Manuel YANG
Familial Autobiography and the World:
A Review Article of Work by Kenzaburo

Thomas PAVEL
Review of Work by Souiller and Troubetzkoy

Ernst GRABOVSZKI
New Ways in Comparative Literature:
A Review Article of  New Work by Tötösy and Tötösy, Dimic, and Sywenky

Reviewer's Profile: Manuel Yang works in history, contemporary Japanese literary criticism and the history of the trans-pacific working class at the University of Toledo. He is currently translating the writings of the Japanese anti-militarist poet Kaneko Mitsuharu. E-mail: <manuel_x@yahoo.com>.

Familial Autobiography and the World:
A Review Article of Work by Kenzaburo

In this review article, I am discussing Oe Kenzaburo's Kaifukusuru kazoku (A Healing Family) (Tokyo: Kodansha <http://www.kodansha.co.jp>, 1995) and Yuruyakana kizuna (A Gentle, Relaxed Bond) (Tokyo: Kodansha <http://www.kodansha.co.jp>, 1996). Grounding its state of being and transformation on what he fondly calls the geographical and spiritual "margin" of Japan, Oe Kenzaburo's work (see, e.g., <http//www.asahi-net.or.jp/~gd7k-itu/oee.html> opens up a paradox -- or, to use a central vocabulary in his acceptance speech for the 1994 Nobel Prize for  Literature
<http://www2.passagen.se/tvs/tidning/nobel01.html>, "ambiguity" -- that indelibly reflects in its unique and inimitable way the international, theoretically self-conscious character of that segment of contemporary literature which is very much concerned with border-crossing, hybridity, and other cultural signatures of postmodernity." Oe's formative influences do not fit snugly into the reified categories of what we take to be distinctly "Japanese," "Western," "Eastern," or, for that matter, "modernist" or "postmodernist." The oral tradition of village mythology and legendary narrative of peasant rebellions as transmitted through the voice of his grandmother lies at the origin of his literary imagination as much as his childhood reading of two books that cultivated, respectively, his compass of moral being and sensual appreciation of nature, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Wonderful Travels of Nils. Later, this "compass of moral being" would develop a political form of its own under the influence of Watanabe Kazuo, a specialist in French Renaissance culture and Japanese translator of Rabelais who taught at the University of Tokyo, as well as through his systematic reading of Jean-Paul Sartre (whom Oe claims to be the only writer he read outside of class at the university -- Sartre's The Age of Reason was the topic of his graduation thesis). Throughout his literary life Oe has carried the habit of systematically traversing -- both in translation and in the original language -- the terrain of writers and poets, ranging from W.H. Auden to William Blake to Malcolm Lowry to W.B. Yeats to Dante Alighieri, and actively shaping them into metaphorical structures that undergird the images, style, and language of his major novels.

The succession of these influences in the "Western" tradition does not pose for Oe a dichotomous tension to his Japanese cultural identity -- as much as he has rejected the narrowly nativist or Orientalist streams of literary ideology to which some writers, both "Eastern" and "Western," have fallen prey -- but as integrative elements that bind and supplement it. The Sartrean investigation of literary commitment -- littérature engagée -- in the period of political and social upheavals in the late 1950s and 1960s, as well as the "structuralist baptism" -- as Oe terms it -- in the 1970s, that he had undergone were both attempts at theorizing and fructifying his literary practice, whose unitary movement was, as mentioned, constituted from the myths, voices, personal memories, and world-views embedded in the forest village of his childhood. Although such a literary orientation is very much part and parcel of the postmodern ethos of transgressing traditionally or hegemonically defined cultural borders and of assembling diverse cultural terms, elements, and relations to compose autobiographically distinct, creatively hybrid literary texts, Oe still maintains within his work a modernist conception of a writer as an autonomous, creative subject, whose moral agency counts as much as his or her propensity to aesthetic innovation and experimentation. To study the work of Oe Kenzaburo, then, is to contemporaneously explore the intimate interstices of comparative and world literature, to gauge within the span of a single writer's work the historical shifts and realignments that have taken place internationally on both geographical and aesthetic grounds with much creative turbulence and ferment in the last fifty years, and there are few textual guides better suited for initiating such a study than his two books of essays published in 1995 and 1996. Kaifukusuru kazoku (A Healing Family) (see <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/4770020481/qid=933181049/sr=1-6/002->9585834-6872063>) and Yuruyakana kizuna (A Gentle, Relaxed Bond) are each a collection of essays that explicitly addresses the process of healing that the Oe family has undertaken vis-à-vis Hikari, Oe's eldest, autistic son. Both books were written after Oe's acquisition of the Nobel literature prize and, in style and appearance, are homologous (the second book is essentially a sequel of the first). Both books are extensively illustrated by Oe's wife Yukari and, in many ways, their form -- as well as content -- exude this spirit of familial collaboration. One of the recurrent points of thematic reference is, for example, Hikari's musical composition and its relationship to Oe's creative work, and Oe expresses this relationship eloquently in detailed descriptions of Hikari's awakening to the sound of birds, discovery of his musical intuition, and the revitalizing effect this creative self-discovery has had on the father and rest of the family.

