THE INTERNATIONALIZATION OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

In a separate essay1 I have commented on the diverse set of fields which are being pursued in the 1990s in North America under the label Comparative Literature. My subject here is not the cluster of issues and concerns peculiar to current debates in the United States, but the global network of practices and concepts which currently go under the label Comparative Literature or other closely related terms. Department of Comparative Literature and Culture, the name of Japan's leading group at the Komaba campus of Tokyo, exhibits the naturally twinned (out) growth of comparative cultural studies. The key terms in the name of the French Society for General and Comparative Literature, a pairing frequently found around the world, exhibits the natural association of formal, theoretical, and interdisciplinary considerations with comparatism. The University of Tel-Aviv has a Department of Poetics and Comparative Literature, but poetics in this case also means theory in a broader sense. The unit Algemene Literatuurwetenschap (General Literary Science) at the University of Utrecht can legitimately be translated Department of Comparative Literature and Theory, with a stronger accent on the latter. Often a program in Comparative Literature will be housed within the department responsible for study of the major native literary tradition - for example, English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. The number of serious comparatists is legion who are scattered across various academic specializations in institutions where Comparative Literature is not formally organized, even as an affiliated field of activity. There is no easy transparency in the labels today, despite the proliferation of named programs or chairs of Comparative Literature in many countries, partly because earlier waves of Comparative Literature have spawned newer relationships of fields.

The Comparative Literature pedigree is too illustrious to permit more than a cursory reminder of it. Cross-cultural interpretation is as old as the hills. In Antiquity, St. Jerome implicity acted as a comparatist, as well as theologian, when he translated Hebrew, Syriac and Greek scriptures into Latin, negotiating among several complex literary traditions and their vocabularies. In their Epistle Dedicatory, the translators of the King James version of The Bible are mindful of the challenge involved in "[...] comparing of the labours, both in our own, and other foreign Languages, of many worthy men who went before us." Thus it is hardly surprising that more recently, in The Literary Guide to The Bible (1987), the comparatists Robert Alter and Frank Kermode consciously look over the shoulders of prior generations of readers, who did likewise within the context of their own times, as they explored in and through various languages. A quick check into virtually any major comparativistic topic, whether 'literary' or 'cultural' or 'theoretical', is likely to reveal a considerable pre-history. Illustrative is the situation of scholars who today, once again, follow the traces James Joyce provides for modernity's archetypal Hamletic identity in the Library chapter of Ulysses. As of 1922, Joyce invites his readers' and our retrospection on a stream of cultural self-stylization in the image of Hamlet already then flowing a full century, from Goethe's formulation of it, over the Symbolist view in France, and on into the channel of the Freudian family romance. One can easily continue tracing this subject-matter along various strands, for example, retrospectively via such learned treatises as W. Wittich's Über Sophokles' "König Ödipus" und Schillers "Braut von Messina" (1887), A. Heintze's Versuch einer Parallele zwischen dem Sophokleischen Orestes und dem Shakespearischen Hamlet (1857), A. W. Schlegel's Comparaison entre la Phèdre de Racine et celle d'Euripide (1807), and so forth. What so strikingly emerges from such exercises is the natural reaching for literary comparisons by readers who regard themselves to be members of a metamorphosing community whose cultural space is larger than any limited temporal zone or particular language.

The Enlightenment kept the Renaissance cosmopolitan idea alive, and so did Romanticism in its own ways. Organicist thought of the later eighteenth century indeed deeply modified the understanding of what and how various parts of the human family could share, by expanding the range and types of literatures deemed worthy of serious attention. This mixture of ideas - that the various regions of Europe constituted a larger civilization, and that scholars could apply philological tools in the analysis of the cultural lives of remoter peoples, too - automatically enjoyed a parallel implantation in the New World. Other 'comparative' sciences such as anatomy eventually influenced the methodological habits of literary analysis. 2 The gradual reception of these European attitudes by non-European scholars occurred in the course of colonialization and trade.

The oft-told story of the growth of Comparative Literature from its nineteenth-century European and North American roots scarcely requires further elucidation, any more than does the relevance of Goethe's coinage "world literature" to designate the processes by which a world that was knitting ever closer bonds in modern times would naturally come to share literary treasures of the widest provenance. 3 At mid-century, from his own special angle, Marx formulated a more extreme version of the dynamics of the modern era whereby "[...] history becomes transformed into world history [and] the separate individuals [will] be liberated from the various national and local barriers, be brought into practical connection with the material and intellectual production of the whole world [...]."4 The rate and rhythms of cultural convergence have been different from what Marx anticipated, and cultural sharing and transferences - what contemporary general systems analysts might term "interferences" - have been remarkably variegated down to the present. Nonetheless, the newer waves in the internationalization of Comparative Literature since the Second World War have been an expectable response to the ever accumulating real experience of global interconnectedness. The Joycean act of being "rare regardant"5 in Ulysses, that is, recognizing our 'vertical' relationships to a larger civilization, also involves acknowledging 'horizontal' relationships of deeper kinship to other branches of the human family. The poet Octavio Paz celebrates this broadened global relatedness of literary utterance in many of his works.

