Comparative Literature

Author(s): Simon During

Source: ELH, Vol. 71, No. 2 (Summer, 2004), pp. 313-322
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

BY SIMON DURING

In 1886, Hutcheson Posnett, an Irish socialist lawyer and Profes-

sor of Classics and English Literature at the University of Auckland,
New Zealand, published a volume under the title Comparative
Literature for Kegan Paul's pioneering International Scientific Se-
ries. It was written to encourage the "establishment of chairs in
Comparative Literature at the leading Universities of Great Britain,
America and the Australian colonies," and can be said to mark the
beginnings of the discipline's academic institutionalization.1
Posnett was not himself primarily a literary scholar. Author of a
critique of David Ricardo's theory of rent and a handbook on The
Historical Method in Ethics, Jurisprudence, and Political Economy,
he was committed to an amalgam of social and historical science
which was indebted both to the "comparative method" associated
with the legal historian Henry Maine and to the historical sociology of
Herbert Spencer. For Spencer, successful social development invari-
ably requires increased functional differentiation and structural com-
plexity as well as increases in size. On this basis, in Comparative
Literature Posnett argued that literature must always be understood
as a function of social organizations which are themselves (potentially
at least) in process. And he used the comparative method to
demonstrate that literature has played a key role in the ordered
passage of social organizations from filiative groups (clans) to a world
community formed by globalized trade, communications, and corpo-
rate industrialization (cosmopolitan humanity).
His book was more or less explicitly articulated against the
contemporary shibboleths of literary value, including the cult of
individual genius, any aesthetics based on the Kantian notion of
disinterestedness, the notion of the autonomy of literature as articu-
lated by the French avant garde, and the Arnoldian project for which
literature and criticism might help cultivate a civil sensibility against
the supposed disorder and crudity of democratic, commercial society.
Comparative Literature was a manifesto for literary science and for a
particular politics, since Posnett also wished to persuade readers that
literary history or "growth," as he put it, has been organized by "the

ELH 71 (2004) 313-322 C 2004 by The JohnsHopkinsUniversityPress 313

progressive deepening and widening of [individual] personality" (C,
72). This meant that, at its most successful, contemporary literature
could depict and express highly individuated characters and voices who
also, paradoxically,represented wide-ultimately transnational-social
associations, Walt Whitman (who owned a copy of Posnett's text)
being the favoured example of this "democraticindividualism"(C, 389).
In sum, Posnett conceived of comparative literature as a social
science which, along with the world-literature canon it addresses,
forms a basis for the politics of cosmopolitan democratic individual-
ism. It does so not just because literature uniquely articulates those
structures through which individuals recognize themselves as con-
nected to and formed by an increasingly wide range of distant social
formations, but because the comparative method enables recognition
of social and cultural differences and, hence, encourages the dissemi-
nation of relativism as well as entry into a single world system. For
Henry Maine and the Victorian anthropologists, the comparative
method used empirical data on surviving nonmodern societies to
construct a stadial account of the history of early social development.
For Posnett, it demonstrated how different social structures produce
different literatures that might then be judged in relation not to
aesthetic universals but to the contemporary advanced society/
literature nexus.
In these terms, Posnett's treatment of Arabic, Indian, and Chinese
cultures is characteristic. Admitting that he is ignorant of a "literary
field so boundless in its wealth of interest," he nonetheless finds in
the ancient literatures of Asia a cosmopolitanism less retarded than
that of the West of the time, being based on the extraordinary
"diversities of language and race" that they had to address as well as
on their sensitivity to the nonhuman environment. Nonetheless
Posnett's analysis is skewed towards Europe. As a Mainesian, he
contends that in Asia "individual life" remained underdeveloped
"among the castes and village communities of India or the family
system and paternal government of China" (C, 386), so that Asian
literatures failed to cross the threshold into democratic individualism
even if, in their merging of "personal being" with social life, by
implication at least, they anticipate elements of the socialist future.
(Ironically, in 1907 Rabindranath Tagore gave a series of extension
lectures on "Comparative Literature" for the Bengali Studies section
of the Bengali Council of Education in which, not wholly dissimilarly,
the "continuous diffusion of self" was posed as a terminus of
Bishwasahitya [that is, world literature]).2