If contiguous in terms of the continuity of subject matter from his previous work, stylistically the two books constitute a sort of departure, a quiet and graceful simplicity of language has replaced the multilateral language and polyphonous voices with elaborate metaphors and long sentences that characterized his previous essays found in such collections as The Persistent Will (1968) and The Day the Whales Are Annihilated (1972). In the larger arc of Oe's literary life, such a stylistic transformation also, arguably, signifies a further entrenchment of his de-politicizing tendency that was noticeable in his work since the early 1970s. Although shifting its terrain of expression, this movement towards a simpler language continues to elaborate the themes of healing, recovery, and spiritual redemption that have powerfully animated and defined his "post-political" work. Oe's statements after the completion of The Blazing Tree trilogy (1993-1995), his self-proclaimed "last novel," have indicated that he intends to reform his literary style to a more elemental and down-to-earth shape after the fashion of the late work of Ibuse Masuji (see <http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/ibuse.htm>, the author of The Black Rain (1965; see <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/4770020481/qid=933181049/sr=1-6/002->9585834-6872063>), a classic novel about the survivors of the Hiroshima bombing.

As with its companion volume, A Healing Family covers quite a lot of grounds and each of its chapters can be read in isolation from the others, as all the chapters each have an autonomous theme that functions as an organizing principle. Such autonomous themes -- ranging from the earnest and honest humor of Dr. Moriyasu Nobuo, a now deceased physician who was in charge of Hikari, to the making of Hikari's music CD and its concert performance to Oe's brother-in-law and film director Itami Juzo to Oe's teacher at Tokyo University, Watanabe Kazuo -- loosely form a family portrait that extends beyond mere blood lines and embraces literary relationships -- for example, Inoue Yasuhi's novel Confucius and Dante's Divine Comedy are comparatively discussed in a chapter titled "Ah, Now, in My Hometown, a Light is..." around the tripartite metaphorical matrix of crisis, recovery, and redemption -- as well. It is Oe's literary conceit and testimony to his invariable capacity to register an apt term or an engaging image that each of the portraits and extended disquisition has at its center a particularly distinct word or phrase, flashing and illuminating the contours of a personality or an idea with a condensed, succinct gaze that is uniquely Oe's. What is, in fact, most striking about both of these books are the extraordinary sensitivity Oe displays towards language: certain words or phrases expand and fructify within his imagination to such a point that they take on associations and relationships that are deeply rooted in his personal family life, becoming the guiding thread to bring together what are, on the surface, widely variegated and only loosely connected topics.

Such words are, for example, "rehabilitation," "acceptance," and "decent," which form the tripartite, signifying context for a chapter by the title of "Accepting" (all translation from the Japanese are mine). Oe fluently interconnects these words in relation to a speech which he made at the World Congress on Rehabilitation held in Tokyo in 1988 and a documentary film about a twenty-year-old woman in a wheelchair who travels single-handedly through Kyoto to her grandmother's home in the countryside. The continuity of the two books is explicitly stressed through such linguistic bridges in the second volume, the first chapter -- also entitled "A Gentle, Relaxed Bond" -- has the following concluding remarks which set the tone of the rest of the book:

Having begun writing novels when I was a student and continuing that to today, I have not once taken formal employment. As concerns student life, I have never participated in so-called club activities -- when I was in high school, I had edited a journal for the cultural and literary club but, as that meant merely performing intensively that task about twice a year for a week and did not entail any activity within the cultural and literary club, I can't even remember the faces of the classmates with whom I edited the journal. On the other hand, although we have had a relaxed relationship, there's also a classmate like Itami Juzo who had become a friend for life. At university, despite my lack of money, I didn't live in the dorm. At first I wanted to live in a dorm but, as soon as the living arrangement was explained to me -- a few students got together and lived in a huge room in a dorm (such as I haven't lived since I was in the old high school) -- I ran away ... And I think to myself whether or not such things are what prevented me to have an experience of becoming a "true adult." Especially in the middle of my forties to fifties, I was anxious if such a defect of character was not also the defect of my literature. It is true now, though, that I think such a human defect is itself a positive element within the totality of my literature. ... Thinking over such things, I would like to now produce a freely connecting series of writing with the concrete image of the "relaxed, gentle bond" as the central theme. I am hoping that such will be -- for me in my relationship with Hikari and in terms of my family as a whole -- a natural development of what I have grasped as "a healing family." (14-15)

