Kulttuuri-imperialismia vastaan

komparatismi maailmankirjallisuuden tutkimuksena

• Liisa Steinby Turun yliopisto

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30665/av.74959

Abstrakti

Against Cultural Imperialism: Comparative Literature as Research on World Literature

In contrast to what is commonly thought, modern, historical literary studies were not originally restricted to a national – even less, nationalist – perspective, but already in Johann Gottfried Herder and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe we find the idea of a world community of literatures. Nevertheless, in the course of the nineteenth century literary studies narrowed to the study of literature in national frames. This approach was contested only after WWII, when some seminal works, such as those of Erich Auerbach and Ernst Robert Curtius, established the unity of European literature. In the end-of-the-twentieth-century discussion concerning the globalisation of culture, the Eurocentrism of comparative literature was criticized and a study of world literature in the broad sense of the word called for. However, the approaches emphasizing globalisation, (post)colonialism, multiculturalism, marginalization etc. are themselves criticized for a cultural imperialism because of their way of imposing theoretical concepts on the subject of study. The question of how to face world literature as a whole is given different answers, of which Franco Moretti’s and David Damrosch’ are here briefly discussed. At the end of the article, an approach is proposed which stresses the necessity of developing theoretical concepts in close contact with the subject of study. The synthetic view on the subject enabled by such concepts results however in a merely elliptic presentation of the whole.