My name is Ben Hutchinson, I'm professor of European literature at the University of Kent. I'm going to talk to you today about comparative literature. What do you see in the ink blot? Some see an abstract cloud, others some form of menacing mask, some see the suggestive spaces, others focus on the lines that shape them. We can presumably all agree that the two sides of the image are symmetrical but beyond that our brains process the information differently projecting associations and prejudices and hopes and fears onto a shifting undefined object. The image in other words is only as revealing as the observer.

Impressionistic as it is Hermann Horshack's ink blot test offers an instructive analogy for comparative literature. Understood as the reciprocal study of at least two forms of writing, comparative literature is both the most natural and the most constructed of intellectual activities, as we struggle to make sense out of one text or tradition we instinctively compare it to another text or tradition. One side of the object mirrors and shapes the other, cover half of the image behind me and it quickly loses any form of structure. Yet we also bring a whole set of political historical and cultural predispositions to the comparison, a perceptual apparatus through which we conjure meaning as we compare it. To use one text to understand another to read Shakespeare's The Tempest alongside Montaigne's essay on cannibals, for instance, or to compare Chinese poetry of the Tang period with European poetry of the modernist period is to reveal something about one's own tastes and knowledge, if only the belief that there is something meaningful to be learned through contextualising one's own tastes and knowledge. Comparison clarifies through it's very methodology that reading literature is also reading into literature. For literature exists, after all, comparatively from the dramas of antiquity to the novels of modernity, from Eastern epics to Western classics, there is not a text in history that is truly self-sufficient. To read and to write is to work within an existing framework of characters, conventions, plots and premises, how we understand one work of literature is contingent on how we understand another work of literature. The more we know the more we contextualise, the more we learn the more we compare. Knowledge itself is comparative; beyond how we read beyond how we write comparison is hardwired into the very ways that we think. While this makes comparative literature among the most ambitious of intellectual disciplines, it also brings the whole undertaking into question. For if to read is to compare in the pithy words of George Steiner, one of the most influential of contemporary comparatists, then fencing off a protected zone for its pursuit might in fact seem unnecessary, since we are constantly doing it anyway. What, to put it simply, is the force of comparative literature as opposed to that of literature. 

To answer this question requires delving into the practice the history and the theory of the discipline. Why, and indeed how, does one become a comparatist? In my case it began with a passion for languages, then for the literature's written in them and then for how to join the dots between them. The moment the dots start to cohere into a pattern is the moment at which literature becomes truly comparative and it is amongst the most exhilarating of intellectual experiences. To follow the evolution of the novel from Cervantes to Calvino, to study the history of the sonnet from Petrarch to Pushkin is to navigate by new and larger constellations, drawn on by the delight of making cross-cultural connections. Anyone naturally inquisitive, whether with or without foreign language skills, can share this satisfaction. Curiosity, open-mindedness, intellectual ambition, these are the only prerequisites for making comparisons. But, if there are few more basic human instincts than the urge to compare, scholarly modes of comparison take this psychological drive and dignify it with disinterest. Yet the context of the observer continues to provide the crucial point of reference, comparative literature may aspire to the objectivity of a discipline but in reality it is deeply complicit in the prejudices and positions that define it. There is in fact no such thing as a single objective sense of comparative literature, almost every comparatist has a different idea of how and what to compare, almost every comparatist has a different set of priorities, the only consensus is on the inherent instability of the term. Like governments in a democracy we have the modes of comparison that we deserve. This instability is the very essence of comparative literature both its meaning and its methodology depend on unsettling fixed canons, on forging fresh connections and mutually enriching links between disparate texts and traditions. Unlike the clearly demarcated fields of national literature's, English, French, Russian, etc comparative literature does not have a canon of texts so much as a canon of approaches to texts. Comparative literature, in short, constitutes less discipline than an indiscipline. If this makes it akin to a Rorschach test, it also makes it a mirror for modernity's intellectual anxieties regarding globalisation. But what is comparative literature, ambitious readers looking to stretch themselves are generally intrigued by the concept but uncertain of its implications and rightly so in many ways; even the professionals cannot agree on a single term calling it, to take just three examples, 'compared' in French, littŽrature comparŽe, comparing in German, vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, and comparative in English. Where the French past participial suggests that the comparing has already happened and the German present participle that it is in the process of happening, the English adjective blurs the distinction between object and observer.