The power of revelation that both of these books metaphorically seek to articulate -- with carefully chosen (one is tempted to say, "illumined" by way of literary dialogue and imagination) words and phrases -- then has a literal counterpart in its ability to partially show us the background and autobiographical dimensions that were imaginatively fictionalized in Oe's novels from A Personal Matter (1964) onwards. Such power is not at all the stuff of solemnly composed, schematically formalized literature, as much as Oe has creatively appropriated structuralist, Bakhtinian, and Russian Formalist conceptions and ideas into his work. Rather, it lies in an intimate evocation of details and brief commentaries, as when Oe tells us off-handedly of his lifelong habit of endlessly searching for the right words and sentences to describe what he is seeing and observing as he is taking a walk or talking to someone. It is an enduring search sustained by an unwavering faith in the capacity of language to poetically crystallize the most pronounced features of an individual, a landscape, or an event into a few densely concentrated juxtaposition of words. This privileged stress on the power of language underlay his work from the beginning of his career (one may recall, for instance, his fondness for the terms "political imagination" and "situation" -- terms extracted from Norman Mailer and Jean-Paul Sartre, respectively -- which Oe profusely employed in interviews and writings during this period leading up to the late 1960s). And it is precisely this privileging of language which was instrumental in making possible the gradual transition from his politically vociferous -- at times even militant, albeit polemically -- voice to a more structurally mythological, even spiritually oriented one, denuded of its political substance except in name.

One of the most moving passages in the second volume revolves around a set of four chapters entitled "Twilight Readings," largely chronicling Oe's discovery of the Welsh poet R.S. Thomas (Oe includes in this section his Japanese translation of some lines of Thomas's verses). His description of the excitement, the feverish intensity, with which he paced back in a hotel room in Wales all night long until dawn as he read Thomas, impatiently telling himself how time was running out and how he needed to read all the books written on Thomas, gives one a sense of how Oe has continuously reconstructed and expanded his literary vision, how consistently Oe has kept his eyes afresh for new writers and thinkers to enrich and press him beyond whatever crisis -- personal, literary, or otherwise -- that he has confronted throughout his life. One comes to partly understand that, for Oe, reading -- usually designated as an antithesis of life and experience -- was and is an experientially essential act for the formation and development of his character and creative work. Although, as he himself never fails to emphasize, his work is deeply rooted in Shikoku -- the Southwestern island of Japan which is his place of birth and the area where his family resides -- with its mythopoeically conceived forests and marginality from the metropolitan center of Tokyo, this openness to influence, readiness to absorb influences, especially those stemming from the West, destabilizes the traditional dichotomous conception of Kipling's "East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet." In fact, what the actual history of international relations and political economy between these two regions of the world tells us is that the East and West were already always interfused with each other the European trade with and, later, colonization of Asia, Africa, and the Americas and, more recently, the ongoing neo-colonial relations with those same regions of the world or, as it is the case with Japan, regional delegation of control under ongoing U.S. imperial hegemony. Globalization, in short, was hardly a recent neo-liberal invention. One can date the cultural transactions lined in the conflicted, turbulent streams of this complex history all the way back to what Martin Bernal calls the Afro-Asiatic roots of ancient Greek culture, but, whenever one lays the periodizing origin of this cultural coming together, negotiation, and hybridization, the fact that it is one of the defining features of world history and literature is hardly controversial today. Oe's literature may then be seen as a latest expression of this historically constituted heteroglossia, to borrow Bakhtin's term, composed of both "Eastern" and "Western" currents and elements that no one can say who really originated or invented first.

Apart from such insights, we also find valuable insights into Oe's "defects of character" which are altogether of different order from the sense above. In "The Cracks in My Identity" in A Healing Family, he explains to us the roots of his "defect":

I lost my father when I was ten years old. As my father at that time was fifty years old, I have already passed his age when he died. However, there are times when I realize how I still carry the defect of character that I could not overcome due to having passed from boyhood to youth without having a father. ... Shall I call that something anarchic at the fundamental level? Although I have lived trying not to be uncourteous to those who are my elders, there was always something in me that refused to recognize their authority. Although it appears contradictory, I also tended to have a heartfelt inclination towards elder specialists as if they were my ideal father. I lose my power of criticism to such people. (82)

