafter socially esteemed poetry
not just in royal collections but collections like
collections, in exemplary or formulary collection
(as of one hundred poems).
The full title, Kokinwakashu, means something
of Ancient and Modern Japanese Poems. The poe
appear along with some less than recent poems
poems from the generation of the compilers. Th
ranged chronologically or by author but rather
the two most important are the seasons (Book
spring and autumn) and love (Books 11-15, be
half of the twenty books). Starting with a poem
about whether one can now say it is spring, the
step by step through the codified annual emergenc
mena. The love poems begin with the male exper
some desirable woman. There follows a fluctuatin
to get in touch with her, her initial coldness, p
love (to avoid gossip) and, at some point, consum
meeting (au koi). After going to visit the woman
herited matrilineally in early Japan) at dusk and le
the man was obliged to send a next-morning poem,
The attention then shifts more to the woman's
waits for a lover whose visits become less frequent
then distraught, then bitter. She may finally put t
mind and much later, by some sudden image, re
all this suggests, the essence of love is primarily
rather than being loved and the collective expre
to be fluctuation. Even after successive women have been deserted,
runs of poems may start new affairs.
What is true of these principal books is true of others on such sub-
jects as travel: unlike Western sonnet sequences, these collections and
their parts do not develop plots. The names of the different authors
and the headnotes (somewhat like titles but often fairly lengthy ex-
planations of circumstances and persons) prevent our taking the prin-
cipals involved to be continuous. Continuous characters, times and
places - with logic of some sort for any shifts - are necessary for
plot. Instead, the narrative we discover in Japanese collections, if it is
narrative, is one of the collective lyric units ordered by progressions
and associations between poems. The arrangement is made by the
compilers to form a collection, and that is as true of their own

as of those by others.
The Kokinshu principles set the terms for subsequent Ja
poetic collections. It remained to improve on them, as was th
with later royal collections and hundred-poem sequences; or t
them, as linked poetry did by making the act of alternating com
tion by a group of poets the simultaneous act of collection
play comically with the principles. The Japanese urge to coll
goes so far that the sequences of linked poetry (themselves co
in their way) were drawn on to make collections resembling the
ones. The Tsukubashu (1356) compiled by Nijo Yoshimoto
88) is organized into twenty books on the model of the royal
tions. And in this first collection of renga, an esteemed st
given wvith its predecessor, since each stanza after the first mu
understood for the skill in connection with its predecessor.8
The later, less courtly kind of linked poetry, haikai, was al
lected. The most famous collection, Sarumino Shu (1691) is
parts.9 The first four include opening stanzas (hokku), requ
incorporate a season. Given that the collection is known as
Kokinshi of haikai" and, after centuries of honoring the K
model, the order of the hokku in Sarumino is shocking: Part
ter; 2, Summer; 3, Autumn; 4, Spring. This is deliberate
change" in giving the two least esteeemed seasons first and,
pair, giving the more esteemed season second, all out of their na
order. Yet it also enables the compilers to arrange the entire
section as a gigantic haikai ?equence, so that (for example) the
flower stanzas occur at the point equivalent to the 35th stan
36-stanza sequence. For that matter, the design of the 36-sta
kasen sequence, can be seen throughout the collection. Just a
and haikai stanzas might be selected for a collection, in the Saru
Shu, the collection is variously patterned on the kasen model
Odagiri 1981:28-34).
The eccentricities of the compilers of Sarumino Shu are del
integrative gestures playing with older ideas of coherence. T
other evidence to show how consistently the Japanese chose t
grate, even to the point of altering Chinese models to their own
poses. One of the Chinese collections most prestigious in Jap
the Wenxuan, Monzen to Japanese. That collection provid
Japanese with numerous classifications for kinds of writing:
chuan (den), lun (ron), etc. By the seventeenth century, a F
Monzen or Popular Wenxuan had appeared in Japan. This co
of prose writings (often including verse) by Basho and his
using about twenty of the Chinese classifications adapted so t
8. For an account of linked poetry, see Miner 1979a.