The widely spaced calls for a comparative study of literature and the occasional creation of university chairs in the nineteenth century prepared the ground, as is well known, for the generational splurge on both sides of the Atlantic at the Modernist threshold when newly designated chairs in the field were established at Columbia and Harvard in the United States and at Lyons, the Sorbonne and Strasbourg in France around 1900. A prominent feature of the gradual build-up to a second threshold and to a veritable explosion of activity in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War was that the prestige of history, once it had become ranked as a science, lingered from the nineteenth century well past the critical challenge which many elements of Modernism posed to the Western rationalist tradition and to the concept of 'scientific' history, the model for such terms as les sciences humaines and Literaturwissenschaft. H. M. Posnett's Comparative Literature, the field's first general manual, was published as volume 55 in the British "International Scientific Series," in the same year (1886) that Nietzsche was focussing with some pride in an "Attempt at a Self-Criticism" on the fact that his youthful The Birth of Tragedy had raised "[...] the problem of science itself [...]" - that is, had questioned the basis of supposedly scientific history and the human sciences "[...] in the context of art - for the problem of science cannot be recognized in the context of science."6 The question whether comparative studies could or should be 'scientific' has been recurrent ever since the first important periodicals bearing the key term 'history' in their names carried this terminology over into the twentieth century. A notable example is the Berlin scholarly periodal "Studien zur vergleichenden Literaturgeschichte" in the first decade. In fact, comparative studies on matters of genre, style, theme, and affinities in epochal thought or arts are just as frequent in these journals by 1900 as are articles of a more decidely 'historical' bent (e. g., those dealing with genetic patterns, filiation, influence, etc.). Yet the habit of such naming is still visible in the series rubric, Forschungsprobleme der Vergleichenden Literaturgeschichte, in which the collected proceedings Beiträge zur Tübinger Historiker-Tagung September 1950 appeared. In fact, important impulses for founding a global organization for comparative studies emerged from this convention. Although the postwar 'literary historians' of many nations who were gathered at Tübingen took principally the literatures of Western Europe and the United States as their subject matter, they already had broader world prospects in mind.

A high watermark of the 'historical' (and still mainly Eurocentric) approach in the early twentieth century was Paul van Tieghem's view of the field set forth in his book La Littérature Comparée (1931). The proceedings of the SIXTH CONGRESS OF THE INTERNATIONAL FEDERATION FOR MODERN LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES, held in 1954 at Oxford and dedicated to the master theme "Science and Literature" showed, however, that the nineteenth-century inclination to bestow the label 'scientific' on literary scholarship and theory was actually steeping waning by the end of the Second World War. Out of this Oxford gathering, which occurred just a few years after that at Tübingen, there also emerged a distinct and separate new scholarly body, the Association Internationale de Littérature Comparée (International Comparative Literature Association), incorporated under French law. Over the past several decades, while its adherents have debated whither the conglomerate comparatist enterprise is heading or should head, the number of regional associations of comparative studies affiliated with International Comparative Literature Association has grown to three dozen. The FIRST TRIENNIAL CONGRESS OF INTERNATIONAL COMPARATIVE LITERATURE ASSOCIATION was held in Venice, Italy (1955) and concentrated largely on Romance literatures. The SECOND CONGRESS OF INTERNATIONAL COMPARATIVE LITERATURE ASSOCIATION moved across the Atlantic to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, U. S. A., in 1958 and already involved some Asian scholars and a broader intercontinental program. This readiness to venture forth was symptomatic of the collaborative leadership role which two key groups then played: the cosmopolitan European scholars who had gone through the war, many in battle, and the Americans, whose ranks had been swollen with learned refugees in the War era and who likewise often had been in the armed forces in various sectors of the globe. As relative as it was (since quite serious armed conflicts still erupted), the 'Pax Americana' of the first decades of the post-War era created an umbrella favorable for the immediate international participation by Comparative Literature scholars from Hong Kong, Japan, and Taiwan and from several parts of Africa. This early reopening to Asia, and to a much more modest extent to Africa, and the early readiness to change the venue of the 'discipline's' main congress away from Europe were crucial for the ensuing steady globalization of Comparative Literature.

The potential for more than a Trans-Atlantic interchange grew evident from the spread of programmatically dedicated first-class journals before and after the Second World War. The trend began with the "Revue de Littérature Comparée" (1921) in France, continued around Europe with "Orbis Litterarum" (1943) in Denmark, and "Rivista di letterature moderne e comparate" (1948) in Italy, around the United States with "Comparative Literature" (1949), the "Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature" (1952), and "Comparative Literature Studies" (1962), and around Asia with "Hingaku Bungaku" in Japan (1958), and the "Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature" (1961) in India. Further significant Comparative Literature journals were founded from the mid-1960s through the early 1980s in the Americas, Asia, and Europe, for example: "Arcadia" (1966) and "Komparatistische Hefte" (1978) in Germany, "Tamkang Review" (1970) in Taiwan, "Neohelicon" (1973) in Hungary, "Canadian Review of Comparative Literature" (1974), "Synthesis" (1974) in Romania, "The Comparatist" (1977) in the United States, "Comparative Criticism" (1979) and "New Comparison" (1986) in the United Kingdom, "Cowrie" (1983) in China, and "Colloquium Hevelticum" (1985) in Switzerland. This list has grown steadily from the mid-1980s into the 1990s, including South America and Africa as well as the 'old' homelands of Comparative Literature; and, if we add in the many bulletins and newsletters of Comparative Literature associations and centers in several dozen countries, which often carry substantial research news and position papers, it is evident that the texture of Comparative Literature's intercontinental discourse has thickened noticeably.

