Cultural/Cognitive vs Contextual Means of Comparison

            In this week’s post I want to discuss Hogan’s distinction between “cultural/cognitive” and “contextual” modes of comparison. This article was written in 1996, and I am not sure what the current trend was in literary studies, but I found it interesting to think that, at least in our department, it seems that cultural/cognitive comparisons tend to be frowned upon. When I first got here to Penn State, I was a little surprised by this, but more and more I find these kinds of comparisons are highly problematic and usually involve misleading generalizations. More importantly perhaps, I think it is hard to establish a rationale for undertaking this kind of study.

For example, I think back to the last mini-seminar I had with Dr. Abel. Needing to come up with a project ex nihilo, I picked one poet with whom I was familiar, F.G. Lorca, and one from a tradition which I had wanted to study, that is the symbolist poet Paul Verlaine. My rationale for the project was that I suspected that Lorca was influenced by symbolist poetics. Dr. Abel was critical (and, I believe, rightfully so) that without a stronger contextual tie between the two (to use Hogan’s terminology), that the project might not work out. At the time I was a little surprised, but after some thought I realized that what was missing was a real reason for the project. A better way to approach this would be to investigate symbolism’s reception in Spain, which would involve studying the actual period when symbolism came to Spain—an entire generation before Lorca. With this, not only am I examining a concrete historical situation (the transmission of texts across national boundaries, but I also avoid the question of “Did Lorca actually read Verlaine?”

            Coming back to the Hogan text, I think the most successful and interesting sounding of the essays he discusses is Tanyss Ludescher’s analysis of why Arab theorists focused on a specific aspect of Aristotle’s work. Apparently, she does this by examining some specific texts in Arabic literary history, showing how these would have influenced the reception of Aristotle. Thus, we have a context for something that could have been generalized as a cultural difference. I think this is most similar to current comparative method—or at least current method that I agree with. Ideally, comparative work will show that cultural difference result form specific contextual/historical proceedings.

Nevertheless, this kind of work is immensely difficult, especially in thinking about differences between diverse cultural groups like the “West” and the “East.” In fact, it might make such a comparison impossible since cultural difference go well into prehistory. Maybe we shouldn’t be so stringent, but again, I think the first question is what is the goal of such comparisons. I know that Hogan is interesting in cognitive and psychological approaches to literature—disciplines that seem to be more at ease with universals than we tend to be, since they work to affirm a