American School of Comparative Literature PDF

The American School of Comparative Literature The founding father of this school, which appeared in the second half of the twentieth century, Henry Remak, states that "comparative literature should not be regarded as a discipline on its own rather as a connecting link between subjects or ‘subject ar...

The American School of Comparative Literature The founding father of this school, which appeared in the second half of the twentieth century, Henry Remak, states that "comparative literature should not be regarded as a discipline on its own rather as a connecting link between subjects or ‘subject areas'. A comparison thus can be made between two or more different literatures and literature and other fields of cognition (music, painting, sculpture, architecture, philosophy, sociology ,psychology, religion, chemistry, mathematics, physics, etc.).In this Remak leaves it all for the comparatist to lay the ground for his or her study , which should not be involved in the problem of 'nationalism'. It is the ' depoliticization' of comparative study then which makes the American perspective on comparative literature different from the French one. Though some critics claim that it is an offshoot of modernist literary criticism, the American perspective is actually a formulation of earlier definitions of the subject. In 1890s Charles Mill tried to draw a distinctive line drawn by Matthew Arnold, H. Macaulay Posnett and Arthur Marsh) by assuming that the subject " should be seen as' nothing more or less ' than literature philology…, by insisting on the importance of psychology, anthropology, linguistics, social science, religion and art in the study of literature". Putting aside all the distinctions used by the French school, the American comparatists concentrated their attention on constructing a model of an' interdisciplinary work'. The sole aim beyond this model is to do away with chauvinistic nationalism, mainly brought by considering literature in the light of linguistic or 'political 'boundaries. Despite difference in language and culture, all nations have something in common. Hence as Susan Bassnett sums it up, " the American perspective on comparative literature was based from the start on ideas of interdisciplinary and universalism'. Furthermore, this perspective threw over another basic principle of the French School , namely binary study, in regarding that the study of affinities and differences between two international literatures was just one angle of the subject, and that, as Gayley proposed," the study of a single literature may be just as scientifically comparative literature if it seeks the reason and law of the literature in the psychology of the race or of humanity". The attitude of early scholars towards comparative literature was quintessentially humanstic. Posnett, the contemporary of Galey's contemporary, linked the subject to the "social evolution, individual evolution and the influence of the environment on the social and individual life of man". In this way, the influences between international literatures are ignored and an emphasis is placed on humanity's collective achievements through time and place and across disciplinary lines--- a view which seems to break down the barriers drawn by the French School between the interrelated elements of a single subject, which is literature. Arthur Marsh's definition of the subjective was distinctive in relating it to pure literary criticism rather than to history. Paying no attention to the influence principle in comparative literature and relating literature to science and art creates new fields of study different from those of the French School. Most significant among these are ' parallelism' and 'intertextuality'.