There is a glaring example of this loss of critical faculty -- which has long been the target of the more sensible critics of Oe, such as the Korean poet Kim Chi Ha and the Japanese progressive journalist Honda Katsuichi -- in the two respective chapters, "The Late Style" and "The Word 'Morality'," in A Gentle, Relaxed Bond. The two chapters in their turn recount Oe's visit to New York and the separate occasions during which he had talked with two intellectuals residing in that city, Edward Said (see, e.g., <http://www.leb.net/tesa/>) and Elie Wiesel
(see, e.g., <http://www.almaz.com/nobel/peace/1986a.html>). The juxtaposition of these two men is quite striking, as both of them have long been vehemently opposed to each other over issues revolving around the persistently crisis-ridden situation in the Middle East, a place which has a central political and imaginative significance for both of them. Wiesel, who has survived the Nazi holocaust to impressionistically and movingly tell his tale in his classic novel Night (1958), is well known as a defender of Israeli state policies, exhorting himself and others to maintain "silence" in the face of whatever the Israelis do (see <http://www.ukar.org/wiesel.html>). Said, whose family was forcibly expelled from Palestine with the Israeli takeover and who is one of the foremost literary scholars of his generation, has consistently criticized what is essentially a colonialist and apartheid regime in Israel. It is possible that Oe is not aware of this division and difference between the two men. However, given the warm comments Oe extends to Said's humanity and struggle to carve out a passage for Palestinian national liberation that would exist on truly equal and mutually symbiotic grounds with Israeli independence, the absence of any criticism or comments on this point following an encounter with Wiesel is all the more astonishing -- or not, if one goes by what Oe has said regarding the loss of critical power to those "elder specialists" who have drawn his admiration. For someone who counseled the need for practitioners of literature to make statements on political situations with the risk of their total responsibility in his early years, it is difficult to observe this as anything other than a kind of critical devolution.

Partly an intimate family portrait (in an expansive sense, as noted); a memoir; a travelogue (a trip to Bali with colleagues and a "musical" journey to Salzburg and Vienna with his wife and Hikari at the invitation of friends are recounted in the first volume while the second volume mentions his trips to New York, Atlanta, and other parts of the world outside the North American perimeter); a collection of reproduction or excerpts from speeches, liner notes for Hikari's CDs, and letters he has written; background notes on a film adaptation of his novel A Quiet Life
(see <http://j-entertain.co.jp/itami/itmhomej.html>, scripted and directed by his brother-in-law, Itami); literary criticism; freewheeling essays in a quotidian mode; and, most significantly for Oe's future production, a preface to the elaboration of his "late style," the two books -- despite their simplicity of style and expression -- are as multidimensional a creature as the author is. Together, they are an eloquently carved mirror upon which Oe reflects his state of mind, life, and creativity right before his departure for Princeton in 1996.

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Reviewer's Profile: Thomas Pavel works in Romance languages and literatures at the University of Chicago. His books include The Poetics of Plot: The Case English Renaissance Drama (Minnesota, 1985), Fictional Worlds (Harvard, 1986), The Feud of Language: A Critical History of Structuralism (Blackwell, 1988), L'Art de l'éloignement (Gallimard, 1996), and, with Claude Brémond, De Barthes à Balzac. Fictions d'un critique, critiques d'une fiction (Albin Michel, 1998). He now works on a history of the novel. E-mail: <JTPavel@compuserve.com>.

Review of Didier Souiller and Wladimir Troubetzkoy, eds.,
Littérature comparée. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997. 787 pages, index.

One of the enviable features of scholarly life in France is the high intellectual level of college handbooks. Far from representing mere syntheses of existing points of view, university manuals are entrusted with the task of formulating new hypotheses and experimenting with new ideas. The little books published in the ubiquitous series "Que sais-je?" (PU de France) often express theses as powerful and original as those contained in any scholarly monograph, and, more recently, the series "Collection Premier Cycle" (also PU de France), which is devoted to undergraduates, brings out works that deserve the attention of advanced scholars. I learned a considerable amount from Didier Souiller's Roman picaresque, Roger Zuber's La littérature française du XVIIe siècle (both in "Que sais-je?"), Christian Biet's La Tragédie (Armand Colin), Marie-Claire Bancquart and Pierre Cahné's Littérature française du XXe siècle (PU de France). Many other examples could be cited.

