Whither East-West Comparative Literature Two Recent Answers from the U.S.

Comparative Literature as a discipline seems doomed to perpetual self-doubt and crisis. Since Rene Wellek's famous address 'The Crisis in Comparative Literature' in 1958, every generation of scholars in the field has had to wrestle with various 'crises,' some internal to the discipline, some external. In 1984 Weisstein went so far as to talk of a 'Permanent Crisis of Comparative Literature,' and in the 90s the Bernheimer report led to long and heated debates about the nature and direction of the field. After sketching the broad outline of some recent trends, this review article will concentrate on two recent works, Cai Zong-qi's Configurations of Comparative Poetics: Three Perspectives on Western and Chinese Literary Criticism and Haun Saussy's Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China, both of which have something to say about where the field might move. (I will make only passing mention here of another important recent publication, Zhang Longxi's Mighty Opposites: From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China, because I have already reviewed it separately last year for this journal). The number and scope of recent publications in Chinese is so great that they deserve separate treatment, and I will not deal with them here.