Approaches to Comparative Literature

The symbol is one of the most commonly invoked and yet loosely formulated tropes to be employed in literary studies. Unlike other terms of rhetoric, it is also widely invoked in other disciplines, from logic to semiotics to theology.  Derived from the Greek symballein, meaning “to bring together,” it has consistently served to mark the substitution of one object by another. As such, it touches on the basis processes of signification and representation. How is it to be distinguished from other signs, and from related concepts such as image, allegory or myth? The symbol has generated a rich and often contradictory body of speculation from the Greeks to the Romantics and well into the 20th century. In the romantic and postromantic eras, it points to the uncertain yet lingering place of religious feeling in an increasingly secular aesthetic realm, to the changing nature of sensory experience, and to the possibility of recuperating aesthetic forms that appear lost to the modern world. The symbol appears increasingly related to the enigma, the archaic, the esoteric, and to cultural otherness.

The symbol is also one of the few tropes to have generated a literary movement, symbolisme, which ushered in the modernist era in European literature and the plastic arts, particularly in France and Russia. Conventionally seen as marking the crisis of realism and its assumptions about representation, the symbol will also, in the Russian context, coincide with a historical  moment of imperial collapse and revolution.

The “symbolist” symbol thus marks a curious convergence of theory and practice: the epistemological, aesthetic, and even religious claims of the symbol in many ways determined the programmatic goals and failures of the European fin-de-siècle. We will address the aesthetics and epistemology of the symbol not merely as a literary-historical problem but also as one of geography. How does the symbol travel across cultural and linguistic space? What “chronotopic” possibilities does the symbol afford? Can the vicissitudes of the symbol allow us to understand how some of the founding tropes of romanticism and modernism move not only through time and space but also engender notions of time and space?

We will be particularly interested in crosscultural contact, and foundational oppositions such as East and West.

Readings include Aristotle, Schelling, Novalis, Creuzer, Hegel, Cassirer, Balzac, Baudelaire, Benjamin, Rodenbach, Biely, and Blok.