Comparative literature is a branch of literature and art that makes a comparative study of the interaction between two or more national literatures and the relationship between literature and other art categories and other ideologies. It includes impact research, parallel research and interdisciplinary research. As a discipline, it rose at the end of 19 and the beginning of the 20th century. The term comparative literature first appeared in the Course of Comparative Literature edited by French scholars Noel and Laplace (18 16), but its methods and theories are not involved in this book. What made this word popular was Veerman (1790 ~1870), a French literary critic and professor at Paris University. 1827, when he was teaching French literature in the Middle Ages and18th century, he used the terms "comparative literature" and "comparative analysis" several times. Two years later, he delivered a speech entitled "A Survey of French Literature in the 8th Century/KLOC-0". After 1865, "comparative literature" was generally accepted as a special term.
19 After the 1970s, comparative literature made great progress in Europe and America, with its center in France. 193 1 France Paul? Van Gogh? The first book "On Comparative Literature" comprehensively summarizes the theory and history of the development of comparative literature in the past 100 years for the first time, and advocates that literary research can be divided into three categories: national literature, comparative literature and overall literature. After World War II, the United States became the center of comparative literature research. 1952 Yearbook of Comparative Literature and General Literature was first published in the United States, summarizing the achievements and problems in the development of comparative literature year by year.
Scholars in different countries have different emphases on the study of comparative literature: French scholars, such as Tugen and Gael, emphasize the study of the influence of different national literature; American scholars, such as Wellek, emphasize the parallel study of different national literature; Russian scholars such as alekseev and Zhirmunski believe that impact research and parallel research are inseparable and should be paid equal attention to at the same time.
In China, Lu Xun, Mao Dun and Guo Moruo have extensively studied the development of literature in various countries, such as Lu Xun's On Moro Poetry and Mao Dun's Miscellaneous Talks on Modern Russian Literature. In 1930s, China began to introduce the history and theory of foreign comparative literature. China's Comparative Literature was promoted to some extent by Chen Quan's Sino-German Cultural Studies, Qian Zhongshu's On Art Records and Zhu Guangqian's On Poetry. Since 1970s, comparative literature has made unprecedented new development in China, with remarkable achievements.
Comparative literature, which came into being in the19th century, refers to the comparative study of literature that transcends national boundaries and language boundaries, that is, it is a new frontier discipline to study the relationship between literature and literature between nations, countries or between literature and other art forms and ideologies by comparative methods. From the perspective of world literature, the task of comparative literature is to comprehensively reveal the process of the occurrence and development of literature held by various countries, regions and nationalities, and to explore the inherent laws of literary development and even the basic laws of human cultural development.
Goethe is a pioneer of comparative literature. At present, there are mainly French schools and American schools in the world. The former focuses on studying the influence of one country's culture on another country's literature; The latter pays attention to the comparison of different national cultures under the same historical conditions, finds out the similarities and differences and reasons, and finds out the laws of * * * *.
What is comparative literature? Let's start with a "case-solving" that happened in the history of China literature and lasted for thousands of years, and then get closer and know comparative literature step by step.
As early as the Tang Dynasty, some people studied the origin of Wu Yun's Yan Xu Goose Cage. Yan Xu Goose Cage tells the story of a man named Yan Xu in Yangxian (now Yixing, Jiangsu) who met a scholar of seventeen or eighteen on the road. The scholar who fell on the roadside claimed that his feet hurt and asked to sit in the goose cage in Yan Xu. Yan Xu thought it was a joke, but the scholar really got into the cage and sat on the double goose, but Yan Xu didn't feel heavy when he mentioned the goose cage. When he went to rest under the tree, the scholar came out of the goose cage and said that he would hold a banquet to thank Yan Xu. Then he spat out wine and food from his mouth to entertain Yan Xu. After a while, a 16-year-old beauty spit out from her mouth to accompany the banquet. After a while, the scholar fell asleep drunk, and the woman actually spit out a 23-year-old man from her mouth to keep her company. Just as Xu and this man exchanged pleasantries, the scholar seemed to wake up. The beauty threw out a silk screen to cover it and slept with the scholar. But the man also spit out a woman of about twenty years old from his mouth to drink and play together. After a long time, I heard the voice of the scholar rustling, and the man was busy swallowing a twenty-year-old woman into his mouth; After waking up, this beautiful woman of 16 years old is busy swallowing this man and sitting alone with Yan Xu. After the scholar got up, he swallowed the beauty and all kinds of tableware for the first time, and then left a big copper plate for Yan Xu as a souvenir and left.
