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Merely Comparative

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Natalie Melas
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Extract

When one has so general and comprehensive an intention one can at first do nothing.

—Erich Auerbach

Comparison was once supremely a matter of method. ernest renan in his pensées de 1848 called comparison “the great instrument of criticism” (296). Echoing the sentiment some two decades later, Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett asserted that “we may call consciously comparative thinking the great glory of our nineteenth century” (76). Comparison had been extensively deployed as an analytic tool before the nineteenth century—to produce, for instance, the massive taxonomies that lay the foundations for natural history and in the gathering of the concordances and chronologies of universal histories. What sharply distinguished the comparative method, what made it in effect a specific method, for nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century scholars, by their own account, was the principle of development. This underlying temporal unity allowed for the most disparate entities to be set into meaningful relation. In words from an 1871 lecture by an early and enthusiastic proponent of comparative literature:

[T]he method in which this study can be best pursued is that which is pursued in anatomy, in language, in mythology…, namely, the comparative. The literary productions of all ages and peoples can be classed, can be brought into comparison and contrast, can be taken out of their isolation as belonging to one nation, or one separate era, and be brought under divisions as the embodiment of the same aesthetic principles, the universal laws of mental, social and moral development (Shackford 42)

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Information
PMLA , Volume 128 , Issue 3 , May 2013 , pp. 652 - 659
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by The Modern Language Association of America

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