Parallelism Theory: American School of Comparative Literature PDF

American School of Comparative Literature This school appeared in the twentieth century. It actually appeared as a reaction against the French School of Comparative Literature which put many constraints on the comparatist. Among these and perhaps the most outstanding one is that the comparison shou...

American School of Comparative Literature This school appeared in the twentieth century. It actually appeared as a reaction against the French School of Comparative Literature which put many constraints on the comparatist. Among these and perhaps the most outstanding one is that the comparison should be between two texts from two different countries, using different languages. In other words it is only possible when you compare a text from Arabic language with another from English or French or German Languages. Thus it is not possible to compare, as the French comparatists argue, a text from an Arab country with another from the same countries. Also there is the narrow view of the French comparatists which stipulates that the literary text should be compared only with another literary text, not with other disciplines and genres such as painting cinema, sculpture poetry…etc. Arguments and judgments of this sort made the French School of Comparative Literature lose its appeal to many practitioners of the discipline of comparative literature and make them keep away from this rigid school of comparative literature and its circumscribing laws. The rise of the American School is the inevitable outcome of conditions that do not give the comparatist a reasonable degree of freedom and choice in dealing with a discipline that combines more than one field such as linguistics, history, literary criticism. anthropology or psychology. 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 the 1890s Charles Mill tried to draw a distinctive line of American comparative literature ( not differing much from the 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". The American comparatists concentrated their attention on constructing a model of interdisciplinary work. The sole aim beyond this model is to do away with chauvinistic nationalism, mainly brought about by considering literature in the light of linguistic or political boundaries. Despite all differences in language and culture, all nations have certain things in common. Thus as Bassnett sums up the matter ,"the American perspective on comparative literature was based from the start on ideas of interdisciplinarity and universalism" The attitude of early scholars toward comparative literature was quintessentially humanistic. Posnett 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 laid 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 one single subject, which is literature. Arthur Richmond Marsh's definition of the subject was distinctive in relating it to purely literary criticism rather than history. Parallelism Theory The parallel theory has replaced the theory of influence of the French school of comparative theory. This theory has been adopted by comparatists in America and Eastern Europe. The Russian comparatist N.I. Konrad finds parallelism is " the correspondence of a certain type of poetry in form or content with another. We call this parallelism. It can be explained further by stating that when a proposition is delivered , and a second is subjoined to it, equivalent or contrasted with it in sense or similar to it in the form of grammatical construction, these I call parallel lines , and the words or phrases answering one to another in the corresponding lines , parallel terms. Parallelism is much wider than just correspondences between different texts in terms of linguistic similarities. The roots of the concept of parallelism as Konrad suggests, are derived from the idea of similarities in humanity's social and historical evolution , which means harmony in the process of literary development. Any study of parallelism claims that there are affinities between the literatures of different peoples whose social evolution is similar, regardless of whether or not there is any mutual influence or direct relation between them.To give an example, political and social relations during the feudal period resulted in similar patterns of thought , art, and literature indifferent parts of the world.Beyond study, the comparatist seeks to determine the bases and premises which underline common features between literatures and writers, or the affiliation of a phenomenon with a specific pattern. Although this theory is opposed by some critics , on the account that literatures differ according to their discovering national and historical backgrounds, it is significant in the common properties of literary phenomena whether related or not , and the national and historical attributes of each phenomenon. Parallelism in Use: The question that needs to be answered here is : how can we find the parallelism in two different texts belonging to two different cultures, languages, religions and concepts of life, irrespective of time and place This is in fact the main privilege of the American school of comparative literature. When we read certain literary texts carefully in one country ,it becomes evident that some of them have parallel lines with other foreign works when they are available in that country. A glaring example in this regard is the philosophy of existentialism in Europe in particular France. This philosophy claims that people are free agents who have control over their choices and actions. Exstentialists believe that society should not restrict an individual's life or actions and that restrictions inhibit free will and the development of that person's free potential. The leaders of this philosophy were Jean Paul Sartre ( 1905-1980) and Albert Camus (1913- 1960).When their French novels and plays were translated into Arabic, a group of writers in different parts of the Arab World were greatly influenced in their views of life and literature, and the role assigned to literature. Names like Adonis, Abdul Rahman Muneef, and Tawfiq Al Hakeem were influenced by that trend and a close reading of the poems and novels of these writers shows that there are clear echoes and references , both thematically and linguistically between them and the western counterparts.