The weaving of this web seems an even more dramatic ongoing event once we take into account the proliferation of certain kinds of publication relevant to Comparative Literature as a conglomerate 'super-field'. There is the long series of Comparative Literature handbooks surveying 'our' tasks and activities since Posnett and Van Tieghem. These have been authored both by individual and collaborating scholars, and are produced mainly in English, French, and German, but also have appeared in Chinese, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, and other languages. There are the by now thousands of master's theses and doctoral dissertations which officially, or actually, are comparative in topic and/ or approach written in the twentieth century. Many of these have made it into print to take their place in libraries alongside the now thousands of comparative studies published by academic and commerical presses; as usual, here too, English, French, and German are preponderant as media of scholarly communication, but the use of other idioms is by no means negligible. By perusing the International Comparative Literature Association review of current research, "Recherche Littéraire/Literary Research", published since the early 1980s, one can take a rough measure of the proportions of the global, as against regional, interest in specific topics. However, readers who are situated in places where some widely used European language is the main local medium may well be, as a consequence, less aware of the constellation of topics in places where literary discourse is conducted in non-European languages; reciprocity is still lopsided in this respect. Other obvious sets of materials out of which we can draw indices of the comparativistic topics which command attention and where and when these appear in significant clusters are the proceedings both of International Comparative Literature Association conferences and of conferences held by regional associations of Comparative Literature and related scholarly organizations. The kinds of Comparative Literature programs taking place in various parts of the world can be tracked in the announcements carried in the "International Comparative Literature Association Bulletin" (1977).

Two works appearing at the start of the 1960s spelled out many of the tensions inherent in the comparatist enterprise which are still reflected in the handbooks, conference programs, and debates on theory down to the present. In a lead essay entitled Comparative Literature: Its Definition and Function for the volume Comparative Literature: Method and Perspective (1961), the post-War pioneer Henry Remak offered perhaps the most compact, yet sweeping formulation of Comparative Literature's scope to date. The explosion of work in the various directions discerned by Remak has demonstrated how prophetic the choice of terms in his opening paragraph was:

"Comparative Literature is the study of literature beyond the confines of one particular country and the study of relationship between literature on the one hand and other areas of knowledge and belief, such as the arts (e. g., painting, sculpture, architecture, music), philosophy, history, the social sciences, religion, etc., on the other. In brief, it is the comparison of one literature with another or others, and the comparison of literature with other spheres of human expression."

In Comparaison n'est pas raison: La crise de la littérature comparée (1963), René Étiemble made an impasioned plea for the vigorous expansion of Comparative Literature beyond its original European and Euroamerican context, and against all provincialism and chauvinism. As I shall indicate in more detail below, current international Comparative Literature is increasingly responding to this call to overcome constricting linguistic, geocultural, and historical boundaries. Nevertheless, the international community of scholars at large has also been experiencing just how difficult it is to overcome the 'majoritarian' Western tendency in countries like the United States and Canada toward compartmentalization into clusters of pronouncedly Western interests in literary and cultural studies - and to people outside North America these may too often appear to be overweening enclaves such as the 'radical' Étiemble denounced thirty years ago. One of the issues he raised still perplexes Comparative Literature advocates everywhere who aspire toward a richer dialogue among cultures. It is the fact that, while Comparative Literature will and does indeed contribute to the elaboration of sounder 'general literature' studies, it can do so only by not being wrongly identified with local predilections for (what so often prove actually to be culture-bound) theoretical models. This proposition applies both to European and non-European practice in Comparative Literature, but Étiemble was naturally addressing himself, initially, to the biggest group of practitioners: fellow Europeans and New World scholars.

Étiemble stressed that Comparative Literature's role is to bring together under one roof the ensemble of knowledge about "literatures individuelles" ("individual literatures")7 with all their contingencies. In Étiemble's view, these factors include their particular relationships to the other arts, to philosophical and religious traditions, to historical experience, etc. - in brief, all the relationships which, as Remak saw, have relevance for Western comparatists. I shall comment in due course on current theoretical efforts to cope with this need to 'de-Westernize' the framing concepts for literary life which an expansion beyond the European and Euroamerican cultural systems entails. The point that bears underscoring here is that, because the overwhelming bulk of Comparative Literature practitioners at the start of the 1960s were located in, and were concerned with, European and Euroamerican cultures, it was natural that many of them were attracted to seeing literature in general in the philosophical, psychological, and anthropological terms derivative from their home civilization. Thus any local devolution of the 'Western' Comparative Literature enterprise into separate camps defined along internal lines in the 1970s and 1980s - e. g., according to particular preferred 'interdisciplinary' approaches or waves - tended to distract scholars in Europe and the Americas from recognizing that, by and large, they were not saying much at all about the literatures of other parts of the world, were not listening very attentively to comparatists rooted in extra-European and non-Euroamerican cultures, and lacked the competence to engage non-European and non-Euro-American topics.

