HOME|Social Sciences Information|Projects & Abstracts|Humanistic Sciences|Social Sciences中文版
Home >>

Chinese-Western Comparative Literature in Post-Theory Age

From:社科报2022-6-13 20:19

In the Comparative Literature in China (No. 1, 2022), Zhang Longxi puts forward that the fundamental question for any effort at comparative literature is what is the ground for comparison. In the 19th century, comparative literature was based on factual relations and aimed at establishing relations or influences between authors and their works through a positivistic approach. As it tended to be made use of by narrow-minded nationalists, such a methodology of positivism became passé and was largely discarded by the scholarly community in the postwar world. The rise of literary theory provided the foundation for comparison of literary works without factual relations and thus made it possible to engage in Chinese-Western comparative literature. The overdevelopment of literary theory, however, moved increasingly away from literature and produced discontent among many literary scholars, and we are now in an age of post-theory. Under such circumstances, how to re-establish the grounds for Chinese-Western comparative literature with the support of textual evidence, and how to further develop Chinese-Western comparative literature and cross-cultural studies — these are important questions for us to consider at the present.