In the late Tang Dynasty, Duan, a poetess with the same fame as Li Shangyin and Wen, compared it with "Brahma Spitting Pots" in the Indian Buddhist sutra "Bhikkhu Sutra" in his Miscellanies of Youyang, which was written in the middle of the ninth century, and said: "The Buddhist monk sutra says: In the past, Brahma spit pots, women had screens and writers. Brahma longed for less rest, and the woman repeated the operation and spit out a pot with a man lying there. Brahma felt that he had swallowed each other for the second time and walked away on crutches. I took Wu Jun to taste this matter, and he felt strange, and I was also very strange. " Later, many people mentioned this matter until Lu Xun made a thorough judgment on this "case-solving". Lu Xun said in A Brief History of Chinese Fiction: "However, this thought does not belong to China. Duan once said that it originated in Tianzhu (that is, ancient India) ... When it comes to the origin of Brahma. Since the Wei and Jin Dynasties, the story of Tianzhu has been translated and interpreted gradually, and it has also spread all over the world. Scholars liked it and used it intentionally or unintentionally, so they returned to China. For example, Xun Shi, a native of A Jin, wrote "Ghost Story", and I still remember that the Taoist priest entered the cage. Shang Yun is from a foreign country, and Wu is a scholar in China. Lu Xun is absolutely right. This story originated in India. After it was introduced into China with Buddhist scriptures, it was originally said to be a foreign Taoist. For example, in "Ghost Record" written by Xun in Jin Dynasty, "In the twelfth year of Taiyuan, a Taoist came from abroad." In the hands of Wu Jun in the Southern Dynasties, it was absorbed and digested into people, things and places purely for China. Of course, this process of "degenerating into state ownership" has continued into modern times. Taiwan Province writer Zhang Xiaofeng Yu 198 1 published the novel "Man's Ring", which further evolved Yan Xu's goose cage story into a contemporary novel with psychological activities, environmental background and delicate description. However, the relationship between the theme, the basic story and the main characters remains unchanged.
It is actually a kind of comparative literature research to study the literary works of different nationalities and countries in China and India like Lu Xun and Duan, compare their similarities, trace their roots and explore their relations and reasons. Due to the extensive contact of literature of various nationalities in history, the following literary phenomena have appeared: in the Japanese classical novel Tale of Genji, a large number of poems by Bai Juyi, a poet of the Tang Dynasty in China, were used; In China's classical novel The Journey to the West, the Monkey King can change seventy-two, which absorbs the element that Hanuman, a monkey, can change thirty-six in Indian Buddhist scriptures. the Monkey King made a scene in the Indian Buddhist scriptures "The Classic of Virtue and Foolishness", and developed the story that the King Ding Sheng made a scene in the Emperor's Palace. According to legend, Li Bai first wrote Bodhisattva Man, but according to textual research, Bodhisattva Man is a musical tune in ancient Myanmar, which was introduced to the Central Plains through Yunnan. An earlier "Songs of the South"? Lisao begins with "Di Laiwen Miao, my Emperor Kaoboyong. Photographed in Meng Wei, Wei Geng and I will drop. " Some experts believe that these incomprehensible words, such as "Sheti" and "Mengwei", are translated names of constellations imported from abroad, most likely Greek or Samaritan. This kind of research is called "influence research" in comparative literature, because it mainly traces the relationship between different countries' literature and studies the influence facts of their origin, media, circulation, translation and acceptance. This kind of research rose and prevailed in France and Germany a hundred years ago, and once dominated all fields of comparative literature, so the results of "impact research" can be described as fruitful, and the theory and methods of "impact research" are relatively mature and complete. Any research focusing on this aspect is called "the school of influence research" for scholars who hold this view and their methods, because they advocate studying the influence facts between literary phenomena of various ethnic groups. Because most of the disputants in international comparative literature in 1950s were French scholars, it was also called "French School". Can this school's recognition of comparative literature be enlightening? Dickens and Keats have representative definitions of comparative literature. Van Gogh? The first one said in the book 193 1 On Comparative Literature: "The real feature of comparative literature, like all historical sciences, is to use facts from different sources as much as possible in order to fully explain each fact; Finding as many reasons as possible for various results is the basis for expanding understanding. " In Comparative Literature published 20 years later, Kea said more clearly: "Comparative literature is the relationship history of international literature. Comparative literature workers stand on the edge of language or nation and watch two or more kinds of literature penetrate each other in themes, ideas, books or feelings. "