The very term itself when considered comparatively opens up a Pandora's box of cultural differences. Yet this in a nutshell is the whole point should look at literature comparatively is to realise just how much can be learned by looking over the horizon of one's own tradition. It is to discover more not only about other literature's but also about one's own and it is to participate in the great utopian dream of understanding the way cultures interact. In an age that is paradoxically defined by migration and border crossing on the one hand and by retreat into monolingualism and monoculturalism on the other, the cross-cultural agenda of comparative literature has become increasingly central to the feature of the humanities. We are all in fact comparatists, constantly making connections across languages cultures and genre as we read. The question is whether we realise it. So the history and theory of comparative literature are the history and theory of how literary cultures have learned to view each other. The forces of modernity that give rise to the discipline, from colonialism and nationalism to exile and internationalism, are also the forces that shaped it, sculpting its project of analogy, antithesis and cultural differentiation. Comparative literature in short constitutes something like the international relations of culture. In fact one doesn't need to look only at the European version of comparative literature and indeed one doesn't want to go well beyond the merely modern version of comparative literature the whole idea of European modernity as we have increasingly learned over recent decades is deeply problematic. Nonetheless, the discipline of comparative literature developed in European modernity and to a large extent because of European modernity so I think I'm going to concentrate just on that for today. 

Within modern Europe then, the development of comparative literature as a process of intellectual exchange between nations looks back to the post-1648 idea of national sovereignty enshrined in the Treaty of Westphalia. To be international first one has to be national, the principle of the balance of power along with that of religious and by extension cultural freedom ensured that the various empires and dominions began to pursue intercultural exchange in lieu of international war. By the 19th century, the era in which the discipline would develop in earnest, this balance of power was reasserted following the upheaval of the Napoleonic Wars by the Congress of Vienna in 1815, which fixed the European map for the next hundred years. The fact that the major empires Prussia, Russia, Austria, had made major gains meant that numerous smaller states and languages were now subsumed within their purview. A range of differing cultures were howls within a handful of overarching groupings the better to balance each other out at the supranational level. The conditions for comparison, one might say, were perfect. Yet for the emerging discipline of comparative literature this imperial structure created a double bind since it meant that attempts to overcome national divisions were tied precisely to those divisions, locked into a narrative of competing countries and colonies. Comparison developed in short within and between nations and empires, Napoleonic, Victorian, the Habsburg as much as within and between languages and literatures. Understood in the geopolitical terms of the 19th century, comparative literature was also competitive literature. Given such competing narratives, how can the process of comparing best be understood? Perhaps we might usefully begin by viewing it as the search from master metaphor. The Belgian born critic Paul de Man argued that modern literature constructs its own allegories of reading. Comparative literature by extension constructs metaphors of reading, models of how to interpret texts and cultures between languages and nations. Such metaphors may provisionally be broken down into two groups, those indicating connection or similarity and those indicating disconnection or difference. Beginning with the former group, perhaps the most obvious metaphor for the comparative approach to literature is that of the crossroads. Standing at the centre of any number of converging routes or spaces, the Silk Road, the Holy Roman Empire, the Enlightenment Republic of Letters, the comparatist surveys and directs the passing traffic. Such a position confers numerous advantages, constant stimulation and negotiation, exposure to competing perspectives and privileged access to a range of sources, but it also risks being disorienting, placing the comparatist at the mercy of chance and circumstance, her head spinning furiously like the roadrunner in one of those cartoons where the traffic signs are all flipped around. 

An alternative increasingly important model of negotiation is that of the marketplace. In an age in which successful authors write as much for the in for an international as for a national audience the cross-cultural marketability of literature has become a significant criterion in determining what gets compared and indeed what gets written. Already in the 1820s Goethe, in launching the term world literature, used the metaphor of the marketplace partly in the Enlightenment sense of a forum for trade and commerce, partly in order to encourage the dissemination of his own works. Monetised in this way the metaphor of the marketplace points towards the socio-cultural framework in which comparative literature necessarily operates towards the network of publishers, reviewers, translators and professors who make it possible. 