The recently published Littérature comparée,edited and largely written by Didier Souiller and Wladimir Troubetzkoy, is destined to serve as an undergraduate manual of comparative literature, but its wealth of insights and originality of views makes it into an important scholarly contribution, worthy of being read by all comparatists. The contributors include the two editors as well as several younger talented scholars: Dominique Budor, Philippe Chardin, Vivette Pouzet, Sophie Rabau, Jean Raimond, Armand Strubel, Pascale Volney, and Georges Zaragoza. The authors discuss the main concepts of literariness, examine the history of literary genres, sketch the historical evolution of the most important European literatures, and conclude with a survey of textual criticism.

Myths, motifs, and themes are the units of literary content highlighted in the first part of the book ("The Literary Fact"); they usually emerge in a single national tradition and, thanks to their flexibility they radiate in all directions (Pierre Brunel's important insights on literary circulation of values are instrumental here). The fortune of a literary work is the result of this process, while the aggregation of successful works creates the image of a national literature abroad (the notion of image belongs to D.-H. Pageaux). Recent reception theories and the structuralist "intertextuality" are in turn examined and criticized. Next, literary writing is linked to the expression of the self and to the world it imagines. First-person narratives slowly evolve from a picaresque view of the self as the site of sin and guilt to the modern vision which at first examines the self with attention and curiosity (39), and later promotes it to the position of absolute ruler of literary experience. After a rich chapter on the ways literary traditions envision the imaginary worlds they evoke, the authors discuss representation, mimesis, symbolism, and temporality. A highly suggestive section on the literary expression of the "inexpressible" explores the links between poetry and mysticism.

The second part, "A Comparative Approach to the History of Genres," is divided into six chapters dealing with poetry, tragedy, comedy, the novel, the fantastic, and the short story. At first sight, the division of the topic appears somewhat disconcerting, insofar as it sometimes employs discursive criteria (the chapter on poetry includes both lyric and epic poetry) while on other occasions it concentrates on well-defined genres (the novel, the short story) or on ways of building the fictional world (the fantastic). But since genre theory is far from having established a coherent taxonomic system, the informal approach selected by the authors makes sense: by focusing on intuitive divisions, they group together large sets of texts which have either a common history or a common thematics. The chapter on the novel, significantly entitled "The Adventure of the Novel," is particularly successful in demonstrating the complexity of the novelistic tradition as well as its incessant and unpredictable renewal. The tradition of the ancient novel, presented as the ancestor of the modern European prose narrative, conflicts with the indigenous medieval tradition, which, according to the authors, appears to have little influence after the sixteenth century. The picaresque and the epistolary novel bring about a "subjective turn," while in eighteenth-century English realism the objectivity of the surrounding world is emphasized, both trends contributing to a long term process that the authors call "naturalizing fiction" (255). Realism rules the nineteenth-century novel and the historical novel is seen as an autonomous tradition grounded in the historical continuity of humanity. Finally, twentieth-century narrative prose is discussed in relation to meta-fiction and the creative self-awareness it encourages.

The third part, "A Comparatist Approach to Literary History" offers broad historical sketches of French, English, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, and Scandinavian literature. These sketches obviously do not aspire to replace the existing literary histories of these national traditions. Rather, they attempt to show how comparatist thinking enhances the appreciation of vast historical movements, since genres and literary trends in one country cannot be fully understood without reference to its neighbours. Interestingly, while for older periods national distinctions are maintained, the literature of the twentieth-century is treated as a specifically international enterprise, in which the mutual awareness of its participants appears to erase national cultural borders.

Finally, the book contains a section on critical practice, entitled "Working with Texts in Comparative Literature." Analytic and synthetic techniques of reading are presented, together with sensible advice on writing examination papers (the nightmare of the French students, who are subjected to an endless series of written ordeals).

The material presented in the volume is so vast and so diverse that inevitably readers might find some decisions questionable. I, for instance, would have preferred to find more details on the oral tradition, both in poetry (during the discussion of the epic and of lyric forms) and in relation to narrative forms. For instance, Adalbert Stifter's importance for Austrian literature and nineteenth-century realism might have been better emphasized. Curiously, late nineteenth-century Spanish prose-writing (Perez-Galdos and Alas) is entirely neglected. Some sections on narrative prose -- the one on the American novel, for instance -- would have made more sense if they had been integrated in the chapter on the novel rather than in the section on the English speaking tradition. The intergeneric links could in some instances have been brought forth more energetically, as for instance in the case of the novel and the novella. But these are small points, which do not diminish the remarkable achievement of the authors. In Littérature comparée, they gave us not only a wonderfully rich handbook and a well-written work of criticism; it is also a distinguished, thoughtful contribution to the field of comparative studies.

