UNIVERSITÉ ALASSANE OUATTARA

UFR : Communication, Milieu et Société

Département d’Anglais

SYLLABUS

INITIATION TO COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

ANNÉE UNIVERSITAIRE 2019 / 2020

1-Cours

Intitulé : Initiation to Comparative Literature

Année : 2020-2021
Niveau/Spécialité : Licence 3 Tronc commun
2- Enseignant
Nom et prénoms : M. Vamara KONÉ
Grade : Maître de Conférences
Courriel :[email protected] ; [email protected]
Téléphone :(+225) 0505313380 (+225 01960529)
3-Plan du cours
Introduction
Section 1 : Defining Comparative Literature
Section 2 : The Birth of the discipline : Foundational works
Section 3 : Comparatist investigation
Section 4 : Comparative literature and Comparison
Section 5 : Method of activity and types exercises
Conclusion
4- Résumé du cours
This course, which is an introduction to comparative literature in the third year of
the Bachelor's program, is designed to train students in the theories and practices
of comparative literature. It presents the discipline, starting with its definitions, its
history, its evolution in time and space, its fundamental paradigms and its
practices.
5- Objectifs du cours (objectif général, objectifs spécifiques)
The main objective of this course is to introduce students to the theory and
practice of comparative literature. As specific objectives, this introductory course
in comparative literature is designed to teach students to:
- Understand literature in its diversity and universality
- Know the history of comparative literature and its foundations
- Describe comparative literature as an approach to rapprochement and openness
- Identify the foreign dimension in a text, in a writer, in a culture
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 - To become familiar with the concepts related to comparative literature such as
influences, sources, fortune, success, invariant, variant, etc.
- Use comparative methods (e.g. binary comparison method, comparison of a
multitude, explicit comparative analysis, implicit comparison)
- Compare and contrast literary texts
- Analyze the relationship between literature and the other arts.

6- Prérequis
Previous knowledge of literature acquired in Licence 1 et Licence 2.
7- Méthodologie (Cours magistraux, séminaires…)
Lectures in five (5) sessions followed by tutorials
8- Lectures conseillées ou ouvrages de référence (par ordre d’importance)
- BASSNETT, Susan. Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction. Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing, 1993.
- BRUNEL, Pierre; PICHOIS, Claude et ROUSSEAU André Michel, Qu’est-ce que la
littérature comparée? Paris, Masson & Armand Colin, 1983, 1996.
- KUMAR DAS, Bijay. Comparative Literature. New York: Atlantic Publishers, 2012
9- Mode d’évaluation :
QCM, dissertation, commentaire
10-Contenu du cours segmenté en séances (5 )

INTRODUCTION
Comparative literature marks a process of interconnection and openness.
Nothing can live in autarky. The era of cultural, political and economic isolation
belongs to the past, a phenomenon clearly mirrored in literature. As Matthew
Arnold asserts in his inaugural lecture at Oxford University in 1857 that
“Everywhere there is a connection, everywhere there is an illustration, no single
event, no single literature is adequately comprehended excerpt in relation to other
events, to other literature" (270). This statement, which is in line with the aim of
comparatism, raises the reflection on diversity and universality. Historically, since
antiquity, the ideal of education has been stadium generale; the appropriate school

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founded in the Middle Ages, was called Universitas. The University of the
Twentieth century has been transformed into Diversitas. Comparatism is destined
to restore and renew, in the realm of letters, the ancient spirit, and to reconvert
diversities into universities. Indeed, it is much more than a reconversion, because
comparatism means the abolition of any barbaricum, ancient or modern. This
course proposes some definitions of comparative literature in its first section. In
the second section, it gives an overview on the history of the discipline. The third
section of this course exposes the comparatist investigation. The fourth section
shows the relationship between comparative literature and comparison. The fifth
and last section of this course presents the method of activity through types of
exercises and topics in comparative literature.

