debut.fm Page i Tuesday, March 20, 2001 1:35 PM The Living Prism debut.fm Page ii Tuesday, March 20, 2001 1:35 PM debut.fm Page iii Tuesday, March 20, 2001 1:35 PM The Living Prism Itineraries in Comparative Literature e va k u s h n e r Published for Carleton University by McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca debut.fm Page iv Tuesday, March 20, 2001 1:35 PM © McGill-Queen’s University Press 2001 isbn 0-7735-2148-8 (cloth) isbn 0-7735-2208-5 (paper) Legal deposit second quarter 2001 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Senate Research Committee, Victoria University, University of Toronto. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for its activities. It also acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for its publishing program. Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Kushner, Eva The living prism: itineraries in comparative literature Collection of essays, either previously published, or presented as lectures. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-7735-2148-8 (bnd) isbn 0-7735-2208-5 (pbk) 1. Literature, Comparative. 2. Literature – History and criticism – Theory, etc. I. Title. pn871.k88 2001 801′.95 c00-901260-5 This book was typeset by Typo Litho Composition Inc. in 10/12 Baskerville. debut.fm Page v Tuesday, March 20, 2001 1:35 PM Contents Foreword: Knowledge, Empathy, and Global Village: The Comparative Discourse of Eva Kushner wladimir krysinski / vii Introduction / 3 pa r t o n e l e g a c i e s a n d r e n e wa l s 1 Literature in the Global Village / 9 2 Is Comparative Literature Ready for the Twenty-first Century? / 19 3 Towards a Typology of Comparative Literature Studies / 30 4 Literary Studies, Cultural Studies: The Case for a Cease-Fire / 38 5 Comparative Literature in Canada: Whence and Whither? / 51 6 Theory, Theories, Theorizing, and Cultural Relativism / 64 pa r t t w o c h a n g i n g p e r s p e c t i v e s i n l i t e r a r y h i s t o r y 7 Diachrony and Structure: Thoughts on Renewals in the Theory of Literary History / 71 debut.fm Page vi Tuesday, March 20, 2001 1:35 PM vi Contents 8 From “Time Lost” to “Time Regained” in Literary History / 87 9 On Renaissance Literary Historiography / 98 10 Comparative Literary History among the Human Sciences / 106 11 Comparative Literary History as Dialogue among Nations / 117 12 History and the Power of Metaphor / 127 13 Comparative Literary History in the Era of Difference / 138 pa r t t h r e e h i s t o r y a n d e a r ly m o d e r n s u b j e c t i v i t y 14 Distant Voices: The Call of Early Modern Studies / 153 15 History and the Absent Self / 163 16 The Emergence of the Paradoxical Self / 174 17 The Renewed Meaning of the Renaissance Dialogue / 190 18 Erasmus and the Paradox of Subjectivity / 202 19 In Search of the Obverse Side of Petrarchism / 221 20 Imagining the Renaissance Child / 232 pa r t f o u r i n m e m o r y o f n o r t h r o p f r y e 21 Northrop Frye and the Possibility of Intercultural Dialogue / 249 22 Northrop Frye and the Historicity of Literature / 257 23 The Social Thought of Northrop Frye / 266 pa r t f i v e c o m pa r at i v e i m a g i n i n g s 24 Liberating Children’s Imagination / 279 25 Myth and Literature: The Example of Modern Drama / 290 26 Greek Myths in Modern Drama: Paths of Transformation / 300 27 Victor Segalen and China: A Dialectic of Reality and Imagination / 311 Index of Names / 329 Subject Index / 333 foreword.fm Page vii Tuesday, March 20, 2001 1:36 PM Foreword Knowledge, Empathy, and Global Village: The Comparative Discourse of Eva Kushner W L A D I M I R K R Y S I N S K I Since the beginning of her university career as a scholar in French literature and as a comparatist, the author of The Living Prism has been committed to the multicultural and multicontextual approach to liter- ature. For Eva Kushner the comparative ethos has always implied understanding through comparison. Understanding what? Worlds and literatures, subjective discourses and collective memories, values, struc- tures and ideas, works and movements, writers in their social, bio- graphical, and individual totality, cognitive passions, legacies, and history. If the didactic and scholarly practice of comparative literature places Canada today among a few avant-garde countries in which this disci- pline gave rise to a renewal of literary studies, it is thanks to Professor Kushner’s efforts. For a long time Professor Kushner has been recog- nized as an internationally authoritative scholar, one of the most com- mitted to the study of literature from an international perspective. As the president of the International Association of Comparative