In Search Of Literariness:on The Research Paradigm Of American Comparative Literature

Since the end of the Second World War,the study of Comparative Literature has transferred its center from France to the United States.At the Second Conference of ICCL,Wellek submitted his influential paper "The Crisis of Comparative Literature",in which he concluded the crisis of the discipline in its lack of distinct subject matter and specific research methods.What he prescribed as antidote to this malaise,namely,designating "literariness" as the object of investigation and adopting the methods of description,evaluation and inter:pretation,is by no means particular to Comparative Literature but well applicable to literary study as a whole.Moreover,since Wellek did not expound on the concept of "literariness",a new crisis is occasioned for the future of Comparative Literature.Since then,the discourse of crisis has never vanished from the disciplinary history.The first chapter revisits the dawning of the American hour.Through a close reading of the essays of Rene Wellek and Henry Remak written in the late 1950s and the early 1960s,yearbooks of Comparative Literature,and ACLA disciplinary reports,it is argued that the dawning of the American hour is a crisis as an ending of crisis,two embodiments of which are the predicament of literariness and controversy over comparability.Though the concept of comparability was not explicitly articulated until 1995 by Jonathan Culler,the practical discussions and theoretical reflections on the grounds of comparison have gained much progress early in the 1960s.Concretely articulated and existing on multifaceted layers,comparability(rhetoric,themes,modes,genres,etc.)endows literariness with various aspects.Conversely,due to its inherent nature of abstraction,literariness elevates the comparability to the domain of poetics.The second chapter probes into different aspects of literariness in the American hour,with Harry Levin’s thematic study and Paul de Man’s rhetorical study as case examples.Harry Levin transformed the old Stoffgeschichte into a new "thematology"and restored thematic literariness by focusing on the artistic ways of selection and responding to certain themes on the part of writers,the structural significance revealed by readers’ interpretation,but also because thematic literariness is an embodiment of humanistic ideals.Paul de Man constructed the "linguistics of literariness" through"rhetorical reading".From "reading literature" to "literarily reading",the connotations of "literariness" substantially expand.The last chapter metaphorizes the development of Comparative Literature as a humanistic discipline into a process of Bildung.Ideal is as vital for the hero of Bildung as for Comparative Literature,for which the ideal lies in depicting and describing literariness in its universal sense and in all contexts.Literariness,in this light,has a crying need for new nomenclature to foreground its specificity and its pertinence to Comparative Literature.This chapter examines three possible versions for fulfilling the task,namely,intertextuality,(common)poetics and interliterariness,analyzing their respective emphasis,workability and limitations.The concept of literariness proffers an inner historical motivation for the development of Comparative Literature as an independent discipline.Though it has to confront the threat of"exhaustion",in Benjamin’s parlance,"literariness" possesses the potentiality to regenerate itself by recourse to the historical contexts and reintegrate variegated theoretical and cultural discourses.The aim of investigating the notion of literariness is to reinvigorate literary study with new methods and new perspectives.Therefore,reflecting on Comparative Literature in the light of literariness is more than to delineate the genealogy of disciplinary history,but also initiate us to revalue the past and envision the future(s)of our own undertakings in this field.