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New Left Review 16, July-August 2002
Does Franco Moretti’s new programme for a study of world literature carry global English in its pocket, as the ticket to leave close reading behind? The cost and benefits of Auerbach’s philology and Said’s sociology, as alternative approaches.
JONATHAN ARAC
ANGLO-GLOBALISM?
This brief essay on a huge subject is very much thinking in progress. [1] To achieve a manageable scope for discussion, I engage key programmatic works by three Western comparatists, representing three generations over the last half-century: Erich Auerbach, Edward Said, Franco Moretti. I select works that are roughly evenly spaced—the early 1950s, the mid-1970s, and 2000—although I will not be dealing with them in chronological order. For the argument developed here, criticism deals concretely with the language of texts, while theory is cast in abstraction, at a distance. By this definition, a lot of what we call theory, because it is thoughtful—much of the work of Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida—would count as criticism.
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