The situation looks qualitatively different in the 1990s as a result of many kinds of base-building that have been mutually reinforcing. Because constraints of space prohibit describing the full variety of topics at International Comparative Literature Association meetings, I would urge readers to browse through the impressive series of Proceedings. 8 One of the post-War realities that the FIRST CONGRESSES OF INTERNATIONAL COMPARATIVE LITERATURE ASSOCIATION had to respond to was the existence of the Soviet block, with its internal conditions that gravely complicated communication with colleagues domiciled under its several governments; the famous 'Iron Curtain' presented a formidable barrier that 'Western' and other comparatists naturally sought to cross. Because it was held in Belgrade, in the then important independent Marxist state Yugoslavia, which acted as an intermediary between Western nations, the Soviet Block, and the so-called Third World, the FIFTH CONGRESS OF INTERNATIONAL COMPARATIVE LITERATURE ASSOCIATION (1967) permitted a crucial expansion of the hitherto minor focus on East European, notably on Slavic, literatures in relation to others. Beyond the Romance-centered inaugural congress at Venice (1955), the early congresses, although concerned chiefly with the literatures of Western Europe and the New World, did maintain scattered attention to cases of European-Asian literary exchange, influence, and stylistic or spiritual affinity, but clearly it took and was taking time to build toward a critical mass in that area of research. Thus while the FOURTH CONGRESS OF INTERNATIONAL COMPARATIVE LITERATURE ASSOCIATION at Fribourg (1964) included only a small segment of papers on Far Eastern literatures in relation to Western literatures, it was a heartening sign that a couple dozen Asian and African scholars were in attendance, the Japanese being most prominent with a delegation of eight. The SIXTH CONGRESS OF INTERNATIONAL COMPARATIVE LITERATURE ASSOCIATION at Bordeaux (1970) offered a broader exploration of the literatures of the Mediterranean, but also sizeable programs on European-Asian and European-African literary relations. The maturation in the range and variety of the research International Comparative Literature Association promoted was unmistakable at the SEVENTH CONGRESS OF INTERNATIONAL COMPARATIVE LITERATURE ASSOCIATION at Montréal and Ottawa (1973). Among other things, there were segments that dealt with issues of literary periodization, movements, and zones, with methods of analysis (anthropological, sociological, formal-e.g., structuralist, semiotic, stylistic -, and intermedic - e.g., film and radio), with values and valuation, and with pedagogy. The generous number of sessions allotted to intercultural relations encompassed American literatures (Latin America, Canada, and the United States) at large, intra-American aspects (e.g., Black, Native American Chicano), and European-American aspects.

The founding pioneers could recognize with satisfaction there was indeed a rhythmic alternation at work by the 1970s as a consequence of the shift in the geocultural and intellectual center of gravity from congress to congress. Concerted efforts to 'globalize' critical discourse in the general direction Étiemble recommended became quite evident with the program of the EIGHTH CONGRESS OF INTERNATIONAL COMPARATIVE LITERATURE ASSOCIATION held at Budapest (1976). It brought together a large selection of papers on Latin American, Near Eastern, African, South Asian, and Far Eastern literatures, without neglecting European and North American topics, and thus in some measure avoided 'ghettoizing' the less represented fields. This danger could rear itself when papers were grouped only by geocultural area and the sessions tended to attract only experts of that area, rather than to draw a mixture of European and non-European experts. So it was important that such topics as the European Renaissance and Enlightenment, the nature and role of myth and symbol, semiotic theory, language and style, translation, and the theory of Comparative Literature were being pursued in the same environment. In a report to the NINETH CONGRESS OF INTERNATIONAL COMPARATIVE LITERATURE ASSOCIATION at Budapest (1979) on The Comparative Study of Asian and African Literature, Douwe Fokkema - International Comparative Literature Association President (1985-88) - affirmed the goals and hoped for the eventual build-up of the needed scholarly forces. The ELEVENTH CONGRESS OF INTERNATIONAL COMPARATIVE LITERATURE ASSOCIATION at Paris (1985) emphasized contacts and influences, processes of acculturation, intra- and inter-regional reception studies, and the distinction between Comparative Literature and 'world literature', but did not greatly increase attention to non-European materials. The TWELFTH CONGRESS OF INTERNATIONAL COMPARATIVE LITERATURE ASSOCIATION at Munich (1988) was important for tightening the focus on theoretical questions associated with the spaces and boundaries of literature and represented in literature, and on the realities of criticism and teaching.

One of the three main parts of the TENTH CONGRESS OF INTERNATIONAL COMPARATIVE LITERATURE ASSOCIATION at New York (1982) was devoted to Latin American literatures, and under that label not only were many bi-continental and tri-continental Euro-American aspects of the relevant literatures explored, but there was some attention to African elements of the migrant cultures in the Western Hemisphere. The African-European relationship enjoyed prominence at the Eleventh Congress at Paris in 1985. A quantum leap occurred in the more ample staging of intra-Asian and East-West sessions at the THIRTEENTH CONGRESS OF INTERNATIONAL COMPARATIVE LITERATURE ASSOCIATION at Tokyo in 1991, which brought together the largest mixture ever of experts from Asian, European, and New World institutions and yielded an entire volume on Inter-Asian Comparative Literature. The FOURTEENTH CONGRESS OF INTERNATIONAL COMPARATIVE LITERATURE ASSOCIATION at Edmonton (1994) maintained a rather high Asian participation and attracted a sizeable Latin American presence, with many Western Hemisphere topics, but seasoned comparatists noted with concern that the drop-off in African participation (except for South African), which was already evident even at Paris, had worsened. International Comparative Literature Association officers began an outreach campaign to rekindle the African enthusiasm of the 1960s and 1970s.

Four important kinds of literary investigation and theory that involve 'bridging' have helped prepare the ground for a more serious internationalism in Comparative Literature at the end of the century. There has been the gradual unfolding of the pursuit of East-West studies from the postwar moment to the successful Tokyo Congress of International Comparative Literature Association. Following closely behind East-West studies, 'postcolonial' studies, albeit a loosely configured complex of interests and in many particular instances fraught with pitfalls and detours, have contributed to "our" readiness for a more demanding internationalist commit ment. Scholars in extra-European/ Euro-American territories have meanwhile been developing their own discussions about the nature and requirements of Comparative Literature. And some brands of general systems theory have suggested higher standards of knowledge and procedure appropriate to serious research on the international level when we seek to talk both about the interaction of cultures and about their respective internal repertorial configuration, dynamics, and other characteristics. In giving just a few selective illustrations drawn from the activities of members of the International Comparative Literature Association as an historical abbreviation of a much larger evolution, I do not mean to slight the myriad overlapping contributions in these regards made by various other specialists and learned organizations.

