Welcome to this last lecture in this short series, and thanks again for dealing with the day change.
There are two classes coming up, Russian formalism and Czech structuralism.
Next week we are going back to Tuesdays, unless improbably, yet another thing occurs which causes a day change.
But it's meant to be on Tuesday at 12:00, unless you hear otherwise in seminar room B and after that reading micro texts that will be in week six,
largely prose, my critics and very micro indeed. Some of them.
I promised those of you who were here last week that this was going to constitute a
philosophical approach to comparative literature rather than a more exemplary one.
So here it comes. I want to talk about a practise that's involved in all reading, yet has hardly ever been the subject.
The explicit subject of literary theory comparison in the broadest sense of the term is the literary process,
which enables us to perceive similarity and difference.
Smells and ideas cannot be distinguished as such without perceiving their similarities and
differences to other smells and ideas will cannot be exercised without comparing options.
To choose comes from gusto and involves Sainsbury's would have us do tasting the difference.
A critic describes a literary work as, for example,
mimetic only after comparing it with both life and other literary works, which are perhaps less mimetic.
Matthew Arnold, who coined the term comparative literature as a translation of the French literature Campari,
claimed in his inaugural lecture at Oxford in 1857 that no single event,
no single literature is adequately comprehended except in relation to other events, to other literature.
In our own century, and I do mean this one, Richard Rorty wrote,
Good criticism is a matter of bouncing some of the books you have read off the rest of the books you have read.
He might have added that good reading of criticism involves bouncing the criticism you are reading off the rest of the criticism you have read,
listening to lectures, of course, likewise. Yet this, as I've just been outlining, it is not a comparison in the strict sense of the term.
Look at the first quotation on your handouts.
This, by the way, is going to be the only time in this lecture that I'm actually directing you to your handouts.
Most of the rest of the quotations won't even appear in the lecture and are there just to create atmosphere,
providing aid to contemplation and keep you occupied if you get bored.
This the first point is my own definition of comparison in the strict sense of the term,
which involves paying a similar quantity and quality of attention to a discrete number of
objects in order to determine their similarities and differences with regard to possession,
lack of possession or degree of possession of a particular quality.
A minority of literary criticism practised is of this kind.
Both of the Internet, national into linguistic, into artistic kind,
which goes under the banner of comparative literature and of the criticism which doesn't the minority may be slightly larger in the first case,
but it is still a minority. A comparison of George Eliot with George saw on a given topic may have the interest,
but also the complication of involving linguistic and cultural variables which are not directly connected to what ever topic it is.
You are comparing them on a comparison of George Eliot with Elizabeth Gaskell,
which involves far fewer circumstantial variables, may therefore be more cleanly comparative and therefore more comparative.
But only relatively any two writers have differences of circumstance,
and any comparison has to be performed against a ground, a background which is to some degree abstract.
But how often does one do symmetric comparison after what I've been talking about, asymmetric comparison,
paying a similar degree of attention to and quality of attention, asymmetric comparison,
which involves paying a different quantity or quality of attention to to compare grander things which are compared,
has strong similarities with a lot of criticism, which isn't usually considered comparative.
For example, if you study the influence of big oil, the 70s is El Ingenuously et al Gore,
Don Quixote de la Mancha on Nikos Kazantzakis Vios capability to Aleksi Sorba, The Life and Adventures of Alexis Sorba.
That kind of study,
that kind of influence study is actually structurally most resembles studies which aren't normally considered comparison comparative.
For example, the representation of attitudes towards sex in rural 1930s Greece in the latter novel,
because in both cases you're looking for features of one complex object,
a novel in the first case, Don Quixote, or a social phenomenon, an aspect of the culture in the other in a different work of literature.
So the discussion of any topic in literature involves a comparison of the form.
Looking for X in Y and the X and Y study is the template for much literary criticism,
very little of what is written on comparative literature, therefore concerns comparison.
The position of comparison as a topic in philosophy is also undeservedly obscure.
No English language reference book of philosophy.
The multivolume encyclopaedias, the one volume companions of which I'm aware has an entry for the term comparison,
despite the fact that comparison is as important a method to philosophy as it is to literary criticism.
And also it is in itself fraught with philosophical implications.
Therefore, all literary criticism is comparative in the broad sense.
Most literary criticism, including most that gets called comparative literature, isn't comparative in the strict sense.
Now, if any of you have done any reading on the subject comparative literature,
you will know that it is described with almost reassuring regularity as ANX genic
makes you feel that English is a discipline which is relatively sure of itself.
