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Comparative literature is at once a subject of study, a general approach to literature, a series of specific methods of literary history, a return to a medieval way of thought, a methodological credo for the day, an administrative annoyance, a new wrinkle in university organization, a recherché academic pursuit, a recognition that even the humanities have a role to play in the affairs of the world, close-held by a cabal, invitingly open to all....1
So begins the foreword to Herbert Weisinger's and Georges Joyaux's translation of René Etiemble's The Crisis in Comparative Literature, published in 1966 and itself one of many polemical contributions to a substantial body of writings on the nature of comparative literature.
As Weisinger and Joyaux suggest, there has been scant consensus about the definition and purpose of the field from its very inception. Debates have been waged about its name and what to call those who practice it. Disputes have swirled about whether or not their task is one of comparison. Questions have been raised about whether or not whatever it is they do constitutes a discipline, producing delight, consternation, or despair in the hearts of those who care. Like the humanities as a whole, comparative literature seems to face one 'challenge' after another and to exist in a state of perpetual 'crisis,' as even a quick glance at the titles of numerous works on the subject can confirm.
Is it, as one critic describes it, "a house with many mansions," or should we regard it as "permanently under construction"?2 Perhaps this is why Charles Mills Gayley, a professor of English at Berkeley, writing in 1894, believed that the members of his proposed new Society of Comparative Literature "must be hewers of wood and drawers of water. Even though they cannot hope to see the completion of a temple of criticism, they may have the joy of construction.... "3 Joyful or not, the hewers and drawers have toiled for more than a century, struggling to define an enterprise that - at once chameleon and chimera - has defied such attempts by mirroring the shifting political climate and intellectual predilections of each successive age. In comparative literature's history, then, we can witness a series of contests that have shaped the past two...