314 Comparative Literature

 Looking back, perhaps what is most remarkable about Posnett's
book is how little relation it bears to comparative literature as we
have come to know it. Rarely can a founding text have left so few
traces on the field it helped inaugurate. Little or nothing of Posnett's
social scientific methods or political corporatism or his comparative
method's global ambitions mark the work of, say, Harry Levin, Eric
Auerbach, Ren6 Wellek or Paul de Man-to name some of the
discipline's famous names. Basically, of course, this is because, in the
lead-up to and aftermath of WWI, literary studies became committed
to national-or at least "civilizational"-cultures and, as an indirect
consequence, became organized ideologically around the concept of
literary autonomy that Posnett refused as well as methodologically
around the professionally subtle interpretation of individual texts-a
protocol that positioned itself firmly against the social sciences. Thus
comparative literature (which turned out to be pretty much confined
to the United States as the only major Western state not officially a
traditional monoculture) was not principally engaged in comparison
at all. It was peopled by experts in close reading across more than one
language (most often the languages of those wartime allies, France
and Britain/U.S.).
Today, close reading is not as hegemonic in literary studies as it
once was, not because cultural nationalism is in decline but because
(among other reasons) the literary canon is losing relative value
within Western national cultures. At the same time, at least arguably,
literature appears to be less tightly bound to spatially defined
traditions than it once was, partly because of the recent remarkable
increase in transnational flows of people, culture, capital, and tech-
nology which we call globalization. This has meant the study of global
literature can follow new paths. One thinks of Franco Moretti's
recent work on the spatial dissemination of the novel or the reinvigo-
ration of translation studies or Pascale Casanova's intriguing historical
analysis of international literary cultural capital in her recent La
Republique Mondiale des Lettres. Comparative literature itself has
become increasingly open to questioning about its restricted range,
such as that by Rey Chow in her essay here.
Chow's postcolonialist essay points in many directions, but let me
abstract what I see to be its main argument. She suggests that
comparison is always locally situated and nuanced, although this has
been occluded by the discipline's relative indifference to the other-
ness of non-European cultures. Outside of Europe, she argues,
literary studies routinely involves recognition of old power differen-

Simon During 315

tials between societies. Certain marginal cultures-many, but not all,
of whom were once the targets of European colonialism-have an
ambivalent relation to the metropolitan centers partly because the
memory of colonialism is so traumatic and partly because neverthe-
less they have been developed both by connecting to and by
distinguishing themselves from those centers. Since they have been
unevenly formed and deformed by European contact, they possess
various internal historicities. This dual relation to the center also
means that marginal cultures, haunted and segmented by their pasts,
are particularly (but not uniquely) transcultural, with the corollary
that comparative literature, whose primary object is now cultural
difference and its history, need possess neither a transnational nor a
multilingual scope. Nor need it jettison universal aesthetic judgments
since such judgments (in their ungroundedness) create moments of
self-reflection in which the mix of resistance and derivation that has
shaped non-European (or post-European) cultures is clarified.
This argument may seem to be critical of comparative literature
but, if I read it right, is in fact profoundly supportive of a reformed
version of the discipline. Indeed to the degree that all cultures are
understood as transcultures, all literary study needs to be compara-
tive or at any rate relational in its orientation. And Chow's particular
mode of support for aesthetic judgments that aim for universal
authority seems to place a form of comparativism at the heart of
literary discrimination itself. Chow's targets then are not the
comparativists. On the contrary, her targets are those who, on the one
side, assume the cultural homogeneity of national literatures and, on
the other, embrace notions of global literature and cosmopolitanism
that make it harder to recognize historical and spatial inequities and
differences.
It is in this context that my brief reanimation of Posnett's work
becomes relevant. Not that his book can be resuscitated: the prejudi-
cial bases and over-abstraction of its theory of history and social
evolution need no spelling out. But for all that, I think that it retains
a certain disciplinary "spectrality,"as Harry Harootunian might put it.
(There is a sense in which Chow and Harootunian's language of
"haunting" "historicity" and "spectrality,"with its confidence about
what is contemporary and what is not, is a transposition of the old
comparative method's "survivals"-now rendered posthumous and
with primary historical agency ascribed to Western modernity and
colonialism). Posnett represents not so much a lost path for compara-
tive literature as a faint reminder that it is constituted by hope, based