However, no matter between Chinese and foreign literature, or between other countries' literature, whether between poetry, novels, drama, prose, literary theory and literary criticism, or between literary trends, schools and movements, there are still many similar situations that do not affect the factual connection. For example, Bai Juyi, a poet in the Tang Dynasty, wrote the beauty of silence in Pipa: "The ice spring is cold and astringent, and it will last forever." . Don't hold a grudge, what they say in silence is more than what they say in their voices. Coincidentally, the English poet Keats also wrote in his Ode to the Ancient Greek Urn: "The audible sound is beautiful, but the inaudible sound is more beautiful." . "In order to express admiration for people, there is a song in the five tunes of Yuefu in the Ming Dynasty:" Change an embroidered shoe and wear it on your golden lotus; Put on a sweatshirt and meet the meat; Become a bamboo lady and hold it in your arms; Become a main waist and bind you; Change a tube of jade and hold it between your fingers; Change another piece of fragrant tea and it will be as small as your cherry. "This description is common in European poetry and novels. The ancient Greek poet wrote: "I would like to be the flute in my heart." /kloc-Rojas, a Spanish playwright in the 0/7th century, also wrote in his folk drama: "I would like to be a belt around my lover's waist. Even in German literature, it says, "I would like to be a flea and a louse around my sweetheart." "There are also some works that not only have similar characters, but also reflect almost the same details. Albagon, the masterpiece of French classical dramatist Moliere, and Yan Jiansheng, the classic novel The Scholars by China, are greedy for money and mean. For example, Albagon will only be satisfied if he has to put out one of the two candles. Yan Jiansheng will not die before extinguishing the remaining oil rope.
The similarities and differences between Bai Juyi and Keats, the Five Tunes of Yuefu in the Ming Dynasty and ancient European dramas, Albagon in The Miser and Yan Jiansheng in The Scholars are not "mutual influence", but the results of the writers' observation, experience and processing in the real life of their respective nationalities. To say "influence" can be traced back to the respective cultural systems and literary traditions of the East and the West. For example, Jia Sheng in the Yuan drama "Seeing Money Slaves" before Yan Jiansheng was very similar to Yan Jiansheng's miserliness before his death. The difference is that Jia Sheng wants his son to lick his greasy fingers before he dies. It can be traced back to the "thrifty old man" in Laughing Forest in the Northern Wei Dynasty, and even the "Dong" in Shang Jun Shu in the Warring States Period influenced later generations by the meanness and greed of loving things more than lovers. Similarly, the Albagon created by Moliere can be traced back to the miser in the comedy A Bucket of Gold by Platus, an ancient Roman playwright, and the paper "On Character" by Theophraspes, an earlier ancient Greek writer, because the paper outlines the character types of stingy people. Moliere is a neoclassical writer who advocates classicism and is keen to draw creative themes from ancient Greek and Roman literature. Influenced by his European literary tradition, even he himself is outspoken. Therefore, in the study of these two similar problems, we should put aside the influence study and explore the law of "the connection between literature and mind" from the aspects of economy, politics and social history. By comparing the Chinese and foreign literary images of Albagon and Yan Jiansheng, we can more clearly find that greed and meanness have existed since ancient times, but when the capital did not lag behind, money gradually became the "most sacred" thing to replace the rank and privilege of feudal society, so among the first commercial bourgeois who appeared among the citizens, meanness was their means of accumulating wealth and money, and it also existed at the same time as their greed to desperately hunt for surplus value. This constitutes a major feature of their personality habits and psychological state: they are so stingy that they regard every sum of money and everything as a typical figure of Almighty God, and then become an immortal artistic image in the history of Chinese and foreign literature.
