It is difficult to classify David Damrosch’s book Comparing the Literatures. At first glance, it appears to be a comparative literature textbook, with an introduction and first chapter devoted to the origins of the discipline, followed by seven chapters that address seven keywords—emigrations, politics, theories, languages, literatures, worlds, and comparisons—and a final chapter of conclusions. In itself this is a significant milestone, for no single-authored textbook on comparative literature had been published in the United States since Claudio Guillén’s (1993) Challenge of Comparative Literature. As Guillén’s textbook is a translation from a 1985 Spanish original specifically conceived for Spanish academe, Entre lo uno y lo diverso: Introducción a la literatura comparada (Guillén 1985), one may go back even farther to Robert J. Clements’s (1978) Comparative Literature as Academic Discipline: A Statement of Principles, Praxis, Standards...
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Book Review|
June 01 2022
Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age
Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age
. By David Damrosch. Princeton, NJ
: Princeton University Press
, 2020
. x + 386 pp.
César Domínguez
César Domínguez is associate professor of comparative literature at the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela in Spain. His latest book is Introducing Comparative Literature: New Trends and Applications (2015, coauthored with Haun Saussy and Darío Villanueva). He is completing two books tentatively titled Auerbach en México: Para otra geopolítica de la literatura mundial and Law and the Making of Modern World Literature.
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Modern Language Quarterly (2022) 83 (2): 227–230.
Citation
César Domínguez; Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age. Modern Language Quarterly 1 June 2022; 83 (2): 227–230. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-9644734
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