Third Term Comparison

To compare, or not to compare? Since when did that become a question? As long as the discipline of comparative literature is situated in the singular discourse of absolute equity, to compare has become a tabooed concept and action. As Zhang Longxi laments, “In the postmodern critique of fundamentals, we are told not to essentialize anything and not to hold things in a metaphysical hierarchy, as though any kind of comparison or differentiation, any value judgment, or any order of things would result in a repressive regime that privileges one and, of necessity, excludes all other alternatives.”1 This reluctance to make value judgments has led the field of comparative literature to turn to world literature as a way of overcoming a Eurocentric bias by integrating discussion of non-European literature. World literature attempts to thereby go beyond national traditions and eliminate bias to promote a universal culture of literature that advocates equity but avoids comparison. David Damrosch sets up an opposition between national literatures and world literature in which the study of the former historically contextualizes a literary text whereas the latter decontextualizes it. In defining world literature, he writes, “I take world literature to encompass all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language.”2 Accordingly, the world literature idea does not establish relationships between cultural traditions. Instead, it focuses on traveling texts in order to set up a universal culture. Zhang Longxi, for instance, tries to imagine a global canon of literature that consists of “a relatively stable set of canonical works from the world’s different literary traditions.”3 This canon does not depend on its development within a particular historical tradition. Instead, such a global canon attempts to establish a worldwide tradition maintained within the minds of some comparative/world literature professors. Zhang Longxi’s recent idea of world literature (which conflicts with his earlier ideas about comparison4) tends to dissolve cultural traditions into a unified world literature as a set of core texts that takes a form of objectivity and universality.