(Comparative) Theory of Literature: Against the World Literature of Time Without History
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.30827/tn.v6i1.26175Keywords:
Comparative Literature, Theory of Literature, World Literature, Franco Moretti, Roland Barthes, Jacques Rancière, Michel FoucaultAbstract
World literature has become the favourite object of study of Comparative Literature, which has been forced to revise some of its classical methodological assumptions in the face of the unprecedented modalities of the production and circulation of texts in the new global space. The article reviews how the assumption by the best-known theorists of world literature of the practices and tools of the social sciences has favoured the revitalisation of those historicist modalities of nineteenth-century comparatism that the various crises of comparative literature seemed to have dismissed from persuasive textualist arguments. In particular, it deals with Franco Moretti's analogy between literary comparatism and historical science. Against his arguments for the sociologisation of literary studies, this article not only suggests the appropriateness of taking up the pro-textualist arguments of earlier debates about comparatism, but argues, from a reading of the work of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Jacques Rancière, that it is in the historiographical operation and philosophy of history that comparatism can find its best tools for critical reading in the new global regime.
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