9. For an English translation and commentary, see Miner-Odagiri, 1981.
134 EARL MINER
Chinese would often not have recognized the catego

vented. In 1724, another version was compiled, W
Wenxuan in Japanese and Chinese), including man
along with some experimental ones, once again grou
the Wenxuan categories, although somewhat fewer
ku Monzen. The point of this detailed account is t
could not rest with such Chinese collection by categ
so radically adopted to alien purposes, as we have s
beginning with veneration of the Wenxuan comes to i
fillment with the Uzuragoromo of Yokoi Yayu (17
collection of various sketches or essays or verse compo
ly different kind. Each is labelled by a category or
one of the Wenxuan terms. But the collection (or
parts appeared in a series) is grouped into runs inte
ese need to incorporate collectively a number of un
the Chinese categories but by integrative procedur
linked poetry.
As this brief account shows, the abstract, separat
diously classifying genius of the Chinese certainly
tions that differ from Western anthologies, and the J
Chinese versions seriously. But the Chinese versions
cation to suit Japanese tastes and the process w
when the separating Chinese classifications were trans
integrated collections.
So far is this true that Chinese inventions lost in Ch
vive in Japan and be put to alien use. A form of co
gagaku in Japan, was introduced from China via K
earlier Indian elements as well) and, although the m
other countries, it is still performed in Japan to t
group from the University of California, Los Angeles
music in New York City in January, 1983. From t
Japanese conceived of a three-part rhythmic structur
stately introduction, jo, an agitated, broken or dev
ha, and a fast close, kyu. This three-part rhythm
integrating renga sequences and, from renga, was
haikai and other kinds of literary writing. As the
Wenxuan and of the rhythmic basis of gagaku show
collections, linked-poetry sequences and even dram
full realization only by integrative means essenti
nature. If the Japanese conception of literary who
Western and Chinese conceptions, so must the concept
integrated into collections. Any reasonably full accoun
ters would need to attend to political ideology, con
relations between individuals and groups and m
1985). Without entering into such matters, it should
universal practice of collecting literary works takes s
ent forms in various literary traditions. In short, by sta

universal conception presuming identity - that of co
can work comparatively to derive sets of resemblance
ences.
Western sequences are usually based on some

or thematic ordering. Alternatively, more rec
organization has been chronological. In China,
separate categorizing are of prime importance
far more important to use integration based o
other than plot, chronology or separate catego
China and Japan, the rational, practical and ye
thinking characterized by Confucianism ha
thought over the centuries and is important t
ese, on the other hand, seek to integrate hig
sequentially or in social, literary and even rel
"collection" must be viewed comparatively if
as a useful literary idea with explanatory power.
C. LOGICAL AND PRACTICAL CRITERIA

FOR LITERARY COMPARISON
Perhaps the least studied issue in comparative literature is

meant by "comparative" and, more precisely, what are the pr
or canons of comparability. Some have argued that comp
study is feasible only within a coherent culture. This argum
offered, in practice, a Eurocentered conception that rules ou
literatures as offering no assistance to categories established
European antique, medieval and modern periods. That posit
one hopes, not taken seriously by many people today. Anoth
tidional conception holds that comparative literature involve
of the influence of one literature or author in one languag
another in a second.10 This study may have genuine compa
merit if it is used to compare - and better understand - what th
ceiving writer has written in light of what was borrowed. In m
same fashion, translations may be compared with originals, s
something of the selections and emphasis of the translator and
times making explicit certain features of the original that had t
to escaped notice.
10. In English-speaking countries, "influence" became respectable once more wit
1971; and it became compulsive for many readers of Bloom 1973 (and following s
him). Although Bloom's skill as an interpreter of poems must be evident to any r
theory of anxiety - particularly with its accompanying Freudianism - seems biza
Asian context. I do not know when the original of Durisin 1974 was published but
of the rigidities of the English translation, his argument for considering as receptio
usually termed influence earns my conviction. In a forthcoming study I argue that i
is better thought of as an effect of cultural and political dominance, whether throu
or prestige and, therefore, that influence necessarily entails reception, although t
be reception without influence.
136 EARL MINER
"Influence study" or certain versions of "rec

