Is a Non-global Universe Possible?

What Universals in the Theory of Comparative Literature (1952-2002)

Have to Say about it

Didier Coste

Although a vote has not been taken, I guess that most of us, ordinary people,

citizens and subjects, at planetary scale, would rather have one world than two or more

conflicting ones. It is also fairly obvious that huge sectors of the population of the world

are not ready or nearly ready to pay the price of a single economic, political or symbolic

model in order to achieve such unity. Understandably, any such model is immediately

branded “imperialist ”, except by the minority of agents who identify with it and are

actively or passively engaged in propagating it. In other terms, we do want one peaceful

world, but it should be like a public space, an open forum, a playground, a maidan1 not an

ecclesia or community of beliefs such as the one best exemplified by the actors of the

Wall Street stock exchange, we want it varied, multifarious, not ruled from above by

common principles of behavior and representation (such as a shared grand historical

narrative).

Some of us still or again deem art to be the aesthetically enjoyable traffic of self-

representation that human societies have taken upon themselves to delegate to relatively

autonomous individual or collective agents. It is no wonder that those few of us who,

whether out of sheer luck or staunch commitment, persist in making serious sense of

literature and art, aspire to a peaceful unhampered flow of values and images across an

open field at anthropological scale. At the same time, even when we are invested with the

magic gifts of the English language and up to date theoretical subtleties, we are not

always ready to dissolve all differences into insipidity by boiling down to stock the shock

of meaningfulness in a standard can of Campbell soup. This is to say that the present

predicament of Comparative Literature should not be dismissed lightly as alien to wide

ranging political and ethical concerns. Joseph Hillis Miller rightly stresses that the

substitution of Cultural Studies for Comparative Literature not only acquiesces in the

“smaller and smaller role [played] worldwide [by literature] in the new globalized

cultures,”2 it “can function as a way to contain and tame the threat of the invasive

otherness the new technologies bring across the thresholds of our homes and

workplaces.”(145) A containing and taming, he adds, that, while rebuilding firm

boundaries, has also the additional unfortunate side effect of reducing radical otherness to

sameness.

Three lectures originally dealing with “the new Comparative Literature ”,

delivered by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in May 2000, were to be published in May

2003 under the title Death of a Discipline. Despite Jean Franco’s claim that “Death of a

Discipline is not a lament but a promise ” since “Professor Spivak invites us to imagine

an inclusive Comparative Literature freed from its traditional national anchorings, a

border-crossing discipline, ”3 there is nothing innocent about the new sinister title when,

in Spivak’s posted lecture summaries, she denounced as a severe threat both the “current

humanist and universalist backlash in the discipline ” and “humanism’s seduction in the

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face of a seemingly uncontrollable plurality. “4 Must Comparative Literature be killed in

order to be reborn in a body endowed with a better “political agency ”, and if so, should

we trust its self-appointed executioner ? Is there not a risk that a non-cultural and

deconstructive concept of collectivity —whatever it means— may bring with it, for

opposite reasons, the demise of that mutually respectful alterity that major theorists born

at the beginning of last century saw in dire straits due to the overwhelming pressure of a

babelian market-place ruled by the iron laws of profit and competition ?

Exactly fifty years ago, Erich Auerbach already noted that the “visionary concept”

of Weltliteratur (“for it transcends national literatures without […] destroying their

individualities”) was severely jeopardized by the one-world syndrome, “the process of

imposed uniformity.”5 “And herewith the notion of Weltliteratur would be at once

realized and destroyed.” (3) But he laid the blame on an “ahistorical system of

education,” (6) while René Étiemble, who passed away on January 7, 2002, was

eventually just as pessimistic about the future of his “littérature vraiment générale” and

“littérature universelle”, in spite of his having always considered historicism as reductive

and blind to the universal nature of literary phenomena.6

We shall examine how the definite incompatibility of Comparative Literature’s

universals with “globalization”, however paradoxical it may seem at first sight, is in

keeping with the ideological thrust of the discipline in the long term. A detailed analysis

of that clash should enable or at least help us to do three things we badly need to put on

our agenda, in this order: a) pay more attention to developments in postmodern theory,

postcolonial and multicultural studies, etc., where we hardly acknowledge their existence,

as in Continental Europe and especially in France; b) conversely, become less dependent

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on and uncritical of those recent trends where we are, as in the Anglophone, or rather

Anglo-writing world; c) redraw our methods and objectives so that we may fulfill again a

responsible “general interest” intellectual role in the present and the foreseeable future. It

is significant and alarming that Comparative Literature, as a discipline and as an outlook,

a Weltanschauung, has come under attack from the Social Sciences sector as well as from

academics dealing in national literatures, almost everywhere in the world, except for

some pockets of resistance such as in India where diversity has long been seen as

constitutive of the nation.