Look out for whether complet whenever you come across, it gets capital letters.
There's no agreement on this articles coming out at the moment.
Sometimes there is even veering between complet with capital Seasonale and small Seasonale within the same article.
This anxiety about what comparative literature is is related to the fact that it can't be easily defined by either method or matter.
In the 1970s, Robert Clemens commented that comparative literature sometimes features in university curricula,
but very few people know what they mean by the term. In 2006, Robert, when Injia claimed that nothing is written or published in comparative,
those words italicised now the problem of defining the subject by method.
I've already suggested most of what's done under its remit isn't strictly comparative.
Therefore, comparative literature, world literature and general literature.
And if any of you are from or have any familiarity with the states, you'll know that these terms are much more common.
They're world literature, general literature courses. They're often imprecisely distinguished from each other as opposed.
Literatura give my literature to literature,
General and Literatura whenever or authors all imprecisely distinguished from the equivalents of comparative literature in those languages.
The question then arises of whether comparative literature should not simply become the study of literature.
Proponents of departments of literature include Venezuela and Austin Warren,
who in the 1940s argued against the idea of national literature's, quote, There's just literature.
Fourteen years later, well, I wish that we could simply speak of the study of literature and that there were,
as Albir thiebaud day proposed professors of literature, just as they were professors of philosophy and of history.
Twenty six, Jonathan Colores argued that the turn to culture, cultural specificity, in other words,
along what might be national lines makes sense for national literature departments.
The division of literature by national or linguistic boundaries was always rather dubious,
but such divisions as these form a reasonable way of studying culture.
This would leave comparative literature with the distinct role of studying literature as the site of study of literature.
In general, comparative literature would form a home for poetics.
Objections to such plans come from those who consider that literature should always be
related to studied in relation to culture in a broader sense and to other art forms,
some consider, in fact, that the subject of comparative literature should not concern literature alone.
It should be the place where the relationship of literature to the visual arts and the sonic arts, for example, are studied.
It's also objected that the so-called general study of literature rarely fulfils that remit,
often in practise consisting of the study of European literature and its nearest relatives.
Well, I mean, you could easily get around that problem. If what you are studying is a European literature course,
then it should simply be called a European literature course, not general or world or comparative literature.
But I also see no problem at all in studying European literature.
They make sense together. Those national literatures, they were made for each other.
Both parts of the title comparative literature then imperfectly denote the subjects de facto remit.
So I would like at this point to make a proposal which cuts through the Gordian knot of many of the problems of definition I've just outlined.
If one were to conceive of academic departments as a city which is built up haphazardly from the Middle Ages,
then I am a zealous town planner proposing to raise the city to the ground and rebuild it on a grid plan.
These are perhaps not serious academic proposals. They are highly unlikely to be adopted,
but they will at least illustrate my conception of what comparative literature is so under of my plans, my grid plans.
Each university would have two types of structure to be called, for example, faculties and divisions.
The faculties would be named after disciplines or objects of studies which have a clearly correspondant discipline.
So, for example, his history of historiography, literature for literary criticism, biology,
biology and so forth, the divisions would correspond to categories of subject matter.
So you've got to conceive of squares. You've got the faculties, let's say, along the top divisions down the side.
So for the arts and humanities subjects, India, Russia, Britain might have their own divisions.
All students and all academics would be obliged to belong to at least one and rarely more than two faculties and divisions.
So, for example, I would belong to the literature faculty and probably the British and Russian divisions.
Someone working on Tolstoy's relationship to the artist rapine would belong to the faculties of literature and art and to the Russian division.
Someone else researching English common law would belong to the law faculty and the British division.
Such a warp and weft of discipline and subject matter would encourage both discipline, Arati and interdisciplinarity.
Literary theory would be taught in the faculty of literature using using examples from different languages,
thereby avoiding the current replication of a lot of theoretical teaching between, for example, the English faculty and modern foreign languages.
Someone currently belonging to a comparative literature department would simply belong to
one or more divisions and either the literature faculty alone or also to the history,
sociology, philosophy, theology, art or music faculty. The theory of literary comparison would be taught in the literature faculty.
The phrase comparative literature would be reserved to describe criticism, which in a fairly strict sense compares literary works with each other.
Those who simply, as Peter Brookes claimed, of himself as a graduate student are not comparing literature.
Just working in more than one language would consider themselves to be working in literature.
Those working in into artistic study would describe themselves as doing just that.
The benefits are endless. By the way, it means that somebody studying modern foreign languages would be able to choose whether what
they are interested in is linguistics or literature or the history of the country concerned.