be practiced and for good reason: they can be co
historically and they reveal things that other k
But the study of influence has also had unden
and dull work. Hence, it has been common recen
to consider matters of literary theory as a main c
tive study.
Before turning to that subject, however, we should pause to con-
sider the proper subject of influence or the grounds of the compara-
tive. Only custom - certainly not logic - has led us to think of the
comparative as a kind of study restricted to cross-literary or cross-
language study. There is no reason why, say, the influence of medi-
eval English literature on Victorian English literature should not be
considered comparative; and, with its very long literary history and
the veneration of the past, Chinese literature affords many oppor-
tunities for comparative study in purely Chinese terms. There is of
course the danger that what is thereby taken to be of universally
secure definition holds only for England or China. There is a danger
of Eurocentricism or Sinocentricism, as we all know from numerous
examples. But, if the danger is recognized, there is no reason not to
investigate comparative topics within a single literature. For that
matter, literature may be studied comparatively with other arts,
especially painting and music.
Certainly matters of literary theory have occupied comparatists
in recent years - for some important and some merely fashionable
reasons. More naturally than non-comparatists, comparatists have a
sense of theoretical issues posed by differences between national
literatures and, by definition, are likely to read theorists' writing in
various tongues. In fact, many so-called comparatists have become so
theoretically minded that they have ruled out historical evidence. It
should be clear that those who do so cannot be termed comparatists
in the sense of those who compare evidence from more than one lan-
guage or culture, aware that, even in one language or culture, things
have not always been the same. This is a serious matter. History
enables us to differentiate and relate. And without differentiation
and relation of some kind, comparison is not possible. This simple
fact takes us to the very serious problem of the absence of principles
of comparability useful for literary study.
Comparison is a matter of central importance for many kinds of
scientific study and is often claimed by social scientists as well.11 To
11. One sociological essay stands far above others known to me. This is Zelditch 1971. His
most important contribution is the positive one of adapting - by correction and amplifica-
tion - J.S. Mill's System of Logic on comparison. His severe remarks apply no less to what
we glibly term comparative literature: "in the present state of the social sciences there are
investigations that pass as comparative that in fact are not in any useful sense comparative"
(p. 270); "a political investigation is often said to be comparative if the political scientist is
the best of my knowledge, nothing of importance has

the subject of literary comparability. It is passingly stran
of us who profess to engage in comparative study have
to inquire what are the principles - including the grou
- of comparison. In what follows, there will be some
suggest very simple logical matters, along with certain
cedures and conceptions.
Obviously we cannot compare that which is the sam
ference must exist or else we identify rather than com
other hand, if differences are too great, comparison beco
ible because the logical or practical results do not sat
version of the problem of too great difference is error
compared. There may be value to the comparison of im
in plays in differing literatures but there is no immediat
value in comparing the imagery of Chinese drama wit
Greek tragedy.
There would be a value in that exercise if it could be shown that
the imagery of Chinese plays was more than analogous to the plots
of Greek tragedies. The comparer would need to demonstrate that
the imagery of the one kind of play was homologous with the plots
of the other kind. In zoological terms, the wing of the bat and the
foreleg of the mouse are homologous, although they differ strikingly
in appearance as well as function. And in mathematics, there is an
enormous body of theory dealing with homology and co-homology.
Whatever the case with some semioticians, literary comparatists have
not done anything with conceptions of homology, not at least in ex-
plicit theoretical terms. Given such lack of definition, comparative
study is still in need of some fundamental and simple clarification.
Without going very far in providing basic principles, I should like to
offer a few observations.
The first is that one useful homology for comparative study is
function. We all recognize that, in different literatures and societies,
differing elements may serve the same function and therefore be
compared. If in China, history serves the function that epic serves in
the West, there is sufficient homology to make comparison feasible.
For that matter, if it could be shown that the imagery of Chinese
drama and the plots of Greek tragedy both served the function of
establishing dramatic character, comparison would not then be a
category error but a meaningful act. In fact, it is when there seems to
be no evident counterpart of something in one culture with that in
American but his subject France or Russia" (ibid.); "A study is sometimes called compara-
tive when all that it does is illustrate a concept by describing an example that is in some
sense foreign" (p. 271). In the strict sense stipulated by Zelditch, comparative literary study
hardly exists and certain questions such as the privileged status of theory or history have yet
to be raised in terms of strict comparison. My observations represent only a few first steps.
138 EARL MINER
another that one may be led to search for what it