This comparative study of national literature is called another category of comparative literature-"parallel study", because its research object is national literature that has no direct influence on mutual communication, just like parallel lines that do not intersect each other. Because it was first advocated and promoted by American scholars after the Second World War, it is also called the "American School". In the 1960s, Professor remarque of Indiana University in the United States gave the most respected definition of comparative literature: "Comparative literature is the comparison between one country's literature and another country's literature or multinational literature, and it is the comparison between literature and other fields of human expression."
This definition not only emphasizes that the parallel study of national literature without mutual influence or connection is also comparative literature, but also puts forward that comparative literature should include the study of the relationship between literature and other disciplines or beliefs, which is called "interdisciplinary" research by academic circles and also belongs to comparative literature.
If we study rhetorical devices in literary creation from the perspective of "synaesthesia" in psychology and physiology, it can be regarded as an interdisciplinary study of comparative literature. How to describe the diversity of things? How to describe the silent scenery? There are enough stars in the night sky, and they are shining enough. What excellent descriptions did the poet have? And what do ordinary critics say? Song Qi, a poet in the Song Dynasty, wrote "The Jade Building is Spring", in which "green leaves are lighter than smoke, and the branches of red apricots are noisy in spring", and the word "noisy" is used to describe the lush apricot trees. However, Li Yu of the Ming Dynasty criticized: "This statement is extremely difficult to understand. Fight, peaches and plums fight for spring, apricots fight for spring. I have no problem with that. If there are noisy words, they can be used for speculation, fighting and typing! " Su Shi, a great poet in the Song Dynasty, went further. He wrote the silent stars in Stargazing at Night, and said that "the little stars are noisy". Similarly, Ji Xiaolan, a college student in the Qing Dynasty and editor-in-chief of Sikuquanshu, also said that this sentence was not good, and he rated it as "like a meteor".
Coincidentally, this kind of beautiful sentence of writing silent things into sounds is also found in western literature: 19 th century Italian poet Giovanni (1855- 19 12) There is a famous sentence in Pascoe that writes stars: "A cluster of stars in the blue sky chirp like chickens. /kloc-a saint in the 0/8th century? Saint Martin also said, "Listen to the sound of flowers, and look at the glowing tone. "
In Li Yu's and Ji Xiaolan's view, these words are contrary to common sense, because how can a star without sound have sound? This is a mistake. Psychology and physiology tell us that people's feelings will have the phenomenon of "sensory transfer", which is called "synaesthesia". That is to say, vision, hearing, smell, touch and taste can often get through and cross. Colors look bright, cold and warm will have weight, and the smell will become sharp. For example, the smell is pungent, the high-pitched sound is loud, and the color is different from cool color and hot color. These are not metaphors, metaphors are the expansion and contraction of similar features, and there is no "emotional shift". Similarly, there are too many stars, and the shadows are like boiling water; Red apricots are in full bloom on the branches. You are red and I am redder, as if in a fight. From the perspective of synaesthesia, this is a record that the writer vividly reflects the law of human perception synaesthesia, so it has become a beautiful rhetoric sentence that has been passed down through the ages and its charm has not diminished.
Whether it is influence research, parallel research or interdisciplinary research, it is different from the usual literary history, literary criticism or literary theory. This new literary research discipline is called comparative literature, which has its own research object, that is, the literature of different countries and nationalities as its own research object, and it is a kind of literary comparative research that pays more attention to breaking the boundaries of regional space and disciplines. This kind of research is not to compare the advantages and disadvantages, but to compare and understand one's own national literature and other people's foreign literature from the perspective of world literature and overall knowledge, so as to build a more scientific literary theory and literary history system. Therefore, comparative literature has opened a new world of understanding for literary research in line with the current globalization process. Professor Ji Xianlin, honorary president of China Comparative Literature Society, wrote an article in People's Daily in 1980s, and gave an accurate answer to what comparative literature is:
"Comparative literature is to compare the literature of different countries. This can be said to be comparative literature in a narrow sense. Comparative literature in a broad sense compares literature with other disciplines, including humanities and social sciences, and even natural sciences. "
At the end of the 20th century, Dr. Posnett, a British female scholar, also said at the beginning of her book Introduction to Comparative Literature Criticism: "The concise answer to what is comparative literature is that comparative literature is an interdisciplinary study of texts that span more than two cultures, and also a study of the relationship between more than two literary related patterns that span time and space."