Besides mounting its triennial congresses, International Comparative Literature Association has managed for some thirty years to convene its Executive Council and heads of administrative and research committees plus special guests at least annually, always at a different venue. These gatherings are planned in cooperation with a national association of Comparative Literature, a learned academy, or a major educational center, and usually occur in conjunction with a major international conference on themes of mutual interest. The International Comparative Literature Association's self-renewing research committees, too, when meeting separately in pursuit of their specific goals, ordinarily collaborate with a host group and participate in an international conference pertinent to the field. In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, these very important events have taken place in the United States, Canada, Western Europe, and Eastern Europe. But in 1989 the entire Executive Council and key members of its research committees joined in the international conference sponsored by the Japanese Comparative Literature Association at Tokyo, replete with East-West and Asian topics, and in a satellite conference at Kyoto. In 1990, at the invitation of the Sahitya Akademy of India and Indian comparatists, the same International Comparative Literature Association cohorts participated in a major week-long conference in New Delhi on narration which drew not just scholars and critics, but also authors and filmmakers because it was timed to follow upon the award ceremonies bestowing prizes for the best works in the twenty-two officially cultivated 'national' languages of this subcontinental country. To gain the benefit of the presence of so many overseas scholars, a second conference on Comparative Literature as a global 'polylogue' was organized, bringing together Western and Asian scholars in the Sikh university city Patiala. In 1990, the International Comparative Literature Association Committee on Literary Theory met in Taiwan, where the long-standing scholarly society Comparative Literature AROC had regularly been inviting individual Western scholars as participants in its congresses. A product of these exchanges is the volume on the East-West theoretical interface edited by Hanlian Chang. Among other works inspired by the Theory group, is a virtually simultaneous general stock-taking entitled Théorie littéraire which in twenty chapters explores the constellation of contemporary Western modes of theory. 1995 will see similar conferences in the Republic of South Africa and in the People's Republic of China which will combine International Comparative Literature Association members and scholars of the local learned societies of Comparative Literature and other guests. Members of the International Comparative Literature Association Committee on Translation Studies have been the moving spirits in founding the international journal "Target" (1989) and are significant contributors to the remarkable collaborative project of the three-volume Translation: An International Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, under the direction of Armin Paul Frank (University of Göttingen).

In 1985, scholars in the People's Republic of China created a national society at an inaugural congress. Besides experts in a variety of Asian literatures and their relationships, the new Chinese Comparative Literature Association counts in its ranks a number of experts in specific European and Euro-American areas and in cross-cultural phenomena associated with 'Western' studies (e. g., the reception of Nietzsche and Freud in Chinese modernism). However, one of the first trends to take hold has been efforts to define a Chinese 'school' or 'approach' in Comparative Literature. 9 Western scholars who still recollect or have heard about the momentary gravitation of some leading comparatists around the so-called American or French 'schools' in the late 1950s and early 1960s may be puzzled over any attempt today to construe mainly bipolar relationships in literature. But one of the realities that international Comparative Literature must take into account is the residual power of the older models of 'national literatures' in quite a few parts of the world. In some countries where, as in China, there is a major tradition and its corresponding earlier historical formulation (in a well-defined canon, etc.), scholars feel the need, after significant systemic turbulence, to reassess the heritage and to sort out the characteristics of the new situation. Thus some sort of 'nationalistic' reconsolidation should not be so surprising from time to time as newer clusters of Comparative Literature appear in the process of the internationalization of our field.

Very instructive in this regard is the fascinating debate that has been underway over the same decade in India. It is self-evident that India's political structure and cultural diversity present a far more complicated picture than that in older 'nation states' like France or China; even though France and China too exhibit regional, ethnic, and linguistic variety, the scale of the variety in India is exceptional. India is home to several great religions, with their numerous sects, some reaching back millenia, others such as Islam and Christianity being more recent, and has nurtured its own philosophic streams. But it has also received continuous cultural infusions of European provenance since the Renaissance. No 'interference' has been so overwhelming as the British imperial presence which gave India much of its current state structure and which brought to India an imported administrative and intellectual lingua franca. Because English took root, India acquired as well a lasting direct connection to Western thought and to examples of Western institutions. Just as English established itself through empire in Ireland or Canada, it spread across India, but it came to count as an indigenous medium alongside thriving major and minor Indian languages. It is not an exaggeration to compare India to the entirety of Europe insofar as each of these great regionss of the world covers an enormous landmass and divides into larger and smaller language blocks and has several territories where languages and/or ethnic and religious communities are intertangled.

Curiously enough, in India as in Europe, English has emerged as the most prominent working lingua franca, even though other powerful idioms cannot be budged from their secure places (e. g., Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, etc., like French, German, Spanish, etc.). Thus in India as in Europe, the use of English no longer only means being 'British' or 'American' or 'Australian', but may simply be part of pursuing 'business' or 'politics' or 'science', etc., unless speakers quite specifically narrow the context of a discussion to refer to matters pertaining to one of the other 'home' territories where English functions as a 'national' language. The question whether perhaps, gradually, Hindi, one of the most widely used Indic languages, will displace English remains to be answered in future generations. Many millions of Indians are bi- or multilingual in Northern and/or Southern Indian languages; meanwhile English contributes to linking many Indians who (albeit polyglot) have no other common idiom, and thereby plays a role in fostering their sense of belonging to a larger civilization. One of the repercussions of the dominant position of English has been an often remarked inhibiting of the study of other major European literatures at Indian universities; English departments tend to monopolize the scene at Indian universities, and (with notable exceptions) the teaching of French, German, Italian, Russian, etc., is ignored or relegated to an inferior status. Thus some Indian scholars feel that Comparative Literature may be needed also to open up consciousness of the bigger European picture. Ironically, because English is a lingua franca of Comparative Literature, it may eventually prove to be the instrument which enables the balancing of the undue influence of 'English' - enables the Indians to pursue globalization in literary studies.