Keeping that in mind, I shall look into the nature and scope of universals and

universalism in the theory and practice of Comparative Literature. Secondly I shall

question the philosophical, logical and ideological implications of the acceptation and the

rejection of those universals in the context of the fuzzy concept of globalization. Thirdly I

shall try to draw a few urgent practical lessons from the confrontation of the discourses of

universalist Comparative Literature Studies with those of Postcolonial and similar

approaches in the face of the “globalization” of literature itself.

***

Comparative Literary Studies, in the last fifty years, has been deeply marked, if

not obsessed by the question of universals and universalism. This is particularly striking

—and significant— in France, which is not only the academic birthplace of Comparative

Literature, but also the only country where the discipline has been fully institutionalized.

Its teaching at all levels of higher literary education, although in the shadow of

remarkably chauvinistic French Literature studies —thus supposed to “open up” to “our

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European neighbors and the world”— does not imply a real recognition of the

multiculturalism of our knowledge, everyday practical behavior and aesthetic experience.

Not unlike diplomacy, Comparative Literature is less valued for its scientific

achievements than for its ambiguous “universalism” or universal reach, which may be

understood in three different ways: a) as the radiating outcrop of the spirit of the French

Revolution, embodied in the genius of the French language; b) as a critique of French

chauvinism, narrowness of mind, latent xenophobia and domineering attitudes; c) as a

reaffirmation of unchanging ancestral values (we Frenchmen have always been universal,

more so than anyone else). On the death of Étiemble, official homage of type (a) was

expectedly paid to him by the then social-democrat Minister of Culture, Catherine Tasca

(he was, she said, an “ambassador of Literature, a fighter for the purity of the French

language”), while the leftist Turkish writer and scholar Nedim Gursel praised him for his

defense of small languages and his fierce critique of gallocentrism, and the far right (the

“mythocritical” school of Gilbert Durand) remained decorously silent.

Although the quest for literary universals is strictly contemporary with the first

developmental phase of Comparative Literature and it was hardly ever abandoned, even

by its fiercest opponents, it will be best examined through the militant program of

Étiemble and his main surviving international supporter, the Romanian Em. Prof. Adrian

Marino. The epistemological set of problems they formulated has played a leading role in

the construction and maintenance of the field and methods of Comparative Studies, even

if it has coexisted to this day with conventional, often decontextualized binary

comparison, “factual” studies of sources, influence and reception, and other little

theorized “exercises”. For their part, most literary theorists I can think of, from Wolfgang

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Kayser to Antonio García Berrío through Aguiar e Silva, Itamar Even Zohar and Jean

Bessière, however narrow their geopoetic limitations when they are European, would

consider any breaking up of the unity of literature at large as a fatal blow to the

Literaturwissenschaft they want to build or consolidate. This is made even clearer by

major Indian literary historians and theorists, from R.K. Dasgupta to Sisir Kumar Das

and, lately, Milind Malshe. All of them would probably subscribe to René Wellek’s

famous statement: “Whatever the difficulties into which a conception of universal literary

history may run, it is important to think of literature as a totality and to trace the growth

and development of literature without regard to linguistic distinction.”7 It should be noted

that Wellek’s phrasing by no means dismisses linguistic difference as irrelevant to the

study of literary texts, it only rejects linguistic distinction as a criterion of exclusion of

certain literary productions and as a ground for methodological differentiation, as soon as

literature itself is the object of study. What, then, are those literary universals, called

“invariants” by Étiemble, that might constitute the building blocks —or the playing

cards— of what I shall henceforth call “(classical) comparative universalism”?