So somebody who ultimately wants to become a historian of France can become a
member of the history faculty and the French division and do that from the outset.
I've already tried to define comparison as a verb, but a comparison is both an action and its outcome,
making a comparison can refer both to the process of comparing and to the description of this process and its result.
For example, if I say that a historian compares Hitler and Stalin, I can mean several things.
By that, I could mean that the historian is trying to discover the similarities and differences of those men,
or that he draws attention to such similarities and differences as he perceives them to have.
This is an important ambiguity between the performance and the results of comparison between the discovery of the results and their dissemination.
If you're making a comparison implicitly,
you are publicising it and therefore think the lack of a clear distinction in this case between empiricism and rhetoric.
Language is not necessarily necessary to do comparison,
but it is to its description in which it can prove limited in English, the language of comparison is peculiarly crude.
It tends to imply one of three positions which can be approximated to similarity, difference and neutrality.
One compares something and with or to something else and is neutral.
You compare cats and dogs with suggests an expectation of similarity and to suggests an expectation of difference.
Something is the same as something, but. But it is different to from or than it.
Apart from the fact that different two is more common in British English and different and different than is more
common in North American English to implies orientation towards the differing other from implies departure from it,
and then implies an alternative to and possible displacement of it.
The comparison should therefore compare and choose his or her words with care.
In contrast to to contrast contrast, to stand against,
to compare means to regard or represent as analogous or similar and intransitive to be of the same quality or value as,
for example, Jin compares with rum in alcohol content,
hence examination questions which of the kind that used to exist that begin compare and on the other hand, contrast.
Correspondingly, a compare, a somewhat archaic term now is an analogy equal or rival of something else.
Many terms for comparison stress like notes over difference to compare is to bring together parities for glycation makes life the same.
Suaveness makes a roughly equal, and Astrud Munier is a simile as well as a comparison, the ancient Greek parable from Padda plus a casting,
throwing or putzing is a placing side by side or an analogy in a parable, as in an allegory,
something is made to stand for something else on the basis of similarity.
Parabola was borrowed in the Latin parabola or comparison and in post classical Latin.
It is an allegory, proverb, discourse or speech and expansion of meaning over time, which acknowledges the importance of comparison to rhetoric.
The Latterman comparator also means to place together to couple to unite, to treat as equal.
By contrast, the modern Greek for the term comparison cleaner to judge together,
avoid the prejudgement of results, which pertains to the words both compare and contrast,
whereas the Latin instruction c p dot in practise often invites for contrast c.f. dot often more invites open minded comparison.
Of course, no two things are absolutely identical or absolutely different.
They attract comparative investigation because they are found to be a metaphor in Todorov sense of the term,
which is to say constituted by the tension of difference and resemblance, separateness and communication.
In other words, an initial comparison of them.
Which is necessary in order to decide whether to pursue the comparison, we'll have suggested that the comprendo are different,
which is an adjective used rhetorically to indicate that two things are more different than you had expected or more often that they are similar.
And what we mean by that adjective is more similar than we had expected.
The idea of an of an initial comparison preceding further comparison indicates
another ambiguity in the word which can refer not just to a method sorry,
a methodical process, but to the other examined impression which precedes and prompts it.
You decide to compare Beckett to Kafka in your essay because you have already compared them.
When comparing literary works originating in different places,
differences between them are one of the assumed bases and one of the ends of the investigation,
the background of divergence against which the similarities between them stand
out and then also the finer points which stand out against those similarities.
Description of difference in relation to an other is one aim of comparison,
but description of difference in relation to the self isn't the very impulse to compare
complex objects produces the attendant impulse to stabilise at least one of them,
rather than to pay attention to the instabilities and complexities of all of them simultaneously.
So when you do comparative work, you tend to simplify one or both objects to some extent,
because if you spend too long comparing one, then you've lost comparative sight of the other.
So that limits the degree of descriptive detail you can enter.
And of course, an infinite description of the complexities of one object is to render it non comparable.
In addition, the arts, unlike the sciences, are infrequently able to make use of quantitative units of comparison,
although they could do so more often than they do.
And the availability of Etext now and word searches allows for a lot more statistical analysis or much easier statistical analysis.
But insofar as we don't use numbers, we rely, as I say, on this crude vocabulary of identity,
opposition, equilibrium and comparatives rather crudely modified by intensifies and superlatives.
Most comparative cadences and literary study assert either identity or difference.
For example, both Waiting for Godot and Happy Days rely on repetition.
In contrast to Beckert, Pinter is persistently concerned with violence.
