This Blog is an Assignment of paper no.208: Comparative Literature & Translation Studies. In this assignment I am dealing with the topic Defining Comparative Literature: Between Discipline and Method in Susan Bassnett.
Name: Khushi D. Makwana
Paper 208 : Comparative Literature & Translation Studies
Subject Code: 22415
Topic Name: Defining Comparative Literature: Between Discipline and Method in Susan Bassnett
Batch: M.A. Sem-4 (2024 -26)
Roll No: 09
Enrollment No: 5108240019
Email Address: khushimakwana639@gmail.com
Submitted to: Smt. S. B. Gardi, Department of English, M.K.B.U
Defining Comparative Literature: Between Discipline and Method in Susan Bassnett
Introduction
Comparative
literature has long occupied an uneasy position within the academic humanities,
situated between the certainty of national literary traditions and the
expansive ambiguity of world literature. At its core, the field raises a
deceptively simple question: what does it mean to read literature
comparatively? Susan Bassnett, one of the most influential voices in
translation studies and comparative poetics, engages this question with
characteristic intellectual rigour in her work Comparative Literature: A
Critical Introduction (1993). In this text, Bassnett does not merely survey the
discipline's history; she interrogates its foundational assumptions, challenges
its Eurocentric biases, and ultimately proposes a radical repositioning of
comparative literature in relation to translation studies. This assignment
examines Bassnett's argument about what comparative literature is, how she
distinguishes between its identity as a discipline and its function as a
method, and why her intervention remains significant in contemporary literary
scholarship.
I. Historical Formation of Comparative
Literature as a Discipline
To
understand Bassnett's critique, it is essential to trace the disciplinary
formation of comparative literature itself. The field emerged prominently in
the nineteenth century, shaped by Romantic nationalism and the growing interest
in mapping linguistic and cultural affinities across European traditions. René
Wellek and Austin Warren, whose Theory of Literature (1949) served as a
foundational reference for decades, defined the literary work as an object with
a specific ontological status, distinct from its historical and biographical
context. The comparative impulse, in this tradition, was to identify universal
aesthetic values transcending national boundaries.
However,
as Bassnett observes, this universalism was largely illusory. The so-called
universals of comparative literature were derived from a narrow selection of
Western European texts, predominantly those written in French, German, English,
and Italian. The discipline's prestige was built upon the exclusion of
non-European literary traditions, a point that postcolonial critics would later
develop at length. For Bassnett, the discipline's origins are therefore
inseparable from a particular geopolitical arrangement of literary value, one
in which European languages served as the default carriers of literary meaning
(Bassnett 11–17).
The
American school of comparative literature, crystallised in the reports of the
American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), sought to expand the
field's methodological reach through a turn to theory in the 1970s and 1980s.
Yet even this expansion, Bassnett suggests, did not fundamentally disturb the
discipline's hierarchical assumptions about language and culture. The
comparatist remained, in practice, someone trained in several European
languages, reading canonical texts through the lens of structuralism,
deconstruction, or psychoanalytic theory. Translation, paradoxically, was often
treated as a secondary activity, a vehicle for accessing texts rather than a
field of inquiry in its own right.
II. Comparative Literature as Method: A
Different Proposition
Bassnett's
most provocative intervention in Comparative Literature: A Critical
Introduction involves her distinction between the field as an institutionalised
discipline and comparative reading as a method or practice. She argues that the
disciplinary form of comparative literature, with its professional structures,
curriculum requirements, and canonical hierarchies, is in many ways an obstacle
to genuine comparative inquiry. The discipline, as it has been
institutionalised in universities, tends to replicate the exclusions and
hierarchies it ostensibly seeks to transcend.
As a
method, however, comparative literature holds considerable promise. Reading
across languages, traditions, and periods can illuminate how literary forms
migrate, mutate, and accrue new meanings in different cultural contexts. The
method of comparison does not require the student to privilege one national
tradition over another, nor does it necessitate the marginalisation of
translation. In fact, Bassnett argues that translation is not merely a
practical necessity for comparative literature but is constitutive of it.
Without translation, no genuine cross-cultural comparison is possible; the
comparatist who refuses to take translation seriously is, in effect, refusing
the very condition of possibility of their discipline (Bassnett 6–10).
This
distinction between discipline and method is not simply academic hairsplitting.
It has real consequences for what kinds of texts are studied, what kinds of
questions are asked, and who gets to participate in the comparative enterprise.
If comparative literature is understood solely as a discipline requiring mastery
of several European languages, it will necessarily remain an elite, Eurocentric
field. If it is understood as a method a set of reading practices that can be
applied across any textual tradition its democratising potential becomes
apparent.
III. Bassnett's Critique of Eurocentrism
and the Canon
One of
the most compelling dimensions of Bassnett's argument is her sustained critique
of the Eurocentric assumptions embedded in the comparative literature
tradition. She draws attention to the way in which the European literary canon
has functioned not as a neutral repository of great works but as a mechanism
for reproducing cultural hegemony. The texts deemed worthy of comparison were
those produced in Western Europe; the literatures of Asia, Africa, and the
Americas were either ignored entirely or treated as curiosities to be measured
against European norms.
