What Does the Comparative Do for Literary History?

Abstract

The comparative provides literary history with a margin of redemptive self-betrayal. by the comparative, we should understand certain practices of reading and inquiry that reveal actions and texts to be more than they appear and that expose narrative claims as other than they strictly claim to be. Historiography is likewise susceptible to this exposure. Narrative acts of literary history no less subject to such self-salvaging through comparative discernment, alert us to historiography's uncertain adequacy to the histories it narrates. The redeeming quotient of the comparative signaled here resides in its preemption of tautology. The comparative, that is, can forestall, if not preclude outright, the possibility of any phenomenon's becoming definitively self-identical. In affirming the comparability of its objects, textual or otherwise, the comparative uncovers and ratifies the difference within and among phenomena and the contingencies of their existence, a sanctioning of difference that could mitigate solipsism and self-delusion. For literary history, this means foreclosing, or at least hedging against, literary history's morphing into world history as tautologically plotted by certain master narratives of historiography that claim total explicatory power over the fortuities of history and historical life. These include narratives of imperial successions, providential history, world monarchies, epochal histories that plot human existence on the self-universalized grid of their own periodicity, and the history of Spirit commonly referred to as “Prussian universalisms.” In this regard, Hegelian Geistgeschichte, with its dialectical-materialist derivative known as Marxism and its liberal-democratic free-market remnants called capitalism, both plied under the flag of modernization theory, is exemplary (Pomper, Elphick, and Vann). These are among historiography's most salient master narratives, perennially dominant in historical discourse and in the hegemony of states that have ideologically abetted and politically deployed them (Fasolt 219-32; Guha 24-47). The comparative persistently troubles the structural coherence of these historiographical master plots and their self-validating systematicity.

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