Facing the Indian situation, scholars on the subcontinent have wondered whether they should be drawn immediately into widening their pursuit of worldwide comparative studies or whether it might not be imperative, first, to build a base in the study of Indian literatures comparable to that which the European originators of Comparative Literature built for European literatures. Within the camp of scholars more eager to expand beyond India, the argument carrying great weight is that India cannot afford to neglect world currents during an interval of reassesssment of the shared indigenous heritage and promotion of intra-regional cross-cultural research. The counter-argument is that Indic civilization is as deserving of intensive scrutiny as any other region of the globe and that the massive 'interferences' caused by the more recent Imperial age have deflected too much attention from the complex heritage, so that trained experts (with appropriate knowledge of the languages) ought to focus on what has happened and is happening in the multiple, interlocking 'target' cultures of India where the foreign influences have been registered. This natural contest of imperatives was one of the burning subjects at the SEMINAR ON COMPARATIVE LITERATURE: THEORY AND PRACTICE which the Indian Institute of Advanced Study held at Shimla (1987). From the selected papers of that 'national' dialogue published in the volume of the same name, we can gain a sense of the real drama of internationalization underway. Some Indian scholars participating at Shimla examine their own world by applying Western critical concepts. Some argue impressively for the relevance of Indian literary theory. Some concentrate on issues of influence and intertextuality, whether inter- or intra-regionally, and now invoking Western, now Indian frameworks. Tilting slightly in the direction of a Comparative Literature that should continue to be 'more-than-Indic' in the immediate aftermath of the Shimla conference is the collective volume Aspects of Comparative Literature: Current Approaches (1989). It mixes position papers by invited Western scholars and Indians. Their work ranges from expositions of newer trends of comparative studies in the West, over reflections on the substance and shape of East-West and intra-Asian studies, to programmatic suggestions for an 'Indian' Comparative Literature focussed on India as against a Comparative Literature in India that is interactive with other parts of the world. In effect, the sort of questions that Indian scholars are posing about internationalization can be easily turned around; they suggest excellent questions for European and Euroamerican comparatists.

The work of two 'Western' scholars demonstrates how the categories and activities mentioned in the preceding paragraphs have already converged in the last couple of decades to produce a widened internationalism. A man of many parts, the Belgian Albert Gérard (University of Liege) is a respected expert in European Romantic and Baroque literature, yet he is also one of the most important contemporary pioneers in Sub-Saharan literary studies, dealing with the crucial phenomena, juxtapositions, and interpenetrations in Black Africa: oral traditions as against literature in older and newly developed written media, indigenous genres and adaptations of foreign models, widespread bilingualism and plurilingualism, African expression through acquired European languages, etc. Gérard's purpose in leading a team of some sixty experts, about half from African and half from other continents, to produce the two-volume European-Language Writing in Sub-Sharan Africa (1986) for the International Comparative Literature Association has been to capture special features of the passage into the postcolonial era, marked by the close of Second World War. He saw the importance of getting as much as possible on record before the vivid sense of these prewar times might fade, and as writers eventually shifted from using (especially) English, French, and Portuguese as their key media and/or certain European languages metamorphosed more definitively into being regarded as 'local' or 'national' languages by non-European speakers (e. g., English and Afrikans in South Africa). As part of the International Comparative Literature Association's Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages, Gérard's project bridges realms and guides us in two ways: beyond Europe into Africa, and out of Africa into Europe. Gérard's pioneering Sub-Saharan project has been followed in the Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages by a four-volume Caribbean project currently underway under the leadership of James Arnold (University of Virginia). The International Comparative Literature Association has learned from experience that only an international team of comparatists, who harness intensive local expertise to their task, can cope with the unique configuration of the cultures impinging on and blended in this oceanic basin, around its mainland rim and on its islands. The historical flows from and interchanges with the great continents (Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas) make the Caribbean project into an exciting model for the sort of boundary-crossing in and with which Comparative Literature must engage. It is through such collaborative efforts that Comparative Literature will gradually metamorphose and cease to be a predominantly European field. The International Comparative Literature Association has just inaugurated a global research Committee on Intercultural Studies, under Earl Miner as its first chair, to foster inter- and intra-regional comparatism concerned primarily with Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and the Southern Hemisphere.

The comparatist Earl Miner (Princeton University) is a preeminent expert in British poetry and drama of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in all genres, and simultaneously a distinguished Japanologist. Together these areas account for more than half of his some twenty books. In one sector of his research, Miner traffics in both directions between the Japanese and English-speaking worlds or marshalls his extensive knowledge of Asian and European literatures as a theoretician to suggest a kind of critical awareness that is not willfully or blindly Eurocentric. (I employ 'Eurocentric' here as a purely descriptive, not an ideological, term.) A work like Miner's Principles of Classical Japanese Literature (1985), which presents the 'native' literary system is, essentially, explanatory scholarship aimed at a general 'foreign' audience as well as at fellow experts (anywhere in the world). Of course, one of its effects is to advance the naturalization of Japanese concepts in the English and international critical vocabularies. Comparative Poetics (1990) has more recently attracted worldwide attention because of its restatement of the challenge for constructing a viable starting point in an international systemic view of literature.