Litera- ture she has organized numerous symposia, encounters, publications, and debates. She has successfully contributed to the continuous ex- change of ideas between East and West. The Living Prism is a collection of selected essays that have been either previously published or presented as lectures or papers. The rationale of this selection is fully justified. In fact it constitutes a set of critical relevant themes, including the role and the method of compar- ative literature in a new social, economic, and ideological configura- tion known by the name of “global village”; the functional relationship foreword.fm Page viii Tuesday, March 20, 2001 1:36 PM viii Wladimir Krysinski between history and comparative literature, and the importance of tra- dition and of the various legacies grounding the humanistic vision of literary and cultural studies that is currently being re-elaborated. Fi- nally, a special section of the volume is dedicated to Northop Frye, seen as a critic whose work helps us better to understand and articulate such problems as intercultural dialogue, historicity, and the sociology of literature. What strikes one in The Living Prism is its wide critical perspective and constant attempt to redefine the status of comparative literature in our “postmodern” era. This search for redefinition crosses cultural and dialogical perspectives. Comparative literature is recognized as a dynamic and open discipline. No matter how complex the matter un- der scrutiny, comparative literature as viewed by Eva Kushner is in fact a “prismatically living” observation tower committed to the dialogue between various albeit adverse partners. Thus comparative literature, to which Eva Kushner attributes great methodological and epistemo- logical flexibility, is an open field of dialogical scrutiny. It is also an apt method to overcome the entropic Babelian state of affairs posed by the multiplicity of understandings and interpretations of literature and its related domains. Eva Kushner has always been a committed yet objective observer of the Canadian and global comparative scene. She scrutinizes all meth- odological fluctuations and all internal or external developments of comparative approaches to literature with passion and empathy. Throughout this book the reader will recognize a compelling media- tion at work between “time lost” and “time regained.” This formula- tion ref ers in a wider sense to the relationships between so-called “effective history” (Wirkungsgeschichte in terms of Gadamer), which de- termines any historicity as a valid and semiotically pregnant vantage- point, and forgotten structures, that is, those excluded from the his- toric process since they had no specifically important effects. The author of The Living Prism bridges the various critical perspec- tives and voices of the modern and postmodern literary scene. The di- versity of the book is a challenge to any comparatist who might have persisted in understanding literature through influences, sources, and bilateral contacts. The comparative discourse of Eva Kushner demon- strates how our epoch is an extraordinary occasion to promote a new reciprocal understanding among nations through an attentive, com- paratively oriented dialogue. The catalogue of comparative material in this book is wide-ranging and diversified. What seems obvious, however, is an oscillation between certain critical themes and certain critical perspectives. In that sense Eva Kushner’s critical discourse rests on at least four guiding princi- foreword.fm Page ix Tuesday, March 20, 2001 1:36 PM ix Foreword ples, or central avenues of ref lexive scrutiny: 1) the principle of historic knowledge and, correlatively, 2) the principle of describing the process of individualization in the Western world (Petrarch, Montaigne, Erasmus); 3) the principle of literary and cultural tradi- tion understood as a system of values that have been promoted in the past and are to be promoted in the present (the historicity of literature recognized as an epistemological value, as intercultural dialogue, and myth as an interpretative matrix of literature and drama); and 4) the principle of the cognitive and functional immediacy of a hic and nunc comparative literature that would be sufficiently open to the changing world. Thus, abiding by these four principles, the critic explains her pan- oramic presentation of many complicated and significant questions not only of modern hermeneutics but also of comparative literature. The author presupposes the functional intricacy of various views and creations that correlatively express and account for the complexity of what she purposefully