Bassnett
situates this critique within the broader context of postcolonial theory,
engaging with the work of scholars such as Edward Said, whose Orientalism
(1978) had exposed the ideological underpinnings of Western representations of
the East. She also draws on the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who had
argued powerfully for the inclusion of non-Western literatures in the
comparative curriculum, not as exotic additions but as constitutive parts of a
genuinely global literary history (Spivak 312–16). For Bassnett, these
interventions are not peripheral to comparative literature; they are central to
any serious reconsideration of the field's disciplinary foundations.
Bassnett
also engages with feminist literary criticism, noting that the comparative
canon has been shaped not only by Eurocentrism but also by androcentrism. Women
writers have been systematically excluded from or marginalised within the
comparative tradition, and their works have been less likely to be translated
and therefore less accessible to comparative analysis. This intersection of
gender and language politics further complicates the idea that comparative
literature has ever operated as a neutral or purely aesthetic enterprise.
IV. Translation Studies and the
Repositioning of Comparative Literature
Perhaps
the most radical aspect of Bassnett's intervention is her proposal that
comparative literature and translation studies should effectively exchange
places in the academic hierarchy. In the traditional formulation, translation
studies was a subdiscipline of comparative literature, concerned with the
practical and theoretical dimensions of moving texts between languages.
Bassnett inverts this relationship, arguing that translation studies should be
understood as the primary discipline, with comparative literature functioning
as one of its branches (Bassnett 161).
This
inversion is not merely rhetorical. It reflects a substantive argument about
the conditions under which literary comparison actually takes place. The vast
majority of comparative literary work is conducted, at least in part, through
translations. The comparatist who claims to read Homer alongside Virgil, or
Goethe alongside Pushkin, is almost certainly reading at least one of these
authors in translation. To ignore the translated status of texts is to ignore a
fundamental dimension of their meaning and reception. Translation is not a
transparent window onto an original text; it is itself a creative and
interpretive act, shaped by the translator's historical moment, cultural
assumptions, and aesthetic choices.
Bassnett
draws here on the theoretical framework developed by Lawrence Venuti in his
work on the translator's invisibility. Venuti argued that dominant translation
practices in the Anglophone world have tended to domesticate foreign texts,
smoothing over their cultural difference in the service of a fluent, readable
English prose (Venuti 1–34). This domestication serves ideological functions,
reinforcing the sense that English is a universal literary language capable of
absorbing and neutralising difference. For Bassnett, the comparatist who is
unaware of these dynamics is not simply ignorant of translation theory; they
are reproducing the cultural politics of invisibility that Venuti critiques.
V. Implications for Contemporary
Literary Study
Bassnett's
arguments in Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction have considerable
implications for the way literary study is organised and practised today. The
debates she initiated in 1993 have only intensified in the intervening decades,
as the globalisation of culture has made the question of how to read across
linguistic and cultural difference ever more pressing. The emergence of world
literature as a field, associated with scholars such as David Damrosch and
Pascale Casanova, has in many ways extended and complicated the trajectory
Bassnett charted.
Damrosch's
influential definition of world literature as literature that gains in
translation offers a partial vindication of Bassnett's insistence on the
centrality of translation to comparative study (Damrosch 281). However, as
scholars such as Emily Apter have pointed out, the world literature paradigm
risks reproducing a new form of universalism, one in which certain texts
circulate globally while others remain confined to local or regional
readerships (Apter 3–7). The question of which texts get translated, by whom,
for what markets, and with what ideological consequences remains as urgent as
ever.
Bassnett's
framework also speaks to the ongoing debates about the place of English in
global literary culture. As English has consolidated its position as the
dominant language of international intellectual exchange, the asymmetries of
the global translation market have become more pronounced. Texts are translated
from English into other languages in far smaller numbers than texts are
translated into English, creating what some scholars have called a translation
deficit that distorts comparative literary analysis. Bassnett's insistence that
translation is a political as well as a literary act is therefore not merely of
historical interest; it is directly relevant to the conditions under which
comparative literature is practised today.
Conclusion
Susan
Bassnett's Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction remains one of the
most searching and productive contributions to debates about the nature and
purpose of comparative literary study. By distinguishing between comparative
literature as an institutionalised discipline and comparative reading as a
flexible, self-reflexive method, Bassnett opens up the possibility of a more
inclusive and politically aware literary scholarship. Her insistence on the
centrality of translation, her critique of Eurocentrism and androcentrism, and
her radical proposal to invert the traditional hierarchy between comparative
literature and translation studies together constitute a genuinely
transformative intervention.
The
significance of Bassnett's work lies not only in its theoretical arguments but
in its practical implications. If comparative literature is to fulfil its
promise as a field that reads across differences of language, culture, gender,
and geography, it must begin by acknowledging the conditions, including the
mediating role of translation, under which comparison actually takes place.
Bassnett's challenge to the discipline is, ultimately, a challenge to its
practitioners: to read more carefully, more self-critically, and with a more
acute awareness of the power relations that shape every act of literary
comparison.
Works Cited
Academia.edu,www.academia.edu/15382353/Review_of_Emily_Apter_Against_World_Literature_On_the_Poitics_of_Untranslatability
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. “The Politics of Translation.” Outside in the Teaching Machine, Routledge, 1993, pp. 179–200.pierre-legrand.com/16spivak.pdf
Venuti, Lawrence Venuti. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. Routledge, 1995.
files.blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/wp-content/blogs.dir/3506/files/2014/09/Venuti-on-Translation.pdf
Wellek, René Wellek, and Austin Warren. Theory of Literature. Harcourt, Brace, 1949.
archive.org/details/theoryofliteratu00inwell