I haven't really made very fine discriminations there like X Y does so and so in contrast to X, Y does so-and-so.
But that's that's the common form of comparative statements. The vague term, relatively, is used to indicate a relatively small degree of difference.
The phrase is just as and it never is just as or more conscientiously rather as cover a range of of degrees and types of similarity,
whereas covers a range of differences. And the descriptions I'm making at the moment are no more precise than what I am describing or little more.
Or hardly more. Yet in inexplicitly comparative work,
the degree of descriptive detail obtained is crucial since it determines what's
described as a similarity and what's described as a difference in practise.
When you increase the level of descriptive detail, you often move from a similarity to a difference.
It's salutary, therefore, to be reminded of the flexibility of these terms,
similarity and difference which are so which are such heavily used tools of thought
and are supposed antonyms similarity is merely difference on a less detailed scale,
and the choice between them can be determined in the interests of rhetoric.
Indeed, comparisons have long been associated with not only rhetoric, but odious,
less odious of old being comparisons and of comparison is engendered is hatred.
Liftgate 14 30 in Shakespeare's works comparison is repeatedly characterised as quibbling, equivocation, gybing allusion and scoffing analogy.
But if it's done conscientiously,
one condition of a methodical comparison being considered worthy of pursuit is that the things you're concerned are in fact comparable.
Now, why on earth do we mean by that adjective? Comparability always involves a degree of similarity in the comprendo.
Of course, anything can be compared with anything else and comparable resembles similar and different in being a relative, not an absolute term.
The applicability of which rests on a comparison. The same, therefore,
is true of the term non comparable and in comparable charges of non-com probability rhetorically assert that lack of interest or tactless ness,
unfairness or some other wrong would be involved in pursuing a comparison.
These are statements of value.
The assertion that any one thing rather than a combination of objects is incomparable or beyond compare implies that the
qualities which it has in common with other things are trivial in comparison to its distinguishing characteristics,
and that if you nonetheless went ahead with the comparison, this would involve paying insufficient attention to those characteristics,
which would therefore render the comparison either trivial or invalid.
The assertion you can't compare Saligari to Mozart, of course, rests on a comparison,
and it implicitly argues that their similarities are unimportant compared to their differences,
and that to describe either would be at best uninteresting and at worst insulting to Mozart.
Similarly, Orsino tells Viola in Twelfth Night, make no compare between that love a woman can bear me and that I owe Olivia.
Sometimes people describe a work of art as incomparable, not just to express admiration for it,
but also to imply that it is in the nature of the work's excellence to determine the
mode in which it alone should be explored and which is by far the most valuable mode,
the only valid mode in which to explore it. That is also what's meant by claims of uniqueness.
The most extreme version of this argument is that the work's own terms are the only terms on which it can be understood.
The implication of this, which is rarely embraced, is that the work uses a private language in Bitcoin's sense and is therefore in incomprehensible.
Corporatists assert both comparability and comprehensibility and the two terms are intimately linked.
Peter Peter Sundy asserted that kind comsubpac Panopto unfertilised based,
does behoved files, foster kinstler auditing critical wall of a failing test as an invader.
No work of art declares that it is incomparable at most.
It is the artist or critic who claims that. But every work of art demands that it is not compared.
But this is clearly wrong, certain works of art clearly ask to be compared with others.
James Joyce's Ulysses and Derek Walcott's amorous to the Odyssey of Homer, for example,
one entity of which incomprehensibility, as well as in incompatibility is sometimes asserted is God.
This is a claim made by several kinds of theism.
The same compound assertion is made in order to express or advocate a sense of quazi religious or in relation to a non divine subject.
For example, since the mid 1960s to the Holocaust,
a bill was recently proposed to the Israeli parliament, which would outlaw comparisons to the Nazis.
Assertions of non ability, as applied to combinations of objects,
are often based on a sense that the way in which they're most likely to be compared will not generate valid.
That other interesting to term results.
Neither apples and oranges are proverbially asserted to be intrinsically incomparable, but they are asserted to be mutually non comparable,
presumably because there are similarities of size and shape generate the risk that they will be judged according to the same criteria,
and an orange would be unfairly criticised as being less crisp than an apple.
In this sense, the idiom can be contrasted with chalk and cheese, which is more of a contrast.
Haslett stated that comparisons are impertinent and lead only to the discovery of defects by making one thing,
the standard of another, which has no relation to it.
Similarities should therefore, of course, not be allowed to obscure the differences which affect comparability.
