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Editor’s Column: This Comparative Literature Which Is Not One

Editor’s Column: This Comparative Literature Which Is Not One Editor's Column This Comparative Literature Which Is Not One This issue focuses on excess. The topic touches on comparative literature's very identity. Excess is arguably constitutive of our hermeneutic practices; indeed, plurality (of subject matter, languages, interpretive perspectives and so on) marks us as comparatists. Taking my inspiration from Luce Irigaray's seminal work, This Sex Which Is Not One, which grounds her ethics of sexual difference on the feminine's "disruptive excess" (Irigaray 78), this volume considers comparative literature as an unruly discipline of its own, as a discipline "in crisis"--whence its incessant redefinition of its boundaries and its ethos. A comparative literature which is not one, we might say, refers both to the discipline's lack (the absence of a specific methodology, of unanimity or consensus about what defines us, about what determines our protocols of reading and interpretive habitus) and to its doubleness (its hermeneutic injunction to compare foregrounds a precarious relationality between the "objects" of comparison). Comparative literature is multiple and hybrid; it is that language, that perspective, that period, that theory--and more. It is, to paraphrase Irigaray, neither one nor two (Irigaray 26). In this respect, a comparative approach seems most hospitable to the problematic of http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png The Comparatist University of North Carolina Press

Editor’s Column: This Comparative Literature Which Is Not One

Zalloua, Zahi Anbra, --
The Comparatist , Volume 38 (1) – Oct 31, 2014
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Publisher
University of North Carolina Press
Copyright
Copyright © Southern Comparative Literature Association.
ISSN
1559-0887
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Abstract

Editor's Column This Comparative Literature Which Is Not One This issue focuses on excess. The topic touches on comparative literature's very identity. Excess is arguably constitutive of our hermeneutic practices; indeed, plurality (of subject matter, languages, interpretive perspectives and so on) marks us as comparatists. Taking my inspiration from Luce Irigaray's seminal work, This Sex Which Is Not One, which grounds her ethics of sexual difference on the feminine's "disruptive excess" (Irigaray 78), this volume considers comparative literature as an unruly discipline of its own, as a discipline "in crisis"--whence its incessant redefinition of its boundaries and its ethos. A comparative literature which is not one, we might say, refers both to the discipline's lack (the absence of a specific methodology, of unanimity or consensus about what defines us, about what determines our protocols of reading and interpretive habitus) and to its doubleness (its hermeneutic injunction to compare foregrounds a precarious relationality between the "objects" of comparison). Comparative literature is multiple and hybrid; it is that language, that perspective, that period, that theory--and more. It is, to paraphrase Irigaray, neither one nor two (Irigaray 26). In this respect, a comparative approach seems most hospitable to the problematic of

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The Comparatist – University of North Carolina Press

Published: Oct 31, 2014

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