A Companion to Comparative Literature [Hardcover]

• Features over thirty original essays from leading international contributors
• Provides a critical assessment of the status of literary and cross-cultural inquiry
• Addresses the history, current state, and future of comparative literature
• Chapters address such topics as the relationship between translation and transnationalism, literary theory and emerging media, the future of national literatures in an era of globalization, gender and cultural formation across time, East-West cultural encounters, postcolonial and diaspora studies, and other experimental approaches to literature and culture

Introduction 1
Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas

Part I Roadmaps 13

1 A Discipline of Tolerance 15
Rey Chow

2 Why Compare? 28
David Ferris

3 Method and Congruity: The Odious Business of Comparative Literature 46
David Palumbo-Liu

4 Comparisons, World Literature, and the Common Denominator 60
Haun Saussy

5 Comparative Literature in America: Attempt at a Genealogy 65
Kenneth Surin

Part II Theoretical Directions 73

6 The Poiein of Secular Criticism 75
Stathis Gourgouris

7 Vanishing Horizons: Problems in the Comparison of Chinalƒ6