Comparative Literature and its Place in the Future of Literary Studies

As a literary discipline, comparative literature has experienced many vicissitudes. For some time, many did not differentiate between comparative literature and world literature, while some others understood them as rivals. Not long after this, comparative literature went through a type of crisis which arose from its theoretical and ideological basis. This issue went so far for comparative literature that back in twentieth century some theorists announced this literary discipline “dead” and declared its theoretical background “in crisis.” All the vitriolic attacks on this literary approach, however, were a proof of its existence and lack of a thorough understanding of its mechanism on the part of comparatists and alike. Over the last years of the twentieth century, and with the researches of some contemporary comparatists, this discipline managed to resolve all these crises. Comparative literature, in twenty-first century has become one of the most important disciplines in reading literary works and many universities have set comparative literature credit courses or run independent graduate programs. This article, using a fundamental research with emphasis on present history of comparative literature as tools of analysis, tries to elucidate the importance of comparative literature among other main literary disciplines and explain its importance in contemporary times. The findings show that with the stylistic changes in literary studies and in the outcome of the literary production in the present age along with the rapid development in technology and virtual world, comparative literature can provide a proper framework for comparing studies in this subject.