names the “living prism,” that is, comparative vi- sion and metacritical perspectives, which are necessary cognitive tools for performing critical work relevant enough to constitute compara- tive literature as a discipline committed to acting in the global village. The global village is therefore a timely metaphor of the planetary space where communication and information brought about a sort of cosmopolitan spiritual habitat. In such a space human beings conse- quently act as emitters and receivers, but they also have at their dis- posal a plethora of tools to convey specific, artistic messages of their identity. The essay “Literature in the Global Village” is a sort of manifesto for and of postmodern comparative literature. Here, Eva Kushner con- vincingly and relevantly affirms a new role for comparative literature. It has all the necessary intellectual power to become a mediator be- tween specific cultural and literary values and a global, perhaps imagi- nary (at any rate, virtual) but necessary cosmological audience. Thus, such a comparative literature has to voice and corroborate messages of the local, of the identitary, and of the universal. This fully active and humanistic function of comparative literature Kushner designates as follows: Faced with an explosion of cultural aspirations throughout the world, compar- ative literature needs to assume forcefully that the universal is already (and has been all along, in often unanalysed ways) at work in the literatures; that we are right in the middle of the global village, and that not only do all literatures al- ready belong – that has long been the assumption of the allied field called world literature – but none of them intrinsically possesses the supreme key to a foreword.fm Page x Tuesday, March 20, 2001 1:36 PM x Wladimir Krysinski hierarchy of formal or ideational values entitling them to discriminate in au- thoritative ways among or within themselves and among cultures. If this affirmation recognizes not merely an obvious but also a neces- sary state of affairs, one can legitimately interrogate various aspects of the comparative method and of its pregnant results within the limits of The Living Prism. Therefore: What gets compared? Is it possible to com- pare subjective worlds and ideological structures? Is comparison a valu- able critical procedure in order to achieve knowledge? How global is a global village? Do time and space belong to the comparative method necessarily or contingently? Does a literary or artistic event emerge in a brief lapse of time, called by the French historian Fernand Braudel brève durée, whereas literary structures reach their maturity only within a long lapse of time, in Braudel’s terms within a longue durée? How does the historic literary process fulfil itself, and how does it establish a his- torical continuity between structures? Is there something like compar- ative understanding at the basis of comparative literature? How do the identitary, the local, the national, and the universal coincide in a given critical perspective? These are among the multiple questions one is tempted to put to the author of these essays. As a matter of fact, by choosing this selec- tion of her various critical studies, Eva Kushner exposes herself to this sort of interrogation. Since The Living Prism is a vertical mosaic of ideas and analyses, each chapter conveys functional elements in order to an- swer all these questions exhaustively. Comparative literature as discipline has always and proverbially, as it were, suffered an identity crisis both institutional and epistemological. At stake were its object and its method. The affirmation of universality as one of the most fundamental critical f ields for comparative litera- ture seems to imply nowadays an efficient relativization if not a dis- memberment of Eurocentrism. In the global village all citizens are equal. All values must be shared. During the last thirty years or so, what is still being called compara- tive literature has moved in various directions in order to integrate within itself new ideas, methods, and approaches towards literature. We have undoubtedly witnessed a transformation of comparative liter- ature. It has assimilated such critical visions as postcolonialsm, gender studies, cultural studies, gay studies, history, and metahistory. At a moment when comparative literature seems to have opened it- self up to some new ways of dealing with literature, Eva Kushner’s es- says constitute a reminder of some fundamental elements, critical and historic, formal and thematic, that today must be taken into account if one is to rethink comparative literature cognitively.