Taking Stock - Twenty-Five Years of Comparative Literary Research

"This essay addresses the question of how Comparative Literature contributes to a sense of being at home in the world. Comparative Literature is today more than ever a 'peculiar' discipline. It is better understood as an inter-discipline or a trans-discipline, maybe even a meta-discipline, for it has no clear text corpus, no distinct methodology, no identifiable center of inquiry. Perhaps because of this heterogeneity it can fit into our culturally heterogeneous world anywhere and can provide 'knowledge for living.' Recent reflections on the nature of world literature and Comparative Literature's relation to it have begun to redirect our attention back to literariness itself. Critical to this move is a double consciousness of being in the world but not just in the cultural world one physically inhabits"--