This is perhaps the sense behind the perfect rhyme in the roughly equivalent Serbian proverb Peridotite Bob IGB to compare grandmothers and toads.
The charge of incommensurable lity denies that a certain type of measure can be applied to all of the proposed comprendo.
For example, Spanish has an idiom which disparages Sumar Para's Common, adding pears and apples.
Of course, you anybody can count pieces of fruit,
but the specific category of pear or apple is the proverb implies of limited interest in the Russian idiom.
Strava need to apply. Smuts Newcome prohibits the comparison of the warm with the soft, since no single measure can be made of warmth and softness.
Finally, certain qualities are definitely perceived by different people.
The Hungarian have no idea how to pronounce this is LISICK is Professor Nork Taste's and Cmax suggests that the relative value of
different objects can't be absolutely decided if they're judged on qualities which are definitely felt by different individuals.
Rather, as two smacks in the face can't be compared if they're experienced by different people.
It's also the case that any comparison, therefore, has to be performed by one person,
non subjective qualities can be determined as belonging to objects by different people in a division of labour.
And then those findings can be compared by a third person making use of their descriptions.
But for a comparison to take place, it has to take place in one mind.
Relative unity of physical or conceptual place assists the equally important unity of time.
Systematic comparisons require a succession of mental movements between holes and parts in order
to select the comprendo to decide on which quality to compare them and to actually compare them.
But the end result of comparison is generated in an instant in which the qualities
of different objects are simultaneously present to the composer's mind.
I suggested that today comparison is a minority pursuit,
but it has played an important an important part in the development of criticism as a subject,
notably in the European tradition, there is a long tradition of comparing the Greeks to the Romans.
And then slightly later, from the early modern period,
the ancients to the Modern's comparison and criticism were connected more systematically in the later 19th century,
when literary studies, particularly on the continent, were modelled on the evolving scientific disciplines.
So little to Oveson Shaft was modelled on Nattu of Schaft, the study of Nature.
Specifically, comparative literature was modelled on certain other subjects which had comparison in their titles,
including comparative philology, comparative biology and comparative philosophy, science, of course, uses comparison.
It precedes inductively through comparison.
Experiments analyse a comparable in relation to an isolated variable and observed deviations from the second comparative or
control comparative philology developed by observing similarities in languages which had hitherto been assumed to be unconnected,
and then using historical information to explain the connexion or the reverse inducing historical hypotheses from the connexion.
The results of these comparisons were sometimes explained in the dimension of time, using a tree metaphor or a tree diagram,
indeed, tree shaped comparative ism has had considerable durability in literary study,
where it's tended either to point to similar social conditions, generating similar literary phenomena, or to posit direct influence between phenomena.
More recently, Franco Moratti, the Italian critic and theorist,
has described the history of British 19th century detective fiction in evolutionary terms,
and he shows the results of his comparisons of novels in tree diagrams which show the
convergence and divergence over time of different subgenres of detective fiction.
The study of influence, which has been a more strong and enduring vein of criticism than social comparison, is necessarily asymmetric.
We're back at looking at X and Y. Alexei Wesolowski, who founded the Department of World Literature at Moscow University in 1873,
stated at the beginning of his book, The Western Influence in New Russian Literature,
that the exchange of ideas, images, fables,
artistic forms between the tribes and people of the civilised world is one of the
most important things studied by the still young science of literary history.
In 1961, Henry Rimac criticised French criticism for its emphasis on influence studies rather than comparison, in the strictest sense,
arguing that purely comparative subjects constitute an inexhaustible reservoir hardly tapped by contemporary
scholars who seem to have forgotten that the name of our discipline is comparative literature,
not influential literature. Kulla argued that world literature courses that bring together the great books from around
the world seem to base comparability on a notion of excellence so that comparison,
rather than opening new possibilities for cultural value more often than not, restrict and totals it.
However, courses of world and general literature, in fact, don't necessarily assert the comparability of the works they studied.
They study. If anything, they may purport to make the principle to make this selection on the principle of non comparability.
In the phrase comparative literature, comparative is the attribute of literature,
yet it is almost never understood in this way because the semantic meaning of the phrase has drifted apart from the compositional meaning.
Exactly the same is true of English and literature and Nietzsche on the LITERATURA,
although not literature Campari in which the literature is the passive subject of comparison.
Compared literature, Clements notes that the equivalent East Asian terms are a compound essentially of two substantives
the Chinese pea chow when Hsueh and the Japanese Heacock born Bengochea and the Korean pig,
your mon hak consist of comparison plus literature.
The terms thus denote the scientific comparison of two or more literatures without the inclusion of adjectival modifiers.