ferent, that serves a comparable function. Traditional
ture seems surprisingly lacking in panegyric in comp
nese, Korean and Western literatures. But investig
that early collections and poetry-matches, like later
no, were sufficiently institutionalized to fulfill a m
panegyric, the legitimizing of an individual or grou
ture. After all, the twenty-one royal collections co
by royal order and are alternatively known as th
twenty-one reigns (nijuichidaishu). In many instances,
ful comparison will show simply that our initial d
revision.
No doubt there are numerous other criteria besides function that
can establish homologous and therefore comparable entities. No
doubt it may also be profitable to think of such things as symmetries
and asymmetries as alternatives to homology or of analogy as a lower-
order degree of comparability. But these other possibilities need to
be accompanied by a second kind of observation having to do with
distinctions between words and things. "Tragedy" is a good example.
Of course it is a Western term and the modern East Asian translations
(e.g., Japanese higeki) do not very well convey what "tragedy"
means. Some people hold, in fact, that tragedy is limited to certaih
literatures. It is commonly said that Christian tragedy cannot exist
because the Christian afterlife renders true tragic suffering impossible.
If so, Buddhist tragedy must be yet more infeasible, since so-called
reality is so questionable a concept, as the famous passage from The
Heart Sutra makes clear: "Reality is the Void; the Void is Reality."
Yet, as Aristotle himself acknowledges, there were Greek tragedies
that ended happily and the one Greek trilogy extant, the Oresteia,
ends in Athenian celebration. To invoke "tragedy" along Western
lines alone is itself to invoke a considerable jumble. The French
could not abide the comic scenes in Shakespeare; Milton's Samson
Agonistes must be a tragedy if Oedipus at Colonus is - and so forth.
And if such diverse things termed tragedy in the West are tragic, then
I do not see how the quality can be excluded from the last chapter
featuring the life of the hero in The Tale of Genji or the accounts of
various characters (Lin Daiyu, for example) in The Dream of the Red
Chamber (Hongloumeng).
Yet there is a dangerous tendency in the effort to seek literary
effect A (the tragic) in every country and it is most desirable to
speak of more particular matters: suffering, concepts of individuals
and their world, the nature of perceived problems or disaster, etc.
And some presumption of difference is, as mentioned earlier, funda-
mental to the whole enterprise of comparative literature - and to
historical understanding. Theory is useful because it tends to enlarge
areas of likeness, but that is also its defect; history tends to overpar-
ticularize and render relative, but that is its different

course we may have theories of history and histor
Moreover, those of us interested in East Asian literature are some-
times too defensive. It may well be that the best answer to the Euro-
centric assertion that there is no Asian epic is not to point to history
but rather to assert that European literature is deficient in lacking
the fu or monogatari. Both of these kinds demonstrate, in any event,
the congenial relation between lyric and narrative discoverable in
Chinese and Japanese literature.
In the first two parts of this discussion, the topics were "genres"
(lyric, drama, narrative) and collections. The former were dealt with
in terms of the definition of a poetic system within a culture. In
other words, in both earlier parts, there was an explicit or implicit
hypothesis that there are "identical" elements in various literary cul-
tures: emergence of poetic systems defined in terms of a given "gen-
re" (lyric, drama) and literary collections. That initial hypothesis
soon leads to differentiation, since the details of what is "identical"
or "universal" vary from one literary culture to another. What I sug-
gest, therefore, as a method for comparative study is the isolation of
conceptual, cognitive, historical elements that are only formally, pre-
sumptively and categorically identical in the sense of being common
to various literatures. Once we isolate such elements, we do not in-
deed have identity but a sufficient homology or symmetry for com-
parision to make sense.
This approach has two variants useful in teaching and criticism.
My terms for these variants do not matter but since the procedures
must be named, I shall term them alienation and misreading, both
considered as deliberate procedures, both considered valuable more
for what they suggest and reveal than for what they prove. "Aliena-
tion" is a deliberate introduction of something kindred but uncon-
nected historically with the issue or matter at hand. Suppose, for
example, one is studying Western renaissance sonnet sequences. If
the subject is "self-fashioning," a poet's creation of a role to play in
the world, it would be very useful to alienate the subject by study-
ing, let us say, Chinese poems using the love motif of the abandoned
woman as a political allegory for neglect of the scholar bureaucrat by
the poet's prince. One would quickly see that the supposed renais-
sance artifice or crisis of self-definition is far less radical than sup-
posed and that the means of "self-fashioning" in those sonnets is far
from being the sole means of establishing a conception of self. Again,
if the issue with the sonnets is their integration, it will prove useful
to alienate them by examining the extraordinary integration ofJapan-
ese royal collections and other collections modelled on them. It will
be clear, of course, that the advantage of the alienating process de-
pends on a degree of homology or symmetry within the apparently
unhomological, alien or asymmetrical evidence brought to bear.
140 EARL MINER
"Misreading" is an equally deliberate procedu