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Reviewer's Profile: Ernst Grabovszki works in theory of comparative literature and social history of literature at the University of Vienna. He has contributed articles to the Encyclopedia of Contemporary German Culture (Ed. John Sandford. Routledge <http://www.routledge.com>, 1999) and Makers of Western Culture, 1800-1914: A Biographical Dictionary of Literary Influences (Ed. John Powell and Derek Blakeley. Greenwood Press <http://www.greenwood.com>, forthcoming). He also reviews books for the Wiener Zeitung at <http://www.wienerzeitung.at/wz-netscape.htm> and he recently published an interview entitled "Geisteswissenschaft als Berufung" he conducted with Steven Tötösy for the newspaper's 30-31 July 1999 issue. E-mail: <ernst.grabovszki@aon.at>.

New Ways in Comparative Literature:
Review Article of New Work by Tötösy and Tötösy, Dimic, and Sywenky

The following is a review article of  two recent volumes: Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek's Comparative Literature: Theory, Method, Application (Amsterdam-Atlanta, GA: Rodopi <http://www.rodopi.nl>, 1998. Softcover, 298 pages, bibliography, index) and Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek and/et Milan V. Dimic with/avec Irene Sywenky, eds. / Textes réunis et présentés par, Comparative Literature Now: Theories and Practice / La Littérature Compareé à l'heure actuelle. Théories et réalisations (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1999. Hardcover, 930 pages, bibliography).

It is always refreshing and soothing to read new introductions to or surveys of a discipline because this makes evident that a discipline is not dead -- as Susan Bassnett claimed for comparative literature in 1993 (47). Steven Tötösy (for a list of his publications, see <http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/totosycv.html) made the effort to put comparative literature in the context of cultural studies and to apply his theoretical framework of the systemic and empirical approach to literature and culture which is a conglomerate of the schools of Siegfried J. Schmidt's Empirische Literaturwissenschaft, Itamar Even-Zohar's polysystem theory, the theory of the literary institution (Jacques Dubois), Robert Estivals' système de l'écrit theory, and of other theoretical approaches. He does so because of his conviction that comparative literature is in need of a methodological background in order to avoid marginalization by academic and political institutions: "My basic premise is that in the current situation an approach that promises innovation and where the results of study may have an opportunity to persuade the taxpayer, the politician, indeed, the general public -- not to speak of university administration -- to recognize the importance of the study of literature as a socially constructive and necessary educational and life force should be paid serious attention to" (19). Tötösy expects from his systemic and empirical approach a more evidence based and a less speculative or essayistic study of comparative literature. Besides the Bernheimer Report of 1993, this book is another step towards the contextualization not only of the literary text, as Bernheimer and his contributors suggest (42), but of the discipline itself which, when based on strong methodological grounds, would be able to acquire a very much needed disciplinary identity. It should set us thinking that, for instance, Earl Miner is not able to find an answer to the question "What is literary comparison?" (21) and therefore notes disappointedly: "I could find nothing on literary comparison, whether by my own searches or in questions to colleagues. To my surprise, philosophers were equally dumb" (21). Of course, I do not want to give the impression that Earl Miner is to blame for any absence of methodology of comparison, but there is evidence that there have been too few endeavors towards defining the notion and the methodology of comparison by comparatists. It is thus astonishing that other sciences such as history, ethnography, etc. have sounded comparative methodology more or less comprehensively (for history, see, for example, Haupt and Kocka, for ethnography see Schweizer, and for the social sciences see Ragin). And the same is with other theoretical approaches against which comparative literature often seems to be immune.

The best characterization of Tötösy's view of comparative literature is reflected by his ten "general principles" of the discipline and field which cover 1) the importance of method in comparative studies, 2) the comparatist's ability and willingness "to move and to dialogue between cultures" (16), 3) the knowledge of several languages, literatures and disciplines, 4) to study literature in relation to other arts, 5) the use of English as a lingua franca of communication, scholarship, and knowledge transfer, 6) the study of literature within the context of culture, 7) the encouragement of the approach of inclusion: "This inclusion extends to all Other, all marginal, minority, and peripheral and it encompasses both form and substance" (17), 8) the attention on methodology in interdisciplinary study, 9) the effort to avoid the paradox of globalization versus localization within the institutional margins of the discipline, and finally 10) the vocational commitment of the student and scholar of comparative literature, that is the necessity of the practioners' reflections on the reason for and the goals of their studies.

So, what is new about these principles? Tötösy's "manifesto" will not surprise anyone working in the field of comparative literature or even in other areas of literary study. But they sum up matters of course for any comparatist while there is a built in solicitation for interest in the discipline. Also, many points in the principles have been discussed, for instance, by the diverse reports on professional standards (e.g., see Bernheimer for the most recent of such reports). In sum, it seems useful to emphasize these principles especially when facing students who are asking themselves what studies to take up or when faced by such questions by colleagues as by Miner (above).