Perhaps if we followed suit and just talked about literature comparison, we might eliminate a great deal of discussion.
On the other hand, well said.
There's little use in deploring the grammar of the term and to insist that it should be called the comparative study of literature.
Everybody understands the elliptical usage,
but I would argue that the phrase comparative literature does have a potential meaning which corresponds with its compositional sense.
That is, literature which invites the performance of internal comparison, or which, to put it another way, contains comparisons.
This is to use the noun comparison in a sense distinct from any in which I've already used it, a process and its result.
What I mean by a comparison of a kind that can be contained by a work is a quality or set of qualities
which can obviously or interestingly be compared with another quality or qualities in the same work.
And that work can't be properly understood without performing that act of comparison.
Waiting for Godot is comparative between its first and second halves in their presentation of parallel stories of two couples,
Daniel Deronda, which I discussed at some length last week, is comparative literature.
This might be the most useful and grammatically cogent application of that term.
A comparison of novels as comparative works of literature is a second-order comparison similar to the comparison of ratios.
Now the comparison of ratios has the benefit of avoiding or confessing the variable of context.
So, for example, to say Daniel's relationship to Gwendoline is the equivalent in Daniel Deronda of Birkins relationship to
Gerald in Women in Love is less problematic than claiming Daniel is like Birken or Gwendoline is like Gerald.
Of course, even internal literary comparisons involve differences of context and all
assertions of the similarities of two of the heroines of just that one novel.
Daniel Deronda Gwendoline and Al Carisi should be always contextualised by the two women's very different circumstances,
their different native countries and races and musical talents.
So even within one story in a novel, you need a similar along the lines of Gwendolyn is to her circumstances what our easy is to hers.
So any comparison of the components of complex objects is nearly always a comparison of ratios.
One is reminded that Rausseo is the etymological ancestor of reason.
Comparing the comparisons of two stories of two times and and potentially two countries makes this fact particularly clear.
Of course, the questions remain of the relationship of Daniel Deronda to women in love and of the realist to the modernist novel.
Gwendoline and Alcaraz in the same novel are comparable in a way in which Daniel and
Birken in two different novels aren't because they are parts of the same work of art.
In this sense, the two levels of comparison comparisons you do within works and between them should be importantly distinguished.
But I would say that is the crucial factor, not whether or not the two works of art are in fact of two different places.
And in any case, why should the difference of place trump the difference of time,
as it tends to do when using comparative literature, only to refer to difference of place and sometimes of language?
Most comparisons have one or both of two motives to compare the veranda to do the comparison
for its own sake and to explore the topic or topics on which they're being compared.
If you're really interested in the topic, then you'll choose the comprendo according to the topic,
and you won't necessarily compare them directly to each other.
So you can look at SEXON or for a and then section author B and they needn't be brought into direct comparison.
But complex comprendo, if you if you're basing your comparison on the desire simply to compare to objects or to authors,
you then have the problem that they generate an infinite number of qualities on which you could compare them.
So you can't simply say, I'm comparing this novel in that novel, you have to say I compare A and B with regard to C and D any.
Steiner posited an access from literal translation of texts through imitation to what he called into animation of texts within a national,
linguistic or broader cultural region. This entire animation is often what we're after.
When we do literary comparison, it can be observed in regard to particular topics or qualities on which to work, might be said to compare notes.
So, for example, to take Women in Love and Daniel Djuanda, you can interestingly compare those two novels with regard to the following topics.
Love, lust, married, life, double plotting, tragedy, comedy, art, politics, intellectual ism, cosmopolitanism, God,
children, Schopenhauer, death myths that misanthropy, satire, horses, railways, symbolism, kitsch amongst many others.
Complex topics of comparison generate fields of comparison.
What I mean by field is a nexus of subject matter and method methodologies within
which the works of literature are then compared on possession of similar qualities,
for example, or consideration of the ways in which these novels are realist or otherwise would require more precise
comparison of the possession or lack of possession of certain qualities which constitute realism in literature.
The concept of a topic of comparison can be replaced by any one of several metaphors,
each of which implies a slightly different method, sometimes you'll hear talk of an axis of comparison.
This implies a quality, according to two degree of possession, of which the comparable order can be placed on a single axis.
A fulcrum of comparison implies a symmetric comparison.
So the idea is that by performing comparison, you're magnifying the force of a second comparator through a lever which is resting on the system.
