The Crisis of Comparison and Its Critiques

Comparative literature is unusually given to announcing its own crises. Recurrent declarations of impasse — and even of the discipline's death — have been less symptoms of failure than engines of methodological renewal, each redefining what and how comparatists should compare.

Definition

The body of metacritical reflection in which comparatists diagnose the limits, biases, and dead ends of their own comparative practice and propose reformed foundations for it.

Scope

Surveys the cyclical crisis discourse of comparative literature: Wellek's 1959 attack on positivist factualism, the multiculturalism debates of the 1990s, Spivak's 2003 call to refound the discipline on alterity and area-studies language depth, and Apter's critique of frictionless 'world literature' in the name of untranslatability. Frames these as critiques of the assumptions underwriting comparison itself.

Core questions

• Why does comparative literature so frequently declare itself in crisis?
• Is the recurrent crisis a weakness or a productive mechanism of self-correction?
• What biases — Eurocentrism, factualism, frictionless translatability — do the critiques target?
• Should the response to crisis be expansion (more languages, more literatures) or a change of method and ethics?

Key theories

Crisis as factualism critique

Wellek diagnosed a crisis in the discipline's preoccupation with sources, influences, and external relations at the expense of the literary work itself and its aesthetic value.

Death of a discipline

Spivak argued the old comparative literature was complicit with Cold War area studies and Eurocentrism, and called for a 'new' discipline grounded in deep multilingual reading and an ethics of irreducible alterity.

Against world literature

Apter challenged the smooth circulation model of world literature by foregrounding untranslatability, arguing that what resists translation marks the limits of easy comparison.

History

Wellek's 1959 conference paper inaugurated the modern genre of the comparative-literature crisis essay. The 1993 Bernheimer Report and its 1995 volume reframed the discipline around multiculturalism and cultural studies, provoking debate over disciplinary identity. Spivak's 2003 Death of a Discipline and Apter's 2013 Against World Literature extended the critique to the politics of comparison, translation, and the very category of the world-literary.

Debates

Expansion versus reorientation

Whether the discipline's crises are best answered by widening the corpus to more literatures and languages, or by fundamentally rethinking the ethics and method of comparison.

Translatability versus untranslatability

Whether world literature's reliance on translation enables a genuine planetary comparison or erases the resistant specificity that Apter locates in the untranslatable.

Key figures

• René Wellek
• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
• Emily Apter
• Charles Bernheimer

Seminal works

• wellek1959
• spivak2003
• apter2013
• bernheimer1995

Frequently asked questions

Is comparative literature really dying?

The recurring 'crisis' and 'death' rhetoric is largely a self-critical genre through which the field renews its methods; the discipline has repeatedly reinvented itself rather than disappearing.