Comparative Literature - Current Developments

Current Developments

There is a movement among comparatists in the US and elsewhere to re-focus the discipline away from the nation-based approach with which it has previously been associated towards a cross-cultural approach that pays no heed to national borders. Works of this nature include Alamgir Hashmi's The Commonwealth, Comparative Literature and the World, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's Death of a Discipline, David Damrosch's What is World Literature?, Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek's concept of "comparative cultural studies", and Pascale Casanova's The World Republic of Letters. It remains to be seen whether this approach will prove successful given that Comparative Literature had its roots in nation-based thinking and much of the literature under study still concerns issues of the nation-state. Given developments in the studies of globalization and interculturalism, Comparative Literature, already representing a wider study than the single-language nation-state approach, may be well suited to move away from the paradigm of the nation-state. While in the West Comparative Literature is experiencing institutional constriction, there are signs that in many parts of the world the discipline is thriving, especially in Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Mediterranean. Current trends in Transnational studies also reflect the growing importance of post-colonial literary figures such as Giannina Braschi, JM Coetzee, Maryse Condé, Earl Lovelace, VS Naipaul, Michael Ondaatje, Wole Soyinka.