Taking Stock - Twenty-Five Years of Comparative Literary Research

Read an interview with Norbert Bachleitner.

In this 200th volume of Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft the editors Norbert Bachleitner, Achim H. Hölter and John A. McCarthy ’take stock’ of the discipline. It focuses on recurrent questions in the field of Comparative Literature: What is literature? What is meant by ’comparative’? Or by ’world’? What constitute ’transgressions’ or ’refractions’? What, ultimately, does being at home in the world imply? When we combine the answers to these individual questions, we might ultimately reach an intriguing proposition: Comparative Literature contributes to a sense of being at home in a world that is heterogeneous and fractured, rather than affirming a monolithic canon marked by territory and homogeneity. The volume unites essays on world literature, literature in the context of the history of ideas, comparative women and gender studies, aesthetics and textual analysis, and literary translation and tradition.

Norbert Bachleitner is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna/Austria. His fields of interest include the reception of English and French literature in the German speaking area; literary translation and transfer studies; social history of literature; censorship; literature in periodicals; intertextuality, and digital literature. His most recent book publication is Die literarische Zensur in Österreich von 1751 bis 1848(2017).
Achim Hermann Hölter is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna/Austria. His thematic priorities are European Romanticism, the exploration of topics and discourses, the historiography of fine arts and literature, ritualisations around literature, aesthetics metareference, aesthetic completeness, comparative arts, comics, international reception studies, canon studies, libraries in literature, and multilingualism in comparative literature. He co-edited with Rüdiger Zymner: Handbuch Komparatistik. Theorien, Arbeitsfelder, Wissenspraxis (2013).
John A. McCarthy is Professor of German & Comparative Literature emeritus at Vanderbilt University. His interests range from the European Enlightenment, to readership studies, the history of Germanics, Romanticism, the relationship of social history, philosophy, science, and law to literature. He recently edited Shakespeare as German Author: Reception, Translation Theory, Cultural Transfer (2018).