Following the general principles of comparative literature Tötösy then presents work in which he applied them: "Literature and Cultural Participation," "Comparative Literature as/and Interdisciplinarity," "Cultures, Peripheralities, and Comparative Literature," "Women's Literature and Men Writing about Women," "The Study of Translation and Comparative Literature," and in his final chapter, "The Study of Literature in the Electronic Age." An aspect of importance for the recent global social development is the process of migration, immigration, ethnicity, and cultural diversity and that Tötösy discusses, with regard to literature, in some detail. Clearly, this area of interest binds comparative literature to topical and explosive political and social questions and it is therefore near at hand and desirable that comparative literature would contribute to these social and cultural processes in order to strengthen its relevance within the humanities. From my perspective, Tötösy's discussion would have benefitted from work in intercultural German philology, an area that has made respectful steps towards the study of xenologia (see Wierlacher). More, it would be rewarding for both German studies and comparative literature if there were more intensive cooperation and interdisciplinarity. I would also like to suggest that for comparative literature -- and for Tötösy's own work -- theoretical discussions in ethnology and the writing of ethnography are also fields worth to look at attentively. For example, one of the first steps towards a reception of auto-ethnography and its transfer to literary studies and comparative literature, at least in the German speaking countries, was surveyed by Doris Bachmann-Medick (1996; see also Clifford and Marcus; Berg and Fuchs). It is in context that Tötösy's book offers some interesting insights into the notion of border writing and the centre/periphery-model in postcolonial theory, paradigms he develops into a theory of "inbetween peripherality" (131) in order to apply this framework to the work of three (East) Central European authors (Cartarescu, Kukorelly, and Esterházy). The application of the framework to the texts of these authors reveals a "narrative of change" after 1989, which means that certain "thematic, linguistic etc., features in the literature of the region are new in form and content" (136). The new situation is also represented by a differentiated discourse on the erotic, the lack of politics and history, and other thematic parameters owing to a shift in the social status of the author and tendencies that are characterized as "subjective sensibility." A stimulating example of peripherality within as well as of a literary text in the context of both Central Europe and ethnic minority writing is devoted to Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize winning novel, The English Patient.

Broad space is devoted to "Women's Literature and Men Writing about Women." Tötösy starts from a "functional and operational framework of gender responsibility" (175) (based on ethical constructivism in radical constructivism), arguing that it is necessary for male academics to overcome any beliefs or attitudes of/toward negative discrimination, this of course not only in academic but also in private, political, social, etc., life. But reading a paragraph -- in Tötösy's proposal of gender parity -- like "Whether your spouse is at home or whether she is working, housework must be shared. If you have the misfortune of having grown up without acquiring skills such as cooking, doing laundry, etc., you should learn them. Also, it is important that we [the husbands/companions] do the less `fun-type' housework..." (175) in a book on comparative literature leaves me puzzled: is a man a better comparatist if he is able to cook and do the laundry? And what about non-Western societies where the woman is forced by social and religious tradition to do the housework and raise children all by herself? In applying the gender parity proposals and his basic comparative literature framework, in this chapter too Tötösy develops a methodological and -- in this case -- an ideological (ethical constructivism, as he designates the question, or politically correct?) basis by means of an interpretation of several texts by the modernist Hungarian Margit Kaffka and the English Dorothy Richardson.

The volume's last chapter is devoted to "Literature in the Electronic Age." It is true that the new media, especially the internet and the world wide web, are of increasing importance for any literary study and academic life not only because of the internet's rapid growth. The user benefits from the possibility of faster, cheaper, and less circumstantial communication as well as from information retrieval by means of both primary and secondary texts and from online bibliographies and theme-oriented sites. The new media on the other hand effect the traditional roles of author, distributor, and reader, and, of course, our notion of the printed text, especially when discussed in the context of the digital space (cyberspace) and it is these aspects that would have deserved more attention in Tötösy's discussion.

