13. Cross Fire and Collaboration among Comparative Literature, Feminism, and the New Historicism

Comparative literature as a discipline seems in recent years to have drifted into an uneasy peace. The heyday of comparatist controversy when scholars from both sides of the Atlantic tossed the word "crisis" back and forth like a football of indeterminate shape-is long gone. Although in this country Rene Wellek has seemingly won out, and comparatists are supposed to be concerned with "criticism" rather than "history," with defining the literariness of literature and interpreting the canon in the light of weighty abstractions, in practice there is still a lot of source-and influenq:-hunting going on, a lot of thematology, the kind of literary history that is supposed to be of secondary interest.1 Much of it has been first-rate, but until the 1990s it remained somewhat overshadowed by giants such as Paul de Man, whose reputations seemed-to switch metaphors-to rise and hover over the discipline of comparative literature, taking on a being and a community of their own. (I do not intend to make them sound quite so much like an angelic host, but the image insistently presents itself.) De Man and his peers belonged to literary criticism and theory more generally, not primarily to comparatists.