Adrian Marino, in one of his several studies of the invariants, chose to hierarchize

them in a four-tiered model, from the “deepest” to the most external level.8 The first layer

is made of the anthropological structures of the human mind (seen as psyche and

imaginary). To the second layer belong the “unity and theoretic and systematic ordering

of ideas ” (topoi) as they could be postulated independently from any contact between

actual texts. The third layer groups the “literary invariants proper”, such as major generic

structures (epic or drama, for example). Finally, at the fourth level, we find the

“theoretical literary invariants”, i.e. the common discourse about “literature” and critical

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framing of texts without which literature could not be envisioned as a unified field of

practice or an identifiable object of knowledge. This is certainly an elegant and clever

“montage” insofar as it manages to be hierarchical both ways (“factually” piled up from

bottom to top, on a vertical axis of deep structures that support the superstructures, but

intellectually seen from above, from the ethereal, overarching vantage point of the

metatheorist) and thus circular and self sufficient, literariness itself being safely tucked in

the middle. But it is certainly not the only manner of categorizing the many invariants

scattered throughout Étiemble’s own essays of “truly general” or “universal” literature as

well as in hundreds and thousands of Comparative Literature publications by other

scholars.

Étiemble, in his blunt anti-historicism, insisted that all invariants can, by

definition, be found in any time and any geographical location —which does not mean,

beware, that they are all actualized everywhere and ever—, but some invariants could

clearly find a more appropriate niche in olden times (not as past actuality but as function

and image), in the archaic, within or without, and others in a rationalizing, classifying and

analytic logos: I would take as an easy (perhaps too easy) example of archaic stuff the

hubris of the hero, versus the catharsis facilitated by the tragic structure according to

Aristotle. On the other hand, general and comparative metrics (and rhythmics) makes it

relatively clear that the composition of verse is largely dependent on linguistic structures

(phonological, syntactic and graphic), shared by certain but not all languages; the

question, then, would be: is only the concept of verse a universal, or are the many

different but not unlimited combinations of number-accent-quantity-tone with hypotax-

paratax and ideogrammatic-pictogrammatic-alphabetic graphic features, also universals

that may occur anywhere without actually occurring everywhere? Although such

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problems, offset by humanist and political preoccupations and a cautious attitude to

structuralism, have never been fully thought out by (classical) comparative universalism,

their careful formulation would help us “reset” universalism for our time. The conditions

of possibility of the invariants could then be logically construed as those of possible

worlds within a nominally anthropological universe. In fact, Étiemble’s main weakness is

to have seen himself too much as a fighter on many fronts, even on all fronts at once

(since stupidity, according to him, is universal); he probably overshot his goal by

reducing the role of “history” in comparative literary studies to a test of erudition and an

occasional zooming in on context-bound detail, but he was fully conscious of the

historicity of the actualization of universals, their textual embodiment and reception.

***

Nevertheless, whatever the scientific case for or against literary universals, and

whatever their truth value and cognitive status (on the apodictic, hermeneutic, and

heuristic planes), they can definitely be seen as a defensive gesture against the ills of

cultural relativism. At the same time, whether or not they may be understood as a modern

extension or an additional property of the supposedly disembodied Enlightenment

subject, their implicit or explicit rejection in favor of the primacy of regional/ethnic

differentiations is also informed by an ideological position regarding that subject,

amounting to its redefinition or its cancellation. Curiously, when Ulrich Weisstein

“postulated that Comparative Literature is concerned with confronting the products of

different national literatures,”9 dictated that “the term ‘national literature’ needs to be

defined in a way that is binding” (11) and correlatively raised the question “whether a

particular world view […] may be regarded as producing national literary traits,” (13) the

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unsophisticated quality of his framing of the domain of exposition should not hide some

kinship of thought with the most advanced postcolonial elaborations. I will not refrain

from stressing that, if not an objective alliance, there is at least a degree of unknowing or

unacknowledged collaboration between those old-fashioned comparative theorists who

are keen to establish and motivate boundaries, and those who place community before

culture and keep pointing at the asymmetrical difficulties of border crossing. The former

do their best to keep the barbarians out and return to “great nations” what belongs to

them, the latter are trying hard to kick the invaders out, out of their own minds, and return

to self-explanation what was misunderstood by aliens.