Comprehensiveness, that's the thing you're comparing them in relation to,
to lift the first object into clearer view, for example, to lift Frankenstein,
the novel into clearer view by implying that by applying the force of paradise lost through a lever resting on the fulcrum of the fall,
which is your Tatsumi comprehension, is the topic on which you are comparing them.
Comparisons of quantity, for example, amount of reference to God can to some extent be distinguished from comparisons of quality,
for example, the conception of God in two different works.
However, this distinction between quantity and quality, which is apparently a distinction of quality,
can also be analysed as one of quantity, as in fact a difference of degree.
Just as differences of degree can also be expressed as differences of kind.
Clearer is the distinction between comparisons which do and don't employ an external an external standard to the objects being compared.
For example, Oxford and Cambridge can be compared on their distance from a third point, which is London,
and they can then be placed on a single axis, which is that of distance in more complex comparisons.
However, the result is more ostensively. F.R. Leavis does a lot of comparative criticism.
He compares, for example, George Eliot in DH Lawrence on sex as follows.
The point may be made by saying they are not only equally unlike Maupassant in their attitudes towards sex, they are unlike in the same way,
which is like saying that Orkestar and Oxford and Bestor both lie roughly in the same direction and distance from London.
Masaaki, who in her book Sisters in Literature, compares the relationships of sisters in Eliot's Middlemarch,
Fosters Howards End and Lawrences women in love to those of the relations of Antigoni and is moeny in Sophocles is Antigoni.
She uses the analogy of musical variations on a theme now.
No conversion to a single axis is possible here, nor is it possible when you foster comparative ism by, for example, teaching a course on tragedy.
Jolliff, who did this, said that constant reference was made both to the governing idea of the course,
the idea of tragedy and to the substance and treatment of each of the plays compared to one another.
So the relations of vishna will be sad. The Cherry Orchard and Beckett's Happy Days to the third point, which is the idea of tragedy.
These results can't be placed on an axis, but both plays can be raised into view on the fulcrum of tragedy.
Or, to use a different metaphor, they can both be viewed simultaneously from the tragic highground.
On the other hand, comprendo can be studied in relation not to any external standard,
but to qualities which are generated only by their very comparison.
This can be illustrated by Anna Karenina, his reaction to her husband, Karenin, when she gets home from Moscow.
So she has just for the first time, met Vronsky. Now she has frequent contact with many men, but none has yet made an impression on her.
She meets Bronsky, he makes an impression. She then goes back to her husband in St. Petersburg.
Now, she does not then compare both Karenin and Vronsky in relation to any third man or indeed any ideal standard of man.
But she judges both men on possession of the quality attractiveness to Anna when the comparison is between Karenin and Bronsky.
Of course, this quality has as much reference to Anna as it has to those men and critics comparing literature.
Unlike women, comparing men should seek to exclude intrinsically personal reactions as far as possible.
However, comparisons of complex subjects inevitably generate qualities which are peculiar to that comparison.
In this sense, compared works of literature could be thought of as involved in a mutual process as suggested by the Russian verb.
A different verb comparison.
So nossiter to correspond with or compare oneself, which, unlike the other verb I mentioned, Sarraf needs exists only in the imperfective aspect.
And so it's a process, not a finite action. When see Booth classified the questions which can be asked of a text into those
which invites those to which it responds and those by which it is violated.
Ideally, comparatives to bring together works which are capable of conducting with each
other an exploratory conversation on a single topic which is worth overhearing.
This topic is not necessarily the one about which the individual works have most to say,
but it's necessary that the works compared find plenty about plenty to say about it once they start their discussion.
When I'm sorry, I'm running slightly gauche. You have to.
When comparison is insensitively performed, it veers to one of two problems.
Exaggerating similarity and exaggerating difference flew.
Alan does the first in his attempt to demonstrate the likeness of Macedon and Monmouth and Henry the Fifth.
This is meant to be said, I believe in a Welsh accent.
If you look at the maps of the world I want you shall find in the comparisons between Macedon and Monmouth that the situations look you is both alike.
There was a river in Macedon and there is, moreover, a river at Monmouth.
It is called the Y at Monmouth, but it is out of my brains. What is the name of the other river?
But it is all. It is all one to Zuleika's. My fingers is to my fingers and there is salmons in both that phrase.
Salmon's in both should stand as the warning against the exaggeration of similarity in comparison.
The significance of the significance of the results of Llewellyn's comparison is on his own terms.
Clear. The similarities between Macedon and Monmouth implies that their leaders are therefore similar,
and that means that his king represents Alexander the first.
So Alexander the Great. This would also mean that he has a legitimate claim to France.