Steven Tötösy's most recent collected volume, one he co-edited with Milan V. Dimic and Irene Sywenky, is a selection from presentations at the XIVth Triennial Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA), held at the University of Alberta in 1994. The volume contains chapters -- with selected articles in English and French -- on "Comparative Literature and Literary Theory," "Literary History and Histories of Literature," "Genres and Textual Properties," "The Novel and Other Prose," "Drama and Literature and Other Arts," "Literature and Film," and "Literature and Technology," and a final chapter with Tötösy's "A Bibliography of Theories, Methods, and Histories of Comparative Literature" (the latter is also available -- with continuous additions of new titles -- on the world wide web at <http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/library.html>. The volume is closed with one of the co-editor's, Milan V. Dimic's -- who was, with Tötösy, the general organizer of the Alberta ICLA Congress and who recently retired from the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta -- thoughts on the "Future(s) of Comparative Literature." According to Tötösy's introduction to the volume (13-18), the third co-editor, Irene Sywenky, was responsible for one of the most onerous and time-consuming tasks of the publication of this volume of 930 pages, namely for the electronic transfers, formatting, and MLA style formatting of the articles (see 16-18).

To a certain extent these papers can be read as a supplement to Tötösy's approach towards a new comparative literature although the papers were not selected for this purpose of course. Interestingly, the French-language abstract on the back cover of the volume makes this clear: "Ce volume ... est ainsi offert un examen pratiquement systèmatique des questions de littérature comparée qui définissent le champ présent de la recherche...." The section "Literature and Technology" for instance contains further remarks on "Postmodern Textuality in the Age of the Computer" by Benzi Zhang, or "Computer Database Use in Literary Study" by Rüdiger Campe up to "The Machine as Allegory and the Literary Text" by Monika Schmitz-Emans, all containing relevant discussions about historical and/or contemporary issues relating to new media.

Traditional topics in comparative literature such as world literature (see Hendrik Birus' article on "Main Features of Goethe's Conception of World Literature"), or comparisons of single authors and works (e.g., Ming Dong Gu's "A Comparison of Some Chinese and English Poetic Concepts" or Yiu-Nam Leung's "Lord Chesterfield and Tseng Kuo-fan") appear among newer approaches demonstrating the interdisciplinary strength of comparative studies. In his article, "Littérature comparée et histoire des mentalités: Concurrence ou collaboration?," Yves Chevrel for instance dares to (re)sound the relation between comparative literature and the histoire des mentalités, a central paradigm of French social history. This is interesting if for no other reason that Marc Bloch has regretted the missing methodological parallels between social history and comparative literature already in the 1920s because of the latter's restrictive use of comparison. But the histoire des mentalités of course challenges literary and comparative studies simply for the reason that literature is -- or ought to be? -- their raison d'être. Another rewarding aspect of interdisciplinarity for comparative literature is outlined by Antony Tatlow in his article "Literature and Textual Anthropology" by examining some works of Bertolt Brecht and is therefore an opportune addition to Tötösy's own discussion of cultures and peripheralities.

If it is legitimate to observe methodological as well as thematic tendencies within comparative literature studies by consulting scholarly textbooks and conference papers -- and it seems legitimate insofar as such volumes often describe a discipline's state of the art at a certain point of time -- one could argue that contemporary comparative literature is concerned with intra-, inter-, and extra-textual problems; a strong effort to establish a theoretical and methodological basis for the discipline; to include the new media and their theoretical aspects into literary and comparative studies; to break open the limits to other arts; the question of the social and political relevance of the comparative study of literature and culture; and a more global view of the discipline by paying attention to such countries that have not yet been noticed so much by scholarship such as Japan, Spain, India, etc. All these efforts seem to be appropriate to enrich the "modest universe of Comparative Literature" (Dimic 927).

Works Cited

Bachmann-Medick, Doris, ed. Die anthropologische Wende in der Literaturwissenschaft. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1996.
Bassnett, Susan. Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.
Berg, Eberhard, and Martin Fuchs, ed. Kultur, soziale Praxis, Text. Die Krise der ethnographischen Repräsentation. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995.
Bernheimer, Charles. "The Bernheimer Report, 1993. Comparative Literature at the Turn of the Century." Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism. Ed. Charles Bernheimer. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. 39-48.
Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus, ed. Writing Culture: The Poetics and the Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986.
Haupt, Heinz-Gerhard, and Jürgen Kocka, eds. Geschichte und Vergleich. Ansätze und Ergebnisse international vergleichender Geschichtsschreibung. Frankfurt: Campus, 1996.
Miner, Earl. Comparative Poetics: An Intercultural Essay on Theories of Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990.
Ragin, Charles C. The Comparative Method: Moving Beyond Qualitative and Quantitative Strategies. Berkeley: U of California P, 1987.
Schweizer, Thomas. "Interkulturelle Vergleichsverfahren." Ethnologie. Einführung und Überblick. Ed. Hans Fischer. Berlin: Reimer, 1992. 421-39.
Wierlacher, Alois, ed. Kulturthema Fremdheit. Leitbegriffe und Problemfelder kulturwissenschaftlicher Fremdheitsforschung. München: iudicium, 1993.

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