History of literature, comparative studies, translation

This article analyzes the problem of constructing historical and literary narratives in the context of latest developments in comparative cultural studies, which have been subjected to the influence of the so-called "translation turn". This perspective requires that one acknowledges the return and reinterpretation of Goethe’s notion of Weltliteratur, and the appearance of analyses of the philosophical, ethical, and political dimensions of the category of "comparison" (undertaken especially by anthropologists and scholars of postcolonialism). The revival of interest in the history of literature among comparative literature scholars (e.g., Frederic Jameson, David Damrosch, Walter F. Veit, Frances Ferguson, Jonathan Arac, Hans Ulrich Gumbricht, or Rebecca Walkowitz) is discussed in relation to the publication of Pascale Casanova’s La République mondiale des lettres (Paris, Seuil, 1999), which turned out to be one of the most important and most interesting works devoted to the problem of constructing transnational historical and literary narratives to appear in the last two decades