SECTION 1: Defining Comparative Literature

The expression “comparative literature” may legitimately appear easy to
define as it encompasses two rather-known concepts: comparative (deriving from
comparison) and literature. In reality, this perception gives only a partial
comprehension of the discipline as to the layperson, comparative literature simply
implies the comparison of literary works of fiction /art.
To get a better insight into Comparative Literature, it is important to define
the subject in connection with the different senses of the concept of “literature”
and the notion of “comparative”. In other words, what does the concept of
literature encompass? What does comparative stand for?
Etymologically, the term “literature” derives from latin litaritura / litteratura
“writing formed with letter”. In its broadest sense, it is all written and unwritten
works of art with an aesthetic purpose. In the 11th edition of Merriam-Webster’s
Collegiate Dictionary, it is defined as “writings having excellence of form or
expression and expressing ideas of permanent or universal interest”.

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 Literature is individual pieces of writing in which he / she expresses his /
her culture. It is a body of writing belonging to a given language or people.
Literature is humankind’s entire body of writing that can be classified
according to:
- 1. Fiction or non-fiction
- 2. Poetry or prose
- 3. Novel, short story, drama, essay, biography
- 4. The writings of a country, e.g. African literature, American literature,
European literature, Asian literature, Arabic literature
- 5. The writings of a period, e.g. The Renaissance and Reformation, The
Enlightenment or Neoclassical period, The Romantic period, the Victorian period,
the Modern Period and Postmodern period
- 6. Literary movements e.g. Romanticism, transcendentalism, Realism,
Naturalism, symbolism, surrealism, postmodernism.
Equally, the adjective “comparative” derives from the noun “comparison”
and the verb “to compare” which means:
- to examine similarities and dissimilarities between two or more things
- to point out the likeness or relation between things.
In the light of all these definitions, one can perceive comparative literature
as a large and complex subject that is concerned with the comparison of literature
in its diversity. This makes sense as literature may be classified according to a
variety of systems, including language, national origin, historical period, genre,
and subject matter. For Bijay. Kumar Das, ‘The single way to define comparative
literature is to say that it is a comparison between two literatures and does not
have an independent status” (2000). This narrower definition of the term is
developed by Kumar Das when he argues that comparative literature “analyses
the similarities and dissimilarities and parallels between two literatures. It further

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studies themes, modes, conventions, and the use of folk tales, myths in two
different literatures and even more” (2000). In reality, comparative literature is
more than a method of comparison. This argument is justified by the fact that the
subject is also concerned with the interrelationships between literatures beyond
national, geographical, linguistic and cultural borders.
In this era of global vision of cultural study and exchange, comparative
literature offers a far-reaching scholarly activity that explores literary and cultural
connections among people and societies, and bridges arts.
Comparative literature is an academic field which studies literature :
- across national and geographical borders,
- across time periods,
- across languages,
- across genres,
- across boundaries between literature and the other arts (music,
painting, dance, film, etc.)
- across disciplines (literature and psychology, philosophy, science,
history, architecture, sociology, politics, etc.).
In short, comparative literature is the study of "literature without borders".
Not only does it expose literature as a whole despite its cultural and linguistic
diversities, but it also deals with the connections between literature and other
intellectual activities. While the reading of these definitions bespeaks the scope of
the subject, the discipline has its history and development.

SECTION 2: The birth of the discipline: foundational works

The history of comparative literature can be traced back to the German
scholar Johann Wolfgang von Goethe with his concept of "world literature"
(Weltliteratur). This idea is not just to study literary works from all over the
world; rather, it is to hold together all the literatures of the world as a totality, one
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that will transcend national and linguistic boundaries (Chow, The Age of the World
Target 71). Goethe's paradigm of world literature includes the notion that
"national literature is no longer of importance; it is time for world literature".
Early comparatists claimed to stand for the universalist principles of world
literature, which aims at totalizing global literary works across linguistic,
territorial, and national particularities: world literature serves to promote "a traffic
in ideas between peoples, a literary market to which the nations bring their
intellectual treasures for exchange" (Strich 13) and this Goethean literary
universalism seemed to go beyond the one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness of
European nationalisms and national literatures. Though Goethe’s vision of "world
literature" conveys the spirit and scope of current perception of comparative
literature, the German scholar has not explicitly used the term " comparative
literature "
The expression "littérature comparée" was first used by the French Professor
Abel-François Villemain, initiator of bibliographical and historical criticism in his
course of French Literature, volume IV in 1838. Professor Villemain used the term
to show the relationships between French and English literatures, and the cultural
influence of France on Italy during 18th century. The purpose of Villemain’s course
was to demonstrate through a comparative chart the debt of the French spirit to
foreign literatures and also the debt of the foreign literatures to French. The term
is popularized later among many others by Sainte-Beuve, and rendered in English
as "comparative literature" by Matthew Arnold. Equally, Transylvanian scholar
Hugo Meltzl, the chief editor of the first Journal of Comparative literature, Acta
Comparationis Litteratum Universarum (1877) and Irish scholar Hutcheson
Macaulay Posnett, the author of Comparative Literature (1886) are referred to as the
pioneers of comparative literature. By stages the term became identified with the
discipline which, rather than studying one national literary tradition, inquires into

