Comparative literature often understands its disciplinary origins at moments of conflict. Acts of comparison frequently work in the disruption of international systems, identifying emerging political configurations in the points of difference of national and cultural conflict. As a method working across such disruption, comparison aligns with the harmonizing impulses of many of the twentieth century institutions with which it shares a history, seeking to negotiate international and intercultural difference by proposing a discipline in which those differences become legible. This seminar asks how we might understand comparative literature as historically aligned with this history of institutionalizing peace, and whether different institutional configurations might understand the disciplinary mission, and method, of comparison differently too. How does this conflictual institutional self-narration shape comparative method, and what does comparison look like, now, in conflict zones––actual or potential?

The dominant Euro-American narrative of the institutionalization of comparison is organized around conflict and the methods, ideals, and structures of peace that come with it.Attempts to think historically about the discipline focus on the post-war moments of Goethe’s Weltliteratur, after the Congress of Vienna (Damrosch), Auerbach and other émigré scholars’ exilic post-war seeding of the discipline in America around 1945 (Spivak, Said), and reflections on conflict as signaling the “death” of the discipline in the wake of 9/11 and the war in Iraq (Spivak, Apter). Conflict seems generative of ways of thinking methodology. Yet at the same time, comparatists seek to reduce or alleviate conflict in ways that align comparative literature with a broader institutional post-war Western consensus, concentrated in institutions like NATO or the UN, that the international arena can become harmonized into one of perpetual peace.

Now, at a moment of increasing fragmentation or pluralization of political world-systems, does this concept of harmonizing peace still hold? How far are the methods of comparison tied to the institutional structures, impulses, and assumptions of north-Atlantic “institutionality”? What does comparison look like from different points of institutional origin, dealing with a different consensus than that of the post-war north Atlantic, and how do local conceptions of conflict inflect institutional formation?

This seminar seeks responses to these broad questions in order to historicize this institutionality of comparative literature by engaging with the local and particular conceptions of comparison as an institution. We are interested in particular in moments of institutional concretion, journals, syllabi, and centers, insofar as they offer a route to narrating particular and plural modalities of comparative method, aiming to think more clearly about the epistemological and disciplinary limits of comparison in these institutional frameworks.