Metaphors such as crossroads and marketplace, as well as other more overtly political variations, such as parliament or United Nations, facilitate interaction between two or more perspectives, indeed they mimic the very meaning of metaphor just as the process of comparison functions as a simile by saying that one thing is like another, so too it acts as a metaphor from the Greek metaferthoœn meaning to carry over or transfer, indicating as it does the ways in which we compare one idea to another. Yet metaphors can be misleading, sometimes meaning is not so much carried over as intercepted. The Danish critic Georg Brandes described comparative literature as a telescope that both magnifies and reduces, since it sees further but only by focusing on specific objects. An image neatly captures the ambivalent nature of both of comparison and of its attendant metaphors, how are we to understand those metaphors that call into question any easy sense of comparative literature as simply an intellectual import-export business? How are we to understand the mechanisms of difference as well as of similarity? What, in short, of what one might term contrastive literature. Contrastive literature forms the necessary counterpart to comparative literature, without difference no similarity, in order to say that one thing is like another one must implicitly say what it is not like. To compare presupposes the ability to contrast. Seen in this way, comparative literature is as much about reconfiguring comparisons as making them and accordingly it attracts a corresponding group of metaphors centered on the creation of new perspectives and meanings. Perhaps the most prominent metaphor in this group is that of the melting pot. Unlike the image of the crossroads, which suggests that texts and ideas may take different directions but will still keep moving in some previously recognisable form, the linguistic melting pot in pre-modernity Latin or Sanskrit, in post-modernity world literature in English or French, implies that local ideas undergo a fundamental change of form in order to find expression within the many variations of one global recipient. Of course comparison even within one language is not this straightforward, a single pot can contain a multitude of ingredients, ingredients that it is the role of the comparatist to taste and identify. Locating the border between one version of an idea and another, bringing them together but also keeping them apart, is an essential aspect of comparative practice. If the model of the melting pot dissolves conflicting elements as much as it solves them the idea of comparative literature as a border point invests the comparatist with greater powers still, for it suggests that she can just as well block the traffic of ideas as allow them safe passage, that she is authorised to rifle through texts in search of contraband content, such as for instance vestigial colonialism in modern European literature. The comparatist sits in judgement on the flow of ideas with a more or less liberal more or less laissez faire sensibility. 

To study the history of the subject, however, is to realise that comparative literature is ultimately not so much about policing borders as crossing them. Comparatists choose to distance themselves from their own native cultures, they choose not to belong to any one particular tradition, indeed, this unbelonging is arguably their defining characteristic. As intellectual emigrŽs comparatists make links between cultures but in doing so they also paradoxically reinforce the distinctions between those cultures, as such the contrasts are as important as the comparisons, the disconnections as instructive is the connections, but why, one might ask, do such metaphors matter?

Why should I, why should you, care about how comparative literature views itself? The answer lies not in specialist skirmishes but in common sense. For, in the case of comparative literature, the metaphors it lives by are arguably as important as the insights it makes possible. Unlike other disciplines, historically more secure in their intellectual and institutional status, comparative literature must constantly renew its sense of mission, constantly tell itself a new story about how and why literatures should be compared. It is the continuous need to justify itself to itself that marks out comparative literature as uniquely beholden to changing intellectual fashions and thus to changing disciplinary metaphors. So, what we might provisionally take the adjective comparative to convey is that the idea of comparison, in conjunction with the idea of literature, is as important as its practice. The animating impulse of comparative literature is not just the urge to take a broad perspective across differing forms and languages of literary expression, it is also the politically, ethically and ascetically charged notion that this is a worthwhile undertaking in the first place. Comparative literature cannot get by, in other words, without a pinch of pathos, since it is the utopian dream of being in no place (utopus) and thus in every place that drives it. Comparative literature is in fact defined by its strategic position between languages literatures and culture. Literary theory, cultural studies, postcolonialism, world literature, translation studies, reception studies, comparative literature in the 21st century draws on all these disciplines and more. Out of these points of intersection emerge a number of recurring debates: the changing notions of high and popular culture, the shifting hierarchy of original and translated texts, concepts and criticisms of the Canon, debates that make comparative literature among the most dynamic of intellectual fields. Irrigated by any number of sources, it overflows with ideas as to how to conceive the role and purpose of the verbal arts in an ever more visual world, for this indeed is perhaps the principal function of comparative literature in the 21st century. For ambitious readers with an appetite for ranging beyond their own native traditions, comparative literature is the natural home. Yet it is also the natural home through all those big questions about why literature and by extension culture still matters. To compare literatures and cultures must be to do more than merely accrue the sum of their parts, it must be to ponder and to protect cultural relations. The surest way of moving beyond a purely subjective response to the Rorschach test is to study the practice, the history, and the theory of comparative literature. 

Thank you very much for your attention.