The Scale of World Literature

Distance has long been a thorny issue for comparative literature. Whether one tries to explicate a foreign text, map a course of influence, or describe an elusive aesthetic, there is the problem of crossing considerable divides without yielding to the fallacy of decisive leaps. And yet, a condition conducive to methodological malaise found consolation in a fixed literary geography that justified comparison, in geniously, with the very fact of incommensurability. Impossible distances beg to be crossed precisely because they cannot be. And for crossings to be attempted, each book, each author, each device?each canon, na tion, or interpretive community?would assume its rightful place. While comparative literature, it was said, would occupy the space-in-between conventional places. And so, by a euphoric celebration of displacement, the comparative method became unquestionably subversive: in practice it exacted "shock value,"1 institutionally it was a "thorn in the side,"2 in ideological wars it proffered a "symbolic weapon."3 But really, may that not be overstating the case? I want to consider why the comparative method, in the first instance, made a cartographic claim to scale. Why dedicate a discipline to the task of charting zones, paths, and crossroads obscured by strict adherence to "national traditions"?when logically, comparison depends for its existence on the entrenchment of nation based geography? Comparison's cartographic commitment (and its poetics of distance) is worth examining not only as a logical paradox, but as a possible key to the recent disciplinary revival of the concept "world literature"?which I take to be the latest, most pronounced attempt to diffuse the teleological thrust of "literary history" with a radically synchronie outlook. With this slide from "literary history" to "world literature" the literary discipline makes a belated entry into the globalization debates,4 a time-honored, social-scientific inquiry into the time and place of uneven development.