The Tasks of Comparative Literary Studies and The Literary Transnationalism

비교문학의 과제와 문학적 트랜스내셔널리즘

In this paper, I suggest methodological ways of studying comparative literature regarding ongoing discussions of world and national literature. The role of comparative literature studies has widened in the contemporary era, in which nations have become rapidly entangled and the concept of the world as a unified entity is under question. In this regard, I critically review the traditional principles of the hospitality of cosmopolitanism and the exclusivity of the borders of national literatures. Further, I suggest that scholars adopt the concept by Sigmund Freud of "unfamiliar familiarity" as a methodological motive for studies of comparative literature. Based on this concept, scholars can further develop the unique methods of the discipline of comparative literary studies for teaching and research amidst the ongoing phenomenon of globalization. They can also use these methods to simultaneously contribute to solving the problem of "comparison without a unifying category of the world," as revealed by the results of deconstructional and postcolonial studies. Regarding community-based discussions of literature, I introduce the "bridge and door" metaphor, put forth by Georg Simmel, as a key concept in methodological consideration of translation and in comparative literary studies. In this paper, adopting the metaphor of the bridge and door as an intertextual and social model for comparative studies, I define the new role of comparative literary studies in literary transnationalism, which is particularly necessary when different languages and cultures overlap and become entangled. Regarding the rapidly changing contemporary world community, comparative literary studies, as an experimental discipline, is uniquely capable of examining this kind of community, which forms itself beyond and beneath individual nations.