It can be seen that comparative literature, which transcends national boundaries, languages and disciplines, is a new humanities subject that meets the needs of the development of the times. It has its own history, system, tasks, characteristics and requirements. It is a comprehensive literary research discipline, which is produced on the basis of literary and cultural exchanges between countries, matured with it, and synchronized with the understanding of today's globalization era.
The term "comparative literature" was put forward by French scholars more than 100 years ago. In Europe at that time, due to the formation of the nation-state, scholars from all over the world devoted themselves to the collation and research of their national literature. The research method is to interpret the works from the social background and the writer's life, which is the so-called routine of "knowing people and discussing the world". Later, French scholars believed that it was not enough to sort out and study national literature, and the study of literature should cross national boundaries. The great German poet J.W. Goethe supported this transnational vision and even put forward the concept of "world literature" in his later years. However, whether it is the French scholar's Comparative Literature or Goethe's World Literature, the focus is on Europe, which needs to be explained. French comparative literature researchers are conducting an "impact study", focusing on how one nation's literature is accepted, imitated and creatively transformed by another nation's writers, and tracing back and cleaning up the track of literature crossing national boundaries. In 1930s and 1940s, a group of writers and scholars who returned from studying abroad, such as Liang, Qian Zhongshu and Chen Quan, devoted themselves to promoting the study of comparative literature in China. Unfortunately, after 1949, the study of comparative literature in Chinese mainland was stagnant for quite some time, and it was not resumed until the end of 1970s. Fortunately, scholars in Taiwan Province Province and Hongkong did not stop their research because of the negative political influence. After World War II, American comparative literature scholars put forward the so-called "parallel research", that is, even if there is no relationship between documents of various countries, comparative research can still be carried out. So Shakespeare can be compared with Tang Xianzu, and A Dream of Red Mansions can be compared with The Tale of Genji. Comparative literature research can even be interdisciplinary, such as literature and music, philosophy, religion, psychology and even mathematics. The beautiful images in some famous sentences in China's ancient poems, such as "the desert is lonely and the smoke is straight" and "the long river sets the yen", are said to be nothing more than words to explain the concepts of "verticality" and "tangency" in geometry, while "the poet lives in a Mulan boat" and "hammering with a hammer" may be suggestive activities, so they can leave a deep and beautiful impression on people, and so on. In the last decade or two, the study of comparative literature began to turn to the study of comparative culture, such as so-called post-colonial criticism, feminist criticism, gender criticism and so on.
First, the basic theory of comparative literature
1, definition:
Comparative literature is a subject that consciously expands the research object from the literature of one country, one nation or one region to the literature of two or more countries, nations and regions for "cross-cultural" comprehensive investigation and research.
In short, comparative literature is the study of the relationship between elements A and B in the field of literary research. The so-called "self-ignorance" ("Lao Tzu? Chapter 24), understanding "self" needs to take "the other" as the reference object, in order to better grasp things.
2. The meaning of "comparison": The meaning of "comparison" in the discipline of comparative literature has specific and exact theoretical content. It is a kind of thinking form, thinking process and methodology with specific connotation, aiming at grasping the internal relations of "bilateral" or "multilateral" literature and further understanding its essence. Comparison here refers to "bilateral" or "multilateral" cross-cultural (cross-literary) research, and "cross-cultural thinking" here refers to the thinking of literature by the discipline of comparative literature, which is the most basic theory of comparative literature. Therefore, comparative literature is the frontier discipline closest to international humanities and social sciences research, which can quickly perceive and accept the latest information in all aspects and extend its tentacles to the forefront of international academic research. Comparative literature respects the differences between different cultures and emphasizes the practice of equal dialogue between the East and the West and Sino-foreign relations on the basis of "harmony without difference" in order to achieve the new humanistic goal of mutual evidence, complementarity and mutual benefit.
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note:
(1) brunell et al. What is Comparative Literature, page 22, Peking University Publishing House, 1989.
(2) quoted from Sun's Concise Comparative Literature, page 65, China Youth Publishing House, 1988.