COML 6090 - [Comparison and Cultural Difference]

Spring. 4 credits.

Next offered 2014-2015.

N. Melas.

This course will be an extended meditation on what would once have been something like an introduction to the method of comparative literature. Taking as our central task a wide-ranging investigation of the pitfalls, the possibilities and the particular urgency of cross-cultural comparison at this historical juncture, we will examine the structure and history of comparison as a disciplinary method, as an idea and a practice and, in its literary form, as a perplexing tropological effect of language. What constitutes comparability and what are its theoretical and institutional limits? To what extent and in what circumstance can comparison produce cultural difference, consolidate given boundaries or contest them? What are the grounds for the authority of the comparatist and what happens when these are claimed by subjects marked by gender or race? What are the ends of comparison? Readings aim to familiarize students with recent debates on the subject as well as to enable a rigorous and sustained inquiry into underlying concepts and will include: selections from recent debates around the idea of world literature (Moretti, Casanova, Damrosch, Spivak); discussions of comparative method in the humanities and social sciences (Anderson, Tilley, Harootunian); philosophical and theoretical meditations (Lyotard, Nancy, Deleuze-Guattari, Fanon, Glissant); selected literary texts.