316 Comparative Literature

on ever increasingglobal contact, markedby radicaldiscontinuities,
ordered by tensions between theory and evidence, and articulated
through the instability of its primary concepts including that of
"literature"itself.
For Posnett literature was primarilyan institution, not a set of
aestheticizedtexts or genres, and one organizedradicallydifferently
in different times and places (even though it alwaysturned on the
structurationof subjectivity-what Posnett generally called "indi-
viduality.")And Posnett'shighly theorizedjudgment that the literary
institutiondiffers acrosstime and place is, at least in principle,based
on empirical data-in his case on facts and texts supplied by
philologistsand colonial administrators.This is importantbecause if
one thinks of literatures from other places and times outside the
protocols and values of close reading and aesthetic judgment (and
even if we wish to defend these things), then we need thick
descriptionsof these literatures'institutionality.This requires pre-
cisely empiricist (often sociological) methods-even if we know in
advancethat these methodswill present us with less realityand truth
than we hope for or, indeed, need.
So it is no accidentthat literarysociologyis undergoingsomething
of a resurgenceat the moment. In relationto globaland comparative
literaturesI'm thinking,for instance,not only of Casanova'sBourdieu-
inflected book mentioned above but also of two recent accounts of
WestAfricanAnglophoneliteraryculture:the firstby WendyGriswold
on contemporaryNigeria, and the second by Stephanie Newell on
colonial Ghanain the interwaryears.
Casanova's book constitutes a challenge for any account of
literature'srelativizing capacities since she represents the global
literarysystem as constitutedby nations,ethnic groups,and individu-
als competing for prestige and recognition.For her, modern litera-
ture begins when, in the wider resistanceto Papal authority,certain
Europeanvernacularlanguageswere called upon to produce classics
that might challenge Latin'sdominance. Thus for her Joachim du
Bellay'sLa Deffenceet Illustrationde la Langue Franpoyse(1549) is
literarymodernity'soriginatingmanifesto. Modern literature, how-
ever, soon escapes containmentby nationsjust because its texts are
constantly circulated and translated across borders. The literary
import/exportmarketformsthe basisof modernliterature'sliberating
autonomyfrom spatially-basedsocieties and cultures-an autonomy
which, by the same stroke, permits experimentationand aestheti-
cism. Nonetheless great literature confers status on the cultures

Simon During 317

which produce it. And only the metropolitan centers-notably Paris-
can consecrate literary works, their power to do so being, to some
degree, quantifiable. That power is a function (approximately) of the
sum of translations in and out of the national language, the degree of
the language's international usage, along with the dissemination of
commentary that translations receive. Thus writers like the Cuban
Alejo Carpentier, the Algerian Kateb Yacine, the Irish Samuel
Beckett and James Joyce, the Roumainian E. M. Cioran, the Croatian
Danielo Kis, the Belgian Henri Michaux, the Czech Milan Kundera,
even the American William Faulkner all owe their global fame, and
thence their capacity to mold future literary form, to Parisian
recognition.
With whatever qualifications one might want to receive this
argument (and Casanova does seem to be reacting to English's
current global dominance), it makes a convincing case for the
existence of a major metropolitan and international literary system
and canon with its own conventions and institutional modes, indi-
rectly related to the politics of nationalism, which is independent of
that of so-called minor literatures, and which sometimes, as Casanova
insists, offers resistance to local oppressions, limiting conventions,
and censorships. This argument, however, also evacuates the local or
regional valency of peripheral literary cultures as well as the constant
need to invent and relegitimate the terms of metropolitan validation
in a literary institution split and spread across its constitutive groups.
Griswold's and Newell's books describe whole other worlds than
Casanova's, focused as they are on localized literatures. In Nigeria,
for instance, literacy rates are relatively low (officially around 50%)
and what Griswold calls a "reading culture" is not deeply embedded
in everyday life: the physical settings of relative privacy, light, quiet,
and some degree of comfort are rare, and widespread social support
for reading is lacking in this poor, intensely religious, ethnically and
linguistically divided, politically repressed nation. So Nigerian read-
ers form a comparatively well-educated, Christianized, Western-
orientated, urbanized group. Nonetheless, Griswold's "Nigerian fic-
tion complex," as she calls it, shares a great deal with first-world
literary culture.3 Nigerian readers read for many reasons-escape,
instruction, substitute sociability, the acquisition of prestige, informa-
tion about the world, and sheer entertainment. They seem by and
large to prefer imported fiction to that locally produced. Local
writers with international reputations are not widely read, and a new
genre of diasporic globally-orientated Nigerian literary fiction (such

