Theories and Methods of Comparison
Comparative literature as a discipline is defined less by a fixed object than by a method: the systematic juxtaposition of literary texts, traditions, and phenomena across linguistic, national, and cultural boundaries. This area examines what is being compared, on what basis, and to what ends.
Definition
The branch of comparative literature concerned with the principles, justifications, and procedures by which literary works and traditions are brought into comparison across languages, nations, and media.
Scope
Covers the foundational logic of literary comparison — the choice of a tertium comparationis (the common ground that makes two terms comparable), the French and American schools of influence study versus parallel study, the relation of comparison to national-philological traditions, recurrent disciplinary 'crises', and newer quantitative and computational approaches. It is methodological and metacritical rather than tied to any single period or genre.
Sub-topics
Core questions
- What makes two texts or traditions comparable, and what is the basis (the tertium comparationis) of any given comparison?
- Should comparison rest on demonstrable historical contact and influence, or on typological resemblance independent of contact?
- How does comparison relate to, and depend upon, the national philologies it claims to transcend?
- Whose literatures and languages set the terms of comparison, and how do power and translation shape the comparative field?
- Can quantitative and computational methods compare literature at scales beyond close reading?
Key theories
- Tertium comparationis
- Any comparison presupposes a third term — a shared category, theme, form, or problem — against which two distinct objects are measured; making this ground explicit is the first methodological obligation of the comparatist.
- French versus American schools
- The mid-century French school grounded comparison in documented relations of influence, sources, and reception (rapports de fait), while the American school, articulated by Wellek, favored aesthetic and typological comparison unconstrained by proven contact.
- Distant reading
- Moretti proposed that the world-literary system is too vast for close reading and should be analyzed through abstractions — units larger or smaller than the text such as genres, devices, and quantitative trends.
- Planetarity and the critique of comparison
- Spivak argued that the discipline's Eurocentric comparative habits must be displaced by an ethics of alterity and deep language learning that resists assimilating the other to a familiar standard.
History
Comparative literature crystallized as a discipline in nineteenth-century Europe, drawing on Goethe's notion of Weltliteratur and on positivist source-and-influence study. A French school emphasizing documented international relations dominated until the mid-twentieth century, when Wellek's 1959 'The Crisis of Comparative Literature' attacked its factualism and helped install a more aesthetic, theoretical American school. Successive 'crises' and 'deaths' of the discipline — restated by Spivak in 2003 — and the rise of globalization, postcolonial critique, and computational methods have repeatedly reopened the question of what comparison is and who it serves.
Debates
- Influence versus typology as the ground of comparison
- Whether legitimate comparison requires demonstrable historical contact (the French rapports de fait) or may rest on resemblance and analogy alone (the American typological approach).
- Eurocentrism of the comparative method
- Critics argue that the categories, periods, and aesthetic standards used in comparison are derived from European literatures and silently universalized; reform proposals range from planetary ethics to deprovincializing the canon.
- Close versus distant reading
- Whether large-scale, quantitative analysis of literary corpora yields genuine knowledge or sacrifices the interpretive attention to language that defines literary study.
Key figures
- René Wellek
- Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
- Franco Moretti
- Susan Bassnett
- Haun Saussy
Related topics
Seminal works
- wellek1959
- spivak2003
- moretti2000
- bassnett1993
Frequently asked questions
- What is a tertium comparationis?
- It is the 'third term' or common ground that two compared objects share, which makes the comparison meaningful — for example a theme, genre, formal device, or historical problem. Comparatists are expected to state it explicitly rather than assume it.
- How do the French and American schools differ?
- The French school required that comparisons be anchored in documented historical relations (influence, sources, reception), whereas the American school, after Wellek, allowed comparison based on aesthetic or typological resemblance without proven contact.