In fact, all “differentialists” (radical as well as conservative) have consistently

failed to assess correctly the richly dynamic possibilities offered by the very

contradictions of the Enlightenment subject. That self-produced subject has not any more

than its old God, been able to shed the raw material of its creation. But chaos will be

tamed, it is believed, the blurred blinding vision of one’s desire will be domesticated by

reducing constantly shifting and infinitely varied phenomena to a safely limited and

organized number of types and categories (such as simple bodies, periods, races and

languages). One-world unity is thus achieved conceptually by mastering unwieldy,

conflictive difference through an exploitative division of being, just as the progress of

production and profit is sought through the division of labor. As a result, the flattening

out of difference as such by nostalgic, utopian and eschatological universalisms, and the

endlessly centrifugal differentiation of minorities, special cases, individuals and

personalities, equally threaten the Enlightenment subject: she/he runs the risk of facing

chaos again, losing her/his privileged vantage point on chaos, and, in short, becoming one

with chaos only. Such a challenge and the fascinatingly innovative discursive strategies

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developed to manage it would be better understood if we looked into encyclopedic and

philosophical poetry of the late 18th and early 19th century instead of revisiting once again

the prose philosophers. The unity of the newly invented “literature” was then being

achieved under the hegemony of worldly prose, a commonwealth of free-trade

discourses: the voice of encyclopedic poetry is discordant, formally dissenting, among

other reasons because it is a voice, that resists its silencing by the barely camouflaged

authority of the written text, printed to last. Similarly the unabashed heteroglossy of

many current multicultural and diasporic fictions is a voice that resists the insolent

authority of uniformly presented statistics, silently screened to act now.

***

The universalist and differentialist attitudes in Comparative Literature should not

be mistaken for pro- and anti-globalization positions. It is not from an imperial eminence,

from a seat of disembodied management, but from the site of painful tensions between

similarity and complementariness, and between disparity and solidarity, that the

paradoxical act of com-parison can be carried out or at least attempted with some

relevance to the lives of speaking/spoken/speakable beings. Nevertheless the historically

parallel timing of the pre-history and modern history of (comparative) literature on the

one hand, and the key phases of globalization of the material and symbolic economy, on

the other, should not be overlooked. We must adopt the universalists’ abductive technique

of investigation if we want to clarify the nature and processes of the interaction involved.

The return of aesthetics and even of aesthetic value recently advocated in the very

framework of multicultural studies, goes very much in the same direction, when Satya P.

Mohanty argues that the immense diversity of aesthetic practices and valuation is, in fact,

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evidence of the anthropological universality of the aesthetic function, just as the diversity

of moral values cannot but comfort the universality of ethics.10 I, for my part, would go

as far as saying that the substitution of segregationist, “purely political” approaches to

aesthetic approaches of the colonial and so-called postcolonial text, for example, is a sure

way of eliminating the implication of the social subject of feeling from the site of the

political, that is everywhere, as much in the intimate sphere as in the outwardly public

sphere, open to public scrutiny. (The subaltern can feel, Raja Rao knew it.) In the same

volume, Winfried Fluck convincingly shows that a static and uniform notion of value that

would reside in a few “great texts” characterized by their organic unity, is itself in no way

a transnational and transhistorical position, but a historically narrow assertion that can

easily be falsified with regards to its holistic claim.11

It is similarly noteworthy that Vilashini Cooppan, initiator with Michael Holquist

of a completely restyled World Literature course at Yale, also grounds the prospect of a

triadic rethinking of literary globalism on the intrinsic (and historical) contradiction of the

global itself, as she writes : “consistently contradictory, deeply double, the global has less

to do with hegemonic, homogeneous universal than with what Stuart Hall terms the

practice of relational thinking.”12

For all these reasons, we should not be scandalized or ashamed that alternative

pictures of present globalization as a form of oligopolistic, diffuse and shifting

governance, or as the imperialist triumph of one nation-state (manifested by its direct

administration of the world or the overwhelming pollution scattered about by its

paradigm) closely mirror the wavering of Comparative Literature between a complex

vision of timeless invariants that happen to be foregrounded in some particular

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synchronies and geocultural sets, and a strict, sometimes mechanistic historicism, that

“explains” aesthetic and ideological revolutions, cultural hegemonies and overwhelming

“influences”. But the territorial and historical distribution of authority and terms of

reference might be better described, in any case, as an unstable balance or compromise

formation between encyclopedic integration (enlisting) and imperial stratification

(commanding). Long term histories of globalization, as those initiated by Braudel and

lately developed by Giovanni Arrighi would offer a highly instructive model and render

supposed “universals” more legible within the framework of cyclically repeatable

structures, while making allowance for determinant changes of scale in the phenomena

observed.

The globalization era usually associated with the rise of British hegemony, was

put into discourse/discursively motivated and challenged by a consistently dialectical

series of representational procedures ranging from neo-classicism to naturalism. We

would therefore be well founded to ask: “What is the functional and structural equivalent

of those forms of representation in the globalization era from post WWII to the present

and beyond?” But mere synchronic analogies do not teach us any more (about discourses

or societies) than arranged sequences in a causal logic of primary and secondary facts.