This book exemplifies the readiness of a good number of Comparative Literature scholars to outgrow the habit of assuming that particular Western brands of literary theory have universal applicability. There is no lack of Western critics who habitually decry the imposition of European and Euro American categories, but who, using concepts of European and Euroamerican origin, are mainly interested in denouncing attitudes expressed in or about local or close-cousin literatures or in touting Eurocentrically anti-European works as replacements for classics in the Western canon. Miner's quite different approach in Comparative Poetics is grounded on a profound respect for both non-Western and Western literatures in their own right. He investigates the sense of genre as it has developed in various quite distinct cultures as a means to define their particular poetics, but his aim is not to flatten all of the phenomena in some artifical schema. Rather his approach requires careful attention to the chronotropic and formal dimensions that appear in the course of the literary history of actual cultures. In defining key genres he adduces evidence from the flow of European writing since antiquity, and analogous evidence from the Far Eastern (Chinese, Korean, Japanese) and Indic literary constellations from their comparable antiquities forward - including earlier and more recent interpenetrations of these several realms. Miner considers the formation of significant continuities as certain poetic habits become reinforced in the works of writers and in commentaries by indigenous critics, but he likewise registers the important internal shifts in these literary streams. The single most valuable finding that emerges is that the great literary worlds of these civilizations have evolved in distinct manners, so that, upon the threshold of the modern period, they did not share the same hierarchies of literary values or foster the same literary sensibilities. Although many elements in every constellation indeed might match something in another constellation, so that there were some bridging commonalities before the modern period, there were also very striking differences in their systemic ranking so elements and there were striking gaps. Thus, for example, it little avails to talk about certain Japanese works in terms of Western theory of drama from Aristotle onward, because the Western ways do not offer any truly useful access to the values and sensibility that had developed in Japan and were reflected in Japanese poetics. As critics, we must learn Japanese poetics in order to appreciate Japanese literary accomplishments.

I have discussed elsewhere10 the formal compatibility of Miner's concept of 'comparative poetics' and general systems theory such as that proposed by Itamar Even-Zohar which starts from the commonsensical assumption that a community of readers (historical or living) could and did, can and do recognize a coherent tradition, even though the average reader may not be aware of its evoutionary dynamics at the moment of participation. Here is not the place to rehearse some of the basic features which many general systems theories agree on (repertory of elements, internal shifting of repertorial position of elements, hetereogeneity, porosity, susceptibility to interferences, interactive relationship to surrounding semiotic universe, significance of size and complexity of a literature for its adaptive capacity, etc.). Clearly, the huge 'disadvantage' of Miner's international openness - analogous to the 'disadvantage' of systemic analysis in real-case application - is that it demands a lot of hard work: devotion to learning 'other' traditions.

Non-Americans may be surprised by the contrast to Gérard and Miner in spirit and tone which they encounter in the report presented to the Association of Comparative Literature of America (1993) by a committee chaired by Charles Bernheimer and reprinted in the recent volume Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism. The Greene report (1975) - also reprinted with the Bernheimer report - of a full generation earlier, written by a committee quite aware of its Eurocentricism, rather modestly and circumspectly acknowledged the deficit in North American competence to deal with non-European literatures. While the Bernheimer committee truistically berates the Greene committee for being "Eurocentric", it is culture-bound in its own way, repeating the hoary ('Eurocentric') cliché of "[...] a critical juncture in its [Comparative Literature's] history."11 Worrisome is that by its choice of the contested, particularly American term "multicultural" and the gong-word "progressive," the 1993 report seems to flaunt a partisan desire to write a huge part of Comparative Literature practitioners in North America and the rest of the world out of the field: "The present moment is particularly propitious for such a review, since progressive tendencies in literary studies, toward a multicultural, global, and interdisciplinary curriculum, are comparative in nature."12 The ideological task is clearly spelled out as a political mobilization to alter the society, to reshape its culture: "Comparative literature departments should play an active role in furthering the multicultural recontextualization of Anglo-American and European perspectives. This does not mean abandoning those perspectives but rather questioning and resisting their dominance."13 But noted American critics like Michael Riffaterre and Peter Brooks are unconvinced that there is some compelling necessity for Comparative Literature at large to covert from literary studies to policically inflected cultural studies.

Many members of the Associastion of Comparative Literature of America believe that the code words which crop up in the Bernheimer report are not really inviting them to study the complex literary culture of the United States in an open process of discovery, but to line up as cadres who already largely agree how to alter the culture in specified ways. Presumptively that is the call non-Americans are supposed to read out of the 1993 report in the case of all other cultures if, as Bernheimer proclaims, we are now living in "the age of multiculturalism." In turning increased attention to matters global, Comparative Literature scholars at home and abroad apparently should start applying the docrinal, 'Eurocentric' formulae of "multiculturalism": a cluster of concepts which specific 'theoreticians' associate with phenomena of the huge immigrant nation in North America and its history. (A favorite phrase in the United States is that one is going to 'theorize' something, which often means only that the writer is going to express a political opinion.) What the Bernheimer report leaves unanswered is the question, under what tent the large number of international American critics are supposed to meet who reject the report's invitation because they are striving to be international in a more satisfying way. Many comparatists from other continents who fail to read the skeptical and qualifying essays in the Bernheimer volume may well feel apprehensive over the possibility that "we" (here I put on an American hat) could collectively pursue another narcissistic and constrictive approach to literary life. There is also a large number of discourse partners out in the bigger world who do not want "American" Comparative Literature to drift into being only a species of American studies. In fact, when American comparatists visit a variety of rather distinct cultures outside the United States of America, they soon make the acquaintance of other comparatists who live in the same sort of tension - often far worse - in their own home territories. These colleagues, too, frequently find themselves 'invited' to bend all their knowledge to reinforcing local agendas, rather than exploring literatures (in the plural) as they prefer to do.