There is a point to his comparison. Literary comparatives, by contrast, sometimes face the question about their efforts.
Cui bono. In whose good is this being done, it, given work resembles and and differs from another work in certain ways.
So what the corporatists can respond in one or both of two ways,
she can try to establish the reasons for those similarities and differences in terms of space or time or influence,
or she can try to point to the results significance.
The latter, which might be related to the reasons,
could lie in an improved understanding of those texts or of those genres or of their authors lives overseas countries, languages and cultural modes.
Literary comparisons worth the trouble of performing will therefore contrast to the hatter's riddle to Alice at the Tea Party in Wonderland.
Why is a Raven like a writing desk? Neither the Hatter nor the March have the slightest idea, solutions can be found and have been found,
Carroll himself suggested, when he was asked, because it can produce few notes, though these are very flat.
But these solutions do not individually or collectively indicate that ravens' and writing desks are,
in theodoros sense, metaphors that is constituted by the tension between similarities and difference.
Nor does the discovery of solutions to Carol's famous riddle involve much interpretive risk,
because the degree of validity and profundity of the results found is immediately obvious.
One factor which which influences the outcome of comparison is the number of comparable to the results of comparing to objects are likely to be,
or more likely to be conceivable of a single conceivable on a single axis of which they may involuntarily be perceived to mark out the opposite ends.
Modern English doesn't use superlatives and less. At least three comprendo are alluded to.
But that doesn't prevent the allusion when you're comparing two things that the thing which has more of a quality is most in possession of it.
And we see this a lot in Shakespeare's English Taming of the Shrew.
Not to bestow my youngest daughter before I have a husband for the elder.
There are only two daughters. Leavis exemplifies and embraces the exaggeration to which such comparison can give rise in literary criticism.
Quote, Lawrence sees what the needs are and understands their nature so much better than George Eliot in the comparison.
In fact, we have to judge the George Eliot doesn't understand them at all.
The addition of a third comprendo makes it more likely that the results will be conceived on a two dimensional field.
An English and a Russian novel may appear less strongly representative of England and Russia, if you throw in a German,
a Czech or an American novel with reference to the third language which used to
be required of anyone on a comparative literature in the United States source,
you wrote the third language like an uninvited guest points to the things that the two language pattern leaves out.
The apex of the triangle just determined is also the point from which a new angle opens up for measurement
flew and might have had greater difficulty in demonstrating that King Henry was a second Alexander.
Had he involved a third point of comparison.
Bernheimer, an American comparatives, celebrates comparison for revealing external presences within the work,
the voice of comparative literature, he says, is unholy.
And this very quality of dispossession, a kind of haunting by otherness, is this voice is great strength.
David Ferris goes further in celebrating comparisons which don't generate coherent results.
He says we compare what cannot be compared. Like any assertion of incompatibility, however, this is either a relative statement or untrue.
I noted at the beginning that that comparison is intrinsic to thought and to willed action.
Given this, I would argue that it's worth sharpening your skills at comparison and consciousness of comparisons,
attractions and dangers in the intellectually challenging but practically sheltered sphere.
That is literary criticism. Such comparative criticism cultivates sensitivity because comparison requires empirical openness
to the precise location of the centre of gravity between separateness and communication.
The term comparatively is related to relatively with relatively understood,
not just in relation to relativism that isn't a necessary component of comparative thought,
but to relationships, to the understanding of any phenomenon in its relevant contexts.
At a political, at a social, at a moral level. The willingness to compare one thing or oneself with with another or others undermines absolutism.
And it's an ethically sound aim of human interaction for individuals to respect their own
and each other's quiddity whilst reaching to find maximum common ground with others.
Moreover, ethical analysis can be assisted by comparative reference to moral benchmarks, far from inducing ethical relativism, their use forbids it,
which is why I would say that one can compare other events to the Holocaust and it is helpful to do so since comparison is involved in all thought.
Thought about comparison is necessarily self reflexive.
That's one reason why the use of comparison should form part of literary theory and why comparative literature courses as they currently exist,
although not in this university, can serve as a home for literary theory.
The difference of degree rather than kind between similar to similarity and difference,
the mind's tendency to look for equivalence and the limited amount of attention you can pay to
any objects which you compare applies to comparison in its broadest sense for much comparison,
in its narrow sense, is distinguished as much by degree as kind and is unconsciously performed in
everything from understanding linguistic difference to reading women in love.
In relation to all of the novels you can remember to choosing your lover.
Thinking about comparison gives a better sense of where art fits into life, how it relates to it and how it compares to it.
Thank you.