complex whole by an important subordinate, r
nant, feature. Even in Western literature, it is
read" lyrics as narratives or narratives as lyrics. I
to do so in East Asian literatures, although the
these two kinds in East Asia makes "misreading
rower or finer task than in the West. Misreading
drama, satires as utopias, description as subjecti
ery as action - these are some of the many pra
ing with an explicit, self-aware technique of m
relevant ends. Just as the study of what may seem
literatures soon lapses into differences yieldin
comparison, so (if carefully handled) these leaps
systematically perverse may yield degrees of lik
that other procedures may not.
It will always be useful to compare what his
actual connection. But in the study of the basic
narrative and, indeed, in the study of the lengthy
traditions, we are apt to gain far richer results by
not depend solely on historical connections betw
ern literatures: those really began only in this cen
riches of Asian literature in earlier centuries simp
to comparative study throughout the world fo
selves with influence or reception alone. And t
are too important to be left to the definitions of
or to the methods devised in any single literary t
dual or chauvinistic pride would defeat the
study of literature.
REFERENCES
Bloom, Harold, 1973. The Anxiety of Influence (New Haven: Yale UP).
Duriin, Dionyz, 1974. Sources and Systematics of Comparative Literature (B
versita Komenskeho).
Guillen, Claudio, 1971. Literature as System (Princeton: Princeton UP).
Konishi, Jin'ichi, 1984. A History of Japanese Literature, Vol. 1, The Ancie
ton: Princeton UP).
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 1966. The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago
Liu, James J.-Y., 1962. The Art of Chinese Poetry (Chicago: University of Ch
1975 Chinese Theories of Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Pres
Miner, Earl, 1979a. Japanese Linked Poetry (Princeton: Princeton UP).
1979b "On the Genesis and Development of Literary Systems," Critic
339-353,553-568.
1985 "The Collective and the Individual: Literary Practice and its Social Implications,"
in: Earl Miner, ed., Principles of Classical Japanese Literature (Princeton: Princeton
UP), 17-62.
Miner, Earl and Hiroko Odagiri, 1981. The Monkey's Straw Raincoat and Other Poetry of
the Bash6 School (Princeton: Princeton UP).
Zelditch, Morris Jr., 1971. "Intelligible Comparisons," in: Ivan Vallier, ed., Comparativ
Methods in Sociology (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press),
267-307.

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Some Theoretical and Methodological Topics for Comparative Literature

Author(s): Earl Miner

The phrase "comparative literature" obviously does not im

for beginning the effort to incorporate Asian literatu

A. SOME IMPLICATIONS OF DISTINCTIONS BETWEEN

sity and narrative by continuity. The usual versions of lyric

ed sufficiently a discrete entity to be honored s

tory, since lyric poetry was taken as the purest exemplar. B

3. Tsurayuki's cousin, Ki no Yoshimochi (d. 919), provided a brief preface in

subordinate emphases also vary. In Asia, one of

4. See Liu 1962, pp. 77-80, a rare explicit attention to assump

It must be impossible to find an example of a literate cult

7. This present section is largely founded on Miner 1985.

Western collecting begins in late Greek or Alexan

topics were specified, using aesthetic rather than pure

The Man'yoshu was compiled in stages and by d

compilers to form a collection, and that is as true of their own

8. For an account of linked poetry, see Miner 1979a.

Chinese would often not have recognized the catego

ent forms in various literary traditions. In short, by sta

Western sequences are usually based on some

C. LOGICAL AND PRACTICAL CRITERIA

Perhaps the least studied issue in comparative literature is

"Influence study" or certain versions of "rec

the best of my knowledge, nothing of importance has

another that one may be led to search for what it

ticularize and render relative, but that is its different

"Misreading" is an equally deliberate procedu

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