Globality, Difference, and the International Turn in Ecocriticism

Abstract

Comparative literature has always pursued literary studies in a transnational framework. But for much of its history it has been a “modest intellectual enterprise, fundamentally limited to Western Europe, and mostly revolving around the river Rhine (German philologists working on French literature). Not much more,” as Franco Moretti pithily sums it up (54). The rise of postcolonial theory in the wake of Edward Said's and Gayatri Spivak's influential work vastly expanded comparatist horizons, as did the attention to minority literatures that spread outward from the study of American literature and culture in the 1990s. In 1993 Charles Bernheimer's report to the American Comparative Literature Association, “Comparative Literature at the Turn of the Century,” criticized the elitist and exclusionary tenor of earlier reports on the state of the discipline by Harry Levin (1965) and Tom Greene (1975). Instead, it emphasized “tendencies in literary studies, toward a multicultural, global, and interdisciplinary curriculum” and called for an expansion from comparative literature's traditional focus on a mostly western European and North American canon of works to a truly global conception of GoetheanWeltliteratur, for inclusion of previously marginalized minority literatures from around the world, and for connections to media studies, other humanities disciplines, and the social sciences (47).

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