1. The Origins and History of Comparative Literature Ben Hutchinson
Seminar 1
The Origins and History of Comparative Literature
Ben Hutchinson

2. Emergence of discipline
Modern comparative literature emerges around 1800…
…as discipline, if not as practice
…and as West Side Story

3. Why does the history of the discipline matter?
1) Repository of methodologies (hermeneutics)
2) Contingency of methodologies (history)
3) Contextuality of methodologies (politics)

4. 1) Repository of methodologies (hermeneutics)
Comp Lit driven by (re-)emergence of philology:
1777 Friedrich August Wolf enrols at Göttingen as studiosus philologiae (not theologiae)
1786 Sir William Jones claims common root for Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin in ‘Proto-Indo- European’
1821 Franz Bopp, inventor of ‘comparative philology’, becomes Prof. of Sanskrit in Berlin
‘Comparative grammar’ (Fr. Schlegel) develops between East and West
This threw up basic questions, incl.:
Why and how compare?
What to compare – original or translated texts?
Comparison as an art, a science, or a politics?
Epistemological validity for comparison?

5. 2) Contingency of methodologies (history)
Place
Westphalian model of nation- state continent
National traditions (Volksgeist)…
…with international presuppositions (e.g. Classical heritage, superiority of European languages)
Time
Why do certain methodologies emerge at certain times?
E.g. Comp Lit as ‘great glory of our nineteenth century’
E.g. Evolutionary models of comparison in 1880s

6. 3) Contextuality of methodologies (politics)
International competition in 19th century for culture and learning
Imperial power – colonial knowledge (e.g. Napoleonic savants, Indian philologists):
‘Littérature comparée’ first mentioned in 1816 book by two savants
Emergence of Weltliteratur within – but at the margins of -imperial Europe
Why did Weltliteratur emerge when (1827) and where (Germany) it did?

7. Emergence of comparative literature in 19th-century as…
Dependent on post-Westphalian framework of the nation- state
Driven by – and driving – imperial competition between European nations (competitive literature)
Defined by national, rather than linguistic interaction
Methodologically self-conscious from the start