The selection of “cases” is a fundamental aspect of literary criticism. As early as 1952, Erich Auerbach observed that choosing a proper Ansatzpunkt is an important task for the critic of world literature, who sifts through an ever-growing corpus of texts. But the process by which we, literary critics, make these selections is often submerged in the finished product of a given close reading. We judge as exemplary those instances in a literary work we think are representative of the work, standing in for the work as a whole; are typical of the work, demonstrating a characteristic feature or tendency; or are indicative of a larger phenomenon, illuminating some literary historical transformation in which the work participates. We may also judge as exemplary those instances which are exceptional within the work in some revealing way. We judge as comparable those instances or works that strike us as unexpectedly similar, in sharing some tendencies or features in spite of differences of genre, tradition, geography, or period; or unexpectedly different, despite ostensible similarities. But what makes a good example? And when we suggest that one example invites comparison with another, what is it that invites our comparison?

This seminar scrutinizes the process by which we make claims on the basis of exemplarity or comparability. These claims are at once aesthetic and conceptual: aesthetic, in the sense that what leads us to single out a set of passages for scrutiny or comparison is often, effectively, our intuition; conceptual, to the extent that what justifies a selection is the coherence of the argument built around it. We would like to explore more rigorously the nature of these judgments which quietly undergird the field’s critical practice. 

We invite papers on topics including, but not limited to:

— the conceptual distinction and/or relationship between case, type, stereotype, sample, representative, and example (or other such concepts);

— re-evaluating canonical, “field-defining” close readings or comparative studies (e.g. Bakhtin’s reading of Goethe, Schwarz’s reading of Machado, Lukács’ comparison of Zola and Tolstoy, Spivak’s juxtaposition of Brontë, Rhys, and Shelley);

— identifying and delimiting modes of exemplarity (such as metonymy, metaphor) and comparability (such as homology, analogy, syllogism) as “metacategories” of judgement;

— the critic’s response to the text as exemplary or generalizable, including metareflections on one’s own process of identifying cases for literary study;

— the specificity of literary exemplarity (as against other creative and expressive forms like cinema, theater, visual art, etc.);

— the problem of exemplarity and scales such as “form,” “genre,” “tradition”;

— historicizing recent investigations into literary critical methodology and pedagogy vis-à-vis the deskilling of the academy and managed decline of comparative literature departments.