[edit] American (USA) School
Reacting to the French School, postwar scholars, collectively termed the "American School", sought to return the field to matters more directly concerned with literary criticism, de-emphasising the detective work and detailed historical research that the French School had demanded. The American School was more closely aligned with the original internationalist visions of Goethe and Posnett (arguably reflecting the postwar desire for international co-operation), looking for examples of universal human "truths" based on the literary archetypes that appeared throughout literatures from all times and places.
Prior to the advent of the American School, the scope of Comparative Literature in the West was typically limited to the literatures of Western Europe and Anglo-America, predominantly literature in English, German and French literature, with occasional forays into Italian literature (primarily for Dante) and Spanish literature (primarily for Cervantes). One monument to the approach of this period is Erich Auerbach's book Mimesis, a survey of techniques of realism in texts whose origins span several continents and three thousand years.
The approach of the American School would be familiar to current practitioners of Cultural Studies and is even claimed by some to be the forerunner of the Cultural Studies boom in universities during the 1970s and 1980s. The field today is highly diverse: for example, comparatists routinely study Chinese literature, Arabic literature and the literatures of most other major world languages and regions as well as English and continental European literatures.
[edit] Current developments
There is a movement among comparatists in the US and elsewhere to re-focus the discipline away from the nation-based approach with which it has previously been associated towards a cross-cultural approach that pays no heed to national borders. Works of this nature include Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's Death of a Discipline, David Damrosch's What is World Literature?, and Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek's "From Comparative Literature Today toward Comparative Cultural Studies," CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 1.3 (1999):[6]]. It remains to be seen whether this approach will prove successful given that Comparative Literature had its roots in nation-based thinking and much of the literature under study still concerns issues of the nation-state. Given developments in the studies of globalization and interculturalism, Comparative Literature, already representing a wider study than the single-language nation-state approach, may be well suited to move away from the paradigm of the nation-state. While in the West Comparative Literature is experiencing institutional constriction, there are signs that in many parts of the world the discipline is thriving, especially in Asia, Latin America, and the Mediterranean. Current trends in Comparative literature also reflect the growing importance of cultural studies in the fields of literature.
