This book started life in 1989 in the French "Que sais-je?" series; there it manifested on the author's part a creative effort to encompass Comparative Literature as a field of study and research with its various crises, uncertainties, conquests in the world of today. The English translation by Farida Elizabeth Dahab is presented in the same spirit, taking into account, in the "Translator's Introduction", the most recent self- analysis undertaken by the American Comparative Literature Association, the 1993 Report on Standards, which in particular reaffirms its commitment to the study of texts in original languages; describes literature as a discursive system among others, to be studied in its relationships to these; and encourages decompartmentalization in terms of both canon revision and openness to cultural studies.
The structure of Yves Chevrel's book shows that he had already arrived independently at these conclusions and that they were already at least partly embodied in the practice of French Universities. Thus, in a major departure from the erstwhile representation of Comparative Literature as, predominantly, comparative literary history, Chevrel's first chapter following definitions begins with the examination of the "The Foreign Work". Now this may strike us as a rehash of the ingrained custom to heap together as "littérature étrangère" anything non-French that was ever written; but it is not. It is a way of beginning to approach strangeness from a non-national, universal point of view - every country has its own vision of littératures étrangères - and to introduce translation, the study of translated texts, comparative stylistics, systems of reception as modes of approach to the literatures of others. This chapter also redrafts linguistic and cultural spaces in such a way that classical literatures, regional literatures, colloquial literatures, and mutual representations of other cultures appear as not only European categories but categories of everywhere. Only then does the author approach "The makings of a comparatist literary historiography" as one of the methods of study in which the discipline can engage, without hierarchical superiority over other methods and approaches. Comparative Literary history is alive and well - witness the Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages - but transformed. It is inductive, it privileges history of texts rather than that of authors, it includes the history of reception, its periodizations are non-dogmatic, it makes room for the history of genres, currents, movements as processes within an open system of relationships constantly undergoing change. Another chapter, entitled "Literary myths", tackles the entire range of problems relating to the literary imagination: mythical narratives but also new fictional creations, and therefore also the fundamental relationship between literature and myth and all the critical and theoretical approaches elicited by it. In "Artistic forms: frontiers of the literary" the author confronts all the osmoses of which literature has been found to be capable, particularly in recent decades: between literature and "paraliterature" including orality, popular literature, children's literature but also between literature and non- verbal arts including music, and the visual arts. Underlying this comprehensive panorama, as well as the following chapter entitled "Towards a Comparatist Poetics?" we can perceive a firm belief in the identity of the literary text, though the reader, particularly the non-traditional reader, is variously credited with the ability to renew and transform the text. Universals are problematized, rather than asserted. In conclusion, Comparative Literature is certainly not hailed as the queen of disciplines - in Postmodernity there are no such queens! - but it is at least credited with allowing for the broadest possible reflections, inventories, exchanges, disagreements shared between many or even all cultures; including discussions about the very nature of poetics, or the very existence of a literary specificity within culture. A window is opened on an "ethics of discovery", presumably away from metanarratives and towards the singular.
The English translation also includes two substantial papers by Yves Chevrel, one on methodological approaches to the literary year and one on the City in the twentieth century novel.
Eva Kushner
