How the other compares : difference and the practice of comparative literature

Abstract

Callus covers the political implications arising from the view that comparative literature can be said to have an obligation to raise the issue of its own conditions of existence. Comparative literature, in this view, finds itself confronting a double bind from which it cannot emancipate itself without abdicating responsibilities which it is, perhaps uniquely, called upon to bear. That double bind is one which, holding comparative literature to the task of being "an intellectual procedure aimed at the study of any object with a claim to being literary by putting it in relation to other inherent elements of a culture,"1 thereupon confers upon the discipline the obligation to undertake a primary comparative process, and analyze the different conditions in which it is differentially given being.