Компаративистика и (друга) история на литературата
Comparative literature studies and (an alternative) history of literature

Summary/Abstract: This article examines the relationship between comparative studies and history of literature. While paying special attention to the present-day condition of these two disciplines, the author surveys various approaches, formulated since the early 19th century, which sought to break with the traditional, national model of the history of literature and the ethnocentric model of traditional comparative studies, driven impatiently by both nationalism and crypto-nationalism. In this context, he focuses on the most recent projects of literary history like ‘comparative history of literature’, ‘international history of literature’, ‘transcultural history of literature’, or ‘world literature’ – all of which are oriented towards the international literary history. The article explores the possible reasons for the late 20th and early 21st- century revival of Goethe’s idea of Weltliteratur (in the critical thought of Pascal Casanova, David Damrosch, and Franco Moretti) and the recent vogue for ‘alternative’ histories of literature produced under the auspices of comparative cultural studies. At the same time it voices some skepticism about the radical reinvention of comparative studies (along the lines of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Death of a Discipline).

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