History as lived/acted out/represented inscribes itself in/as texts, monuments, institutions

that will usually outlast their initial functions in the historical moment of their inscription.

Texts become language, so that any new experience or phenomenon is largely described

in languages that reflect past rather than current experiences and phenomena. Social

discourses are also geared to represent and repress states of things that merely belong to

the realm of possible worlds, whether feared or wished for, and they produce atemporal

metaphors of states of things that have not reached the full consciousness of their

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speakers, ghostly returns of the real as repressed, and figural schemes of anticipation.

Literature as social discourse as well as literature as a defense barrier of the private

sphere against social discourses, is not only temporally multilayered as an accumulation

of memories, dead and alive, it is also discontinuous as a synchronic arrangement of

“blanks” (those of waste, repression, oblivion, prejudice, desire). If we try to bridge the

gap between the supposedly “criticist” ahistoricity of classical comparative universalism

and the deterministic historicist foundation of both traditional Comparative Literary

History and most postcolonial/globalization studies at present, what should be

investigated then, is first of all the asynchrony of the present (and all pasts and futures as

past and future presents), and the cultural heterogeneity of communities and individuals

alike. I deliberately bypass the question, the need and even the paradox of identity, those

preconditions for comparison that were dictated indifferently by tradition (the spirit of

conformity) and modernity (the spirit of distinction).

Experimentally bypassing “identity” leads us much closer to a logical

apprehension of the “global postmodern subject”, de-centered insofar as she/he is subject

and object of multiple histories with different depths, weights and tempi, and related, in a

variable geometry polysystem, to multiple synchronic poles of reference. Assuming that,

in modern times, there ever was a center and a periphery, and universals could not be

perceived in the same way from the dominant center and from the partial positions of

subaltern exemplification in the periphery (lacking authority to survey the whole), a

radically new universalism would take into account two factors that remained occult at

the time and in the wake of the Enlightenment and its colonial counterparts: comparative

scholars are now freer to toss multiple purviews as alternately central and peripheral and

compare interpretations accordingly; and secondly, should we consider that the new

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world “order” of the bellum americanum is profoundly irrational and threatens the pax

Americana itself, the centers of power and those of efficient thought (i.e. knowledge put

to good use) may well appear to be more separated than ever. Consequently, the apparent

subservience to postcolonial theory of many Western and “assimilated” comparative

scholars, particularly in the English-writing world, could be reinterpreted in two ways: on

the one hand, as a mere reflex, a contrary echo, a rather mechanical response to the

triumphalist façade of imperial all-economic liberal ideology; on the other hand, as a

strategy of appropriation which would return some empowerment to the gradually

disenfranchised class of speculative, abstract, distanciated, “disinterested” thinkers. But

allegiance to “postcolonial” ideology makes us dependent on the latest fad of the

dominant ideology (“postisms” of all affiliations). And the strategy of self-empowerment

is probably bound to fail dramatically when its locus is precisely where actual decision-

making rights are denied to speculative, “disinterested” and, more generally, excentered

thinking.

***

In conclusion, I would like to stress that classical comparative universalism, due

to its very ambiguity, may well have been a cautious and subconscious way to let

multiculturalism in without losing the very real benefits of romantic aesthetic assessment

and commitment: freedom in a secluded retreat, perhaps, but an experiment in freedom

nevertheless, since the realm of aesthetics was becoming increasingly worthless in the

economic world; and a mobility in time and perspective that paralleled the purposeful

business trips, administrative rounds and military expeditions of the capitalist setup and

competed with it for symbolic codification. (Cosmopolitanism and exoticism could be

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reconsidered in a less monolithic, and less unambiguously odious light than they are

today). Universalism was a full-fledged theoretical fiction; it should now be apprehended

not only as a set of displaced simulacra, but in all its key historical functions as theory, as

fiction and as builder of models (explanatory models, simulations, prospective models). If

we become aware of the epistemological and ethical historicity of the apparently

gratuitous enigmas formulated by that universalism, we shall improve our capacity of

thinking freely and efficiently as comparative scholars. However unpleasant it may be for

some of us, the multicultural, speculative multi-identity of many a contemporary

diasporic fiction, understood as experimental self-theorizing as much as an expression of

disarray or of will-to-power, would help us progress.