If many American comparatists will read the Bernheimer committee's report largely as vocabulary of a sociolect within a particular culture, but not as a useful guide for doing searching work that is crosscultural and international, then non-American comparatists, too, will recognize, as does David Damrosch, that the earlier reports to the Association of Comparative Literature of America by Levin and Greene were acknowledging a "real problem"14 which the expansion beyond 'Eurocentric' materials and concepts posed for scholarship in the United States of America. One of Damrosch's suggestions,"[...] an elliptical mode of scholarly work [...] a process by which two (or more) scholars serve as the focal points for a single project [...] working with other people, in teaching and research, whenever our topics take us beyond our own areas of competence [...]",15has long been embraced by International Comparative Literature Association. International Comparative Literature Association's self-renewing research committees on theory, literary history, translation studies, and intercultural studies recruit their membership from around the world and they foster projects which require collaborative efforts by teams of experts. The publications which result from these interactions, such as the Gérard Sub-Saharan volumes, do not 'belong' to particular cultures but are a gift to the entire international community of scholars. **

NOTES

** Revised version of the paper:

GILLESPIE, Gerald, The Internationalization Of Comparative Literature In The Second Half Of The Twentieth Century, in ENCONTRO INTERNACIONAL "DIÁLOGO CULTURAL E DIFICULDADES DE ENTENDIMENTO" (COLLOQUIUM ON CULTURAL DIALOGUE AND CULTURAL MISUNDERSTANDING), Macao, Instituto Cultural de Macau - Fundação Oriente, 13-14 October 1995 - [Oral communication... ].

See: SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY - for the following authors and further titles of authors already mentioned in this article:

ALTER, Robert - KERMODE, Frank; ANGENOT, Marc-BESSIÈRE, Jean - FOKKEMA, Douwe - KUSHNER, Eva, eds.; ARNOLD, James, et al, ed.; DEV, Amiya - DAS, Sisir Kumar, eds.; CHANG, Han-liang, ed.; ÉTIEMBLE, René, JOYAUX, Georges - WEISINGER Herbert, trans.; FRANK, Armin Paul, et al., eds.; GÉRARD, Albert; WAIS, Kurt, ed.; GILLESPIE, Gerald, ed.; MINER, Earl; MOHAN, Chandra, ed.; POSNETT, H. M.; RABELAIS, François, CLOUZOT, Henri, ed.; SIXTH TRIENNIAL CONGRESS ON LITERATURE AND SCIENCE [International Federation for Modern Languages and Literatures], Oxford, 1954 - ASTON, S. C., et al, eds., [Proceedings of...]; STALLNECHT, Newton P. - FRENZ, Horst, eds.; Studien zur vergleichenden Literaturgeschichte; TIEGHEM, Paul Van.

1 La Literatura Comparada de los años 90 en Estados Unidos, in "1616", (10) 1995, pp. 39-50. A fuller English version, Comparative Literature of the 1990s in the U. S. A., will appear in a forthcoming two-volume work, being prepared by the International Comparative Literature Association Committee on Issues and Methods in Comparative Literature, under the direction of Tania Franco Carvalhal, which takes stock of current Comparative Literature around the globe. A fuller English version of the present essay will be published in CNL/World Report.

2 BAUER, Roger, Origines et métamorphoses de la Littéature comparée, in XIITH CONGRESS OF INTERNATIONAL COMPARATIVE LITERATURE ASSOCIATION, Munich, 1991, -BAUER, Roger -FOKKEM, Douwe - DE GRAAT, Michael, eds., [Proceedings of...], 5 vols., München, Iudicium, vol.1, pp. 21-27.

3 Littérature comparée/Littérature mondiale: Comparative Literature/World Literature, in XTH CONGRESS OF INTERNATIONAL COMPARATIVE LITERATURE ASSOCIATION, New York, 1982 - [Proceedings of...], vol.5 - The opening essays of this volume review this background.

4 MARX, Karl - ENGELS, Frederick, ARTHUR, C. J., ed., The German Ideology, New York, International Publishers, 1970 [2nd edition: 1993].

5 JOYCE, James, Ulysses: The Corrected Text, New York, Vintage, 1986, p.42

6 NIETZSCHE, Friedrich, The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner, New York, Vintage, 1967.

7 ÉTIEMBLE, René, Comparaison n'est pas raison: La crise de la littérature comparée. Paris, Gallimard, 1963, p.39.

8 The Proceedings of International Comparative Literature Association Congresses are cited here in simplified form, usually omitting the specific thematic titles and editors of multi-volume sets.

See: "International Comparative Literature Association Bulletin", 13 (2) Spring 1993, pp. 33-37 - For a fuller bibliographical listing.

Also see: Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages, International Comparative Literature Association - For a fuller bibliographical listing along with bibliographic details.

9 YUAN Hao-yi, About the 'Chinese School', "International Comparative Literature Association Bulletin", 12(1-2) 1992, pp. 30-37.

10 GILLESPIE, Gerald, Rhinoceros, Unicorn, or Chimera? -A Polysystemic View of Possible Kinds of Comparative Literature in the New Century, in "Journal of Intercultural Studies", (19) 1992, pp. 14-21.

11 BERNHEIMER, Charles, ed., Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, Baltimore - Lon- don, John Hopkins University, 1993, p.47.

12 Idem.

13 BERNHEIMER, Charles, ed., op. cit., p.44.

14 Ibidem., p.131.

15 Ibidem., p.132.

* Ph. D. in Germanics by the Ohio State University. Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature, in Stanford University. President of the International Association of Comparative Literature.