318 Comparative Literature

as Simi Bedford'sYorubaGirl Dancing) are almost unknown back
home.
Yet the Nigerian literarycomplex also possesses distinct features.
Its distributionand marketingis weak: Griswoldoffers a hair-raising
description of trying to buy a book in a large Lagos bookstore
primarilydedicated to selling school texts.4Book clubs, so important
to Western amateur literary-fictionreaderships and once a core
component of West-Africanliterary life, are absent. Readers are
younger than those in the West. For all that, because literacy and
reading are restricted, they retain prestige at least among certain
social sectors. And they are seen to offer some promise of an absent
democraticpublic sphere. The novels themselvestend to representa
more masculinizedethos than do Westernfictions;this is so even in
the romance genre, which is largely read by women (though often
writtenby men). Local novels routinelyarticulatea distrustof official
institutionsand authority,with the difficultiesfaced by the talented
and honest because of corruptionand nepotism forming a common
basis for plots. Infertilityand its evils are a primarytheme, while sex
is a much less importantindicatorof characterand feeling than in the
West. Many Nigerian popular novels describe collisions between
urban modernity and more established rural lifeways, and offer
fantasynarrativesin which characterscan enjoy the benefits of both.
Unlike Griswold'sbook, which is largely based on interviews,
Newell's work is archivaland historical.And she comes to rather
different conclusionsthan does Griswold,finding in colonial Ghana
"a distinctive literary aesthetic" constructed at the intersection of
older,vernacularoral cultures,readingpracticesdisseminatedby the
missions and imported Anglophone fictions.5Colonial Ghana was
much less literate still than contemporaryNigeria (about 6% of the
population completed primary school) so this aesthetic was very
restricted.Indeed the increasinglyfierce strugglefor decolonization
seems to have reduced literaryactivityfrom the 1930s onwards.The
development of Anglophone skills was also problematized by the
colonial government'sindecisive attempts to encourage print-based
vernaculars,a policywhich was attackedby manypan-Africanistsand
elite radicalsin the prewaryears.
So Newell describes literary culture as emerging out of mid-
nineteenth-centurybible readingand a proliferationof missionbased
how-to books, on topics from marriageto soil erosion. By the late
nineteenth century a West AfricanEnglish press had emerged and
literary clubs were widespread: these were the institutions that