It is in this sense I would take David Damrosch’s apparently facile but humorous

metaphor: “We should no longer rest content with a choice between a self-centered

construction of the world and a highly decentered one. Instead, we need more of an

elliptical approach, to use the image of the geometric figure that is generated from two

foci at once.”13 The subtitle, “From the Old World to the Whole World”, of the paper I

am referring to, does not support the priority of a first world: it rather suggests that we

should move away from the priority of any single origin and consider the one-and-whole

both as origin and goal, and thus itself bi-centered. Comparative thinking, as it moves

away from that one-and-wholeness in order to make sense, creates its own bipolarities,

around which it is up to our anthropological self-consciousness to move —elliptically

also in the sense of an omission, an abbreviation, an encryption and a forgetting.

Étiemble, no doubt, would have subscribed to that basic obstacle to sterile circularity that

Salman Rushdie makes more clearly (and more cruelly than ever) perceptible in his last

novel, Fury. We, all of us, writers and critics, are producers of reality-look-alike dolls

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that, for better and surely for worse, will come to life somewhere in the world, farther and

farther away from their visible locus of production (a London suburban house, a New

York apartment or a Parisian classroom); there is no way we can stop the uncanny

resemblance of historical human events with those fabricated by our fancy discourses.

Universals are not weapons, but representations of desire, they mean no harm. And as

such, they will be valuable as long as they are not listed and appropriated by any single

community. The other recurrent lesson of Rushdie’s work might well be that neither

sameness nor otherness can be located in the present or in the past, they belong to the

future(s); their sense is one of anticipation, of something to be said, read and recognized

forward. “Look at me, Asmaan! I’m bouncing very well! I am bouncing higher and

higher!” 14

The question asked by J. Hillis Miller: “how to live in a multicultural situation

without succumbing to [the] superficiality [of making culture a] matter of fashion and

dress” (87) receives its first vital answers from the theoretical fables drawn, among

others, by Rushdie’s global puppet-maker. It may not alleviate our fury or that of a

threatened Empire, but it might unleash ours as a well-aimed factor of historical change

for the better.

Université Michel de Montaigne – Bordeaux 3 (France)

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Notes

1. That typical Indian arena that, in Vikram Shandra’s Red Earth and Pouring

Rain.(Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1995), becomes the reception place and place

of active participation in the literary transcontinental and historically transcultural

narrative.

2. Joseph Hillis Miller, Black Holes / Manuel Asensi, J. Hillis Miller, or,

Boustrophedonic Reading, trans. Mabel Richart (Stanford: Stanford University Press,

1999) 93.

3. Quoted in the Columbia University Press announcement of the forthcoming volume.

4. I refer to The Wellek Library Lectures for 2000 at The Critical Theory Institute,

University of California, Irvine, 22, 23, 25 May 2000. Web source:

http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~scctr/Wellek/spivak/

5. Erich Auerbach,. “ Philology and Weltliteratur,” (1952) trans. Maire and Edward Said,

Centennial Review XIII.1 (1969): 1.

6. René Étiemble, Propos d'un emmerdeur: entretiens sur France-Culture avec Jean-

Louis Ezine (Paris : Arléa:1994).

7. René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (1949; Harmondsworth:

Penguin Books, 1978) 49.

8. Adrian Marino, “ Étiemble, les invariants, la poétique et la littérature comparée,” Le

Comparatisme roumain: histoire, problèmes, aspects, ed. Romul Munteanu (Bucarest

[Bucharest]: Éditions Univers, 1982) 30-72.

9. Ulrich Weisstein, Comparative Literature and Literary Theory: Survey and

Introduction, trans. William Riggan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973) 10.

10. Satya P. Mohanty, “Can Our Values Be Objective ? On Ethics, Aesthetics, and

Progressive Politics,” Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age, ed. Emory Elliott, Louis Freitas

Caton, and Jeffrey Rhyne (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002) 31-59.

11. Winfried Fluck, “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies,” Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age,

ed. Emory Elliott, Louis Freitas Caton, and Jeffrey Rhyne (Oxford and New York:

Oxford University Press, 2002) 79-103.

12. Vilashini Cooppan , “World Literature and Global Theory : Comparative Literature

for the Third Millennium,” Symploke 9, 1-2 (2001): 16.

13. David Damrosch, “World Literature Today : From the Old World to the Whole

World,” Symploke 8, 1-2 (2000): 18.

14. Salman Rushdie, Fury (New York: Random House, 2001) 259.

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