David Damrosch - Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age

1. vii
2. ix

1. . Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum
2. . Lin Yutang with Lin Tai-yi demonstrating his typewriter
3. . Great Moments in Lit Crit, Voice Literary Supplement, 1988
4. . Paul de Man, before and after 1987
5. . Ren tiemble, letter to his mother, 1913
6. . Seminary Library and National and University Library, Ljubljana
7. . Bartolom de Las Casas and John Phillips, Tears of the Indians
8. . Canonicity as shown by citations in the MLA Bibliography
9. . Final Fantasy Gilgamesh action figure
10. . Electronic Arts edition of Dantes Inferno
11. . EK Theater Performance of Grand Theft Ovid
12. . Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Screenshot from Cunnilingus in North Korea
13. . World literature in the empyrean and down to earth
14. . Dai Dudu, Li Tiezi, and Zhang An, Discussing the Divine Comedy with Dante

During the dozen years that this book has been percolating, I have amassed debts whose full acknowledgment would substantially increase the books size. I have tried out these ideas in lectures in some forty countries and have gotten many helpful suggestions in the process. Here I might mention several sets of talks that extended the discussion beyond a single session, with warm thanks to Suradech Chotiudompant at Chulalongkorn University, Chen Yongguo at Tsinghua, Mads Rosendahl Thomsen and Christian Dahl at Aarhus and the University of Copenhagen, Pter Davidhzi at Etvs Lornd and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Mitsuyoshi Numano at the University of Tokyo, and Gisle Sapiro at the cole des Hautes tudes en Sciences Sociales. Perhaps these names can stand for another two hundred.

Versions of sections of these chapters first appeared in the Saussy and Heise reports for the American Comparative Literature Association, the ADE Bulletin, the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, Bermann and Porters A Companion to Translation Studies, The Comparatist, Comparative Critical Studies, Comparative Literature Studies, European Review, Moser and Simoniss Figuren des Globalen, MLQ, Modern Philology, Neohelicon, Hayot and Walkowitzs A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism, PMLA, The Routledge Companion to World Literature, and Translation Studies.

The following chapters owe much to conversations with my students, with participants and colleagues at the annual sessions of the Institute for World Literature, and during the meetings of the ACLA. Martin Puchner generously read and commented on the full manuscript, as did Delia Ungureanu, who also recommended the Chinese painting Discussing the Divine Comedy with Dante as the books cover image. I am grateful for sometimes very lively conversations with Emily Apter, Susan Bassnett, Sandra Bermann, Homi Bhabha, the late and deeply lamented Svetlana Boym, Pheng Cheah, Amanda Claybaugh, my brother Leo Damrosch, Wiebke Denecke, Theo Dhaen, John Hamilton, Eric Hayot, Ursula Heise, Djelal Kadir, Franco Moretti, Stephen Owen, Orhan Pamuk, Katharina Piechocki, Sheldon Pollock, Bruce Robbins, Haun Saussy, Gayatri Spivak, Galin Tihanov, Lawrence Venuti, Rebecca Walkowitz, Saul Zaritt, and Zhang Longxi. I am grateful as well to Young-hae Chang and Marc Voge, to Edward Kim, and to Samuel Whitehead for their kind permission to use their images. The saintly patience and sound advice of my editor Anne Savarese have kept this book on track, and Daniel Simons judicious copyediting has improved the resulting manuscript throughout. My wife, Lori Fisler Damrosch, has been stalwart in her loving support throughout the years.

This book would not exist without the generosity of my teachers in college and graduate school. I have previously dedicated a book to Michael Holquist; here I will mention four other names among many, each representing a different kind of debt. As an assistant professor with many set responsibilities, Margaret Ferguson made time to do a tutorial on Homer, Virgil, and Milton. Peter Brookss classes offered a compelling blend of theoretical sophistication and close reading, in open-ended but still focused seminar discussions. W. Kelly Simpson made learning Middle Egyptian a chance to encounter a very distant culture from multiple perspectives, from art and archaeology to political history to exceptionally close readings, down to the level of individual hieroglyphs and the likely provenance of a scribes handwriting. Finally, Nils Alstrup Dahl was a living link to the Enlightenment tradition of biblical scholarship, in which philology and hermeneutics went hand in hand. His characteristic expression of satisfaction with a piece of evidence was Its clear, while an ill-founded observation would be met with its opposite: Well thats not so clear. Clarity has been a prime virtue for me ever since.

It seems appropriate that these very different teachers, incomparable in both senses of the word, should have made me a comparatist.

Comparing the Literatures