Simon During 319

nurtured a literary reading culture. They also simultaneously fostered
anticolonial nationalism and new forms of local social hierarchy. The
single most important import novelist for the development of the
local fiction complex was Marie Corelli, whose influence on non-
European literary cultures worldwide was immense. For instance,
the first generation of Thai novelists were inspired by her, and across
West Africa she was routinely regarded as the greatest English
novelist by all kinds of readers, a judgment which retained force into
the 1960s. Why? Newell argues that Corelli's supernaturalism, her
Christianized melodrama, overt idealism, and, probably most impor-
tantly, hard critique of English ruling-class decadence formed the
basis for her global success.
Ghana's colonial literary aesthetic crystallized out of this mix. It
was characterized by a particularly ornate rhetoric and vocabulary
that seemed pompous to Western observers, but which, from the
inside, signified linguistic and cultural mastery. It engaged no inter-
pretative or evaluative techniques based on Western high-culture
notions of aesthetic autonomy, organic unity, and fusion of form and
content. Since it was heavily influenced by Christian missionary
activity, it was primarily concerned with consolidating Christianized
norms concerning love, marriage, and money. Yet it provided room
for anticolonial and anti-Christian satire as well as nationalist critique
and black consciousness raising (often drawing on African-American
writing). By the late forties this culture was already in decline,
threatened by commercial leisure industries able to offer "highlife
dances," "concert parties," and "Hollywood blockbusters."6
My main aim in drawing attention to these descriptions of West
African literary cultures is not to enquire how well they fit either
Chow's sense of the historicity that organizes postcolonial cultures or
her hopes for a recuperation of aesthetic judgment and the "alterity"
of non-Western literariness and historicities, although, it has to be
said, neither Griswold's nor Newell's accounts confirm, for instance,
the "involuntary,neurotic" ambivalence and memory of violation that
Chow sees organizing Europe's relation to its "post-European" oth-
ers. The history of non-European Corelli reception, for instance, or
of the relations between literacy, literary writing/reading, religion,
ethnicity, space, politics, class, gender, and other forms of popular
culture in West Africa, are (if it's possible) both more simple and
more complex than that.
My aim is rather to join with Chow and affirm how different
literary cultures and history across the globe are, and, more espe-

320 Comparative Literature

cially, how recondite and specific our literary practices are-I'm
writingas a first-worldprofessionalliteraryacademicto others such.
Those practices, of course, are an outcome of something like the
centralized and imperial system of validation that Casanova de-
scribes, and are based on assumptionsabout aesthetic autonomyand
form, techniques of interpretation,and a general understandingof
the patterns of literary history and canons that are fairly recent
(Posnett,for instance,did not knowof them) and sharedby almostno
one except ourselves, even in the West.
What follows from this recognition is complicated. Recognizing
difference where indifferenceor sameness once reigned can lead to
new hierarchiesas well as to the new "possibilitiesof supplementarity"
that Chow gestures towards. Certainlythe kind of future-directed
political expectationsthat Chow shares with Posnett have a history
markedmainlyby disappointment.It is hard,after readingGriswold,
Newell, and Casanova,to have faith in the possibilities for Chow's
"semioticconjunctionmediatedby differenttemporaldynamics."My
own sense is that we might rather hope to be able to join a
sociological understandingof the variety and materialityof global
literarycultures to practices of elite, academiccriticism,themselves
attuned to local amateur reading cultures, in ways that (and here
idealism makesanotherappearance)might help literarystudies (and
the doctrine of literaryautonomy)expand into those regions of the
globaluniversitysystemwhere todaythey mean little. Why one might
hope for the transnationalexpansionof a renovatedliterarystudies
despite literary studies's remoteness from wider cultural practices
and despite their allianceto privilegein a scene of terribleglobaland
local inequity,is a knotty topic all of its own. At any rate, I am not
persuaded that Chow's brave and subtle defense of universalizing
aestheticjudgmentsis a good place to begin. Once more it's hard to
see how suchjudgmentswould operatein the kindof literarycultures
that Newell and Griswolddescribe,or how they can be disarticulated
from the processes that Casanovabrings to our attention. Perhaps,
after all, Posnett'snotion that the ultimatebasis for literaryjudgment
is not aesthetic universalsbut rather a concrete notion of what a
democratic,just, and interconnectedglobal society would look like is
more promising.
TheJohns Hopkins University

Simon During 321

 NOTES
1
Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett, Comparative Literature (New York: D. Appleton
and Co., 1886), vii. Hereafter abbreviated C and cited parentheticallyby page
number.
2 Rabindranath Tagore, in Selected Writings on Literature and Language, ed. Sisir
KumarDas and SukantaChaudhuri(New Delhi: OxfordUniv. Press, 2001), 149.
3 Wendy Griswold, Bearing Witness: Readers, Writers, and the Novel in Nigeria
(Princeton:PrincetonUniv. Press, 2000), 29.
4 Griswold,85.
5 Stephanie Newell, Literary Culture in Colonial Ghana: How to Play the Game of
Life (Bloomington:IndianaUniv. Press, 2002), 7.
6 Newell, 48.

322 Comparative Literature