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the international and/or multilingual history of literature, with its theory and
criticism, as well as its interdisciplinary interrelationships with the other arts.
Comparative literature's uncertain beginnings in the nineteenth century,
some of which were left without a future, are manifest in countries as diverse as
France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Serbia, Russia, Italy, Switzerland, and the
United States of America.
As a university subject, it has gained a firm footing in the curriculum in
France and the U. S., Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Rumania, the Federal Republic of
Germany, and the U. S. S. R. (as world literature), more recently in the
Netherlands, Belgium, and the United Kingdom, and in certain institutions of
higher learning in India, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, and elsewhere. In some form
or other, the discipline is present in most countries with established universities
and research centres in the humanities.
However, it is constituted differently, according to local traditions, from the
so-called "orthodox" or "French" school, with its rigorous search for historical
evidence of contacts, imitations, translations, influences that occurred between
literatures, through the North American insistence on methodology and theory, to
the East European insertion of this approach into the vast study of the history,
theory, and criticism of world literature.
In Canada, comparative literature became an academic discipline quite late.
This can be attributed, in all probability, to the conservative mood of the land and
the influence of British universities, which only reluctantly found a place for the
systematic teaching of international aspects of literature. (For purposes of
comparison it is worth recalling that the first British lecturership was established
at Manchester in 1953, while the chairs at Harvard and Columbia date from 1890
and 1899 respectively, those at Lyons and the Sorbonne from 1897 and 1910, and
those at Geneva, St. Petersburg, and Belgrade from 1863, 1870, and 1871). When

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expressed openly, voices opposed to the introduction of comparative literature
into Canada used to complain about the discipline's cosmopolitanism, its
ambition to explore too many languages and to use translations when needed,
and its willingness to embrace contemporary methodological orientations going
beyond philology, positivism, the history of ideas, and New Criticism. Some of
these trends were perceived as subversive (forms of Marxism, for instance), others
as alien fields (such as psychoanalysis, structuralism, and semiotics). To boot, the
newcomer seemed to lack respect for the "territorial rights" of established
departments of languages and literatures.

SECTION 3 : Comparatist investigation

Comparative literature raises problems which justifies its existence. One of
the most significant inquiries of the discipline is the concepts or key words used
by the study in its practice These are some important terms which inform the
comparatist research :
1.Fortune :
2. Success :
3. Influences :
– Conscious imitation which has a systematic nature : imitation of a
style, a process or a theory
– Borrowing a minor detail or a more important element :
vocabulary, expressions of phrase, images
– Adaptation of a work, for example a novel in the form of a play or
a film
– Transposition of a work, for instance from rural to urban
environment, or from an intellectual to a peasant environment.
– Innutrition, as called it by Du Bellay, Boileau and Fontaine. It
means this unconscious emission of verses once ead and reread,
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 of images or themes that one has nourrished one’s soul with, and
this slow intellectual and spiritual digestion of knowledge that
one restores unconsciously.
In any case, the causal relationship implied by the concept
of "influence" remains one of the major objective of comparative literature.
Literary and artistic productions are generally the results of influences. They
act as catalysts.
4. Sources :
- Sources and influences are vital elements in comparative literature in that they
function as the two breasts which feed the discipline.
5. Variants versus invariants
Variants and invariants are two key elements in comparative theory
5.1. Variants :
5.2. Invariants :

SECTION 4: Comparative literature and comparisons

Comparative literature and comparison have ambiguous relationships.
According to Terry Cochran, a Canadian scholar and author of Plaidoyer pour une
llittérature comparée (2008), comparative literature does not compare anything. In a
similar vein, one can note Etiemblé’s famous quote and book title “comparaison
n’est pas raison” (see René Etiemble). If comparison is not reason, there is also no
reason without comparison. In reality, comparative literature does not necessarily
imply comparison. Besides, it must be noted that comparative literature, which is
a science and a discipline, differs from a comparative study, which is a way of
reading or analyzing texts. A comparative study is not comparative literature.
This is evidenced by the fact that one can deal with subjects like comparative
science, comparative grammar, and comparative study of geography. Following
the example of these comparative studies, it is important to know that
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comparative literature can be performed on texts from different genres or from
author who do not share the same linguistic, cultural and geographical
backgrounds. Nevertheless, as Jean-Pierre Makouta-Mboukou explains in
Systèmes, théories et méthodes comparés en critique littéraire, Comparative literature in
a context of its study on a given subject may resort to the technical process of
comparison.

-The comparative method is versatile and flexiblle. It can be used to

complement and reinforce other methods of analysis or it can also be the main
method of a study.
- The purpose of comparison or a comparative study is to show the
particularity of one thing in relation to others. In understanding the specificity of
an object, it can help improve it, (as it is the case of the different and improved
versions of technical and technlogical materials).

SECTION 5 : Method of activity and types exercises

5.1. Method of activity
Comparative literature uses several methods within the framework of its
study. Thematology and historical method are among the most used.
Thematology or the study of themes : One of the approaches in
comparative literature is to put themes together. The starting point of research in
comparative literature is thematic. The method allows the researcher to go beyond
national and linguistic barriers, by grouping facts by themes in literary and artistic
works.
Historical method : this method has solid points of reference, such as
enumeration or counting, chronological biographies and influences. It is a core
method which is resorted to by a researcher who has to explore a theme
thoroughly beyond time period and space.

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 5.2. Types of exercises
For Yves Chevrel, one of the most important activities in teaching
comparative literature is the judicious choice of application exercises that must
demonstrate the originality of comparative approach. He proposes five types of
exercises which are :
▲ A Commentary based on a fairly short text which does not necessarily
aims at giving an exhaustive account of all aspects of the text, but presenting an
overall element likely to allow a synthesis.
▲ A presentation which normally deals with a set of texts
▲ An essay writing. The essay should be presented in a form of synthesis.
▲ Translation rewritings (e.g. exercise on the different translations of a text)
▲ Parallel studies on the same theme. Here the exercise consists in studying
two or more different texts, then confronting the studies from which another
comparative reflection can generate.

CONCLUSION
Comparative literature is certainly an important discipline which highlights
a long and an unsuspected connection between literatures of all spheres.
Literature is universal. As one can observe that beyond nations, cultures,
languages, time periods, literature complies with the same generic paradigms
whether produces in prose or poetic. This long tradition is inspirational to the
founding fathers of the discipline. In both its theory and practice, comparative
literature suggests openness and rejection of single thinking. Understandably, if it
is a major subject in the current increasingly globalized world, its activities require
the creation of University departements in most Western countries such as France,
Germany, U.S. , Canada, etc. That is why we must embark on the comparative
ship to open ourselves to others and learn from them too.

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 BIBLIOGRAPHY
-- ARNOLD, Matthew.” “On the Modern Element in Literature.” In Poetry and Prose, ed. John
Bryson and Matthew Arnold. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1857/ 1954, pp. 269-286.
- BASSNETT, Susan. Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell
Publishing, 1993.
- BRUNEL, Pierre; PICHOIS, Claude et ROUSSEAU André Michel, Qu’est-ce que la littérature
comparée? Paris, Masson & Armand Colin, 1983, 1996.
- CHEVREL, Yves, La littérature comparée : Que sais-je ? 6ème édition, PUF, 2009.
- CHOW, Rey, The Age of the World Target : Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work.
Durham: Duke University, 2006
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