The Reconsideration of Comparative Literature through the Untranslatability

번역불가능성을 통한 비교문학의 재사유

This thesis aims to explore another possibility of comparative literature in the light of translation. Comparative literature has been criticized for its Eurocentrism to attempt to assimilate all differences from other cultures and national literatures into the frame of the Western. On the other hand, it has been haunted by the anxiety of "unhomliness", which means it doesn't have a stable and definable terrain as an independent disciplinary. However, it can offer the possibility to overcome its limitation and thematize in- betweenness of diverse terrains due to its fluid and ambiguous position and identity of discipline. When it deals with the issue of in-betweenness, 'the Untranslatable' can be an helpful apparatus to analyze comparative literature through translation theories. Along with the recent change in the study of comparative literature under the influence of transnationalism and hybridization, the role of translation which has been disregarded for a long time is being reevaluated. Translation functions to transfer literary works beyond boundaries of languages, whereas it visualizes incommensurable differences through the failure of finding ultimate equivalences between languages and arriving at one single meaning. The existence of the untranslatable suggests that the attempt to totalize differences is unfeasible, thereby makes comparison unending. Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown can be an appropriate instance that the untranslatable was used as a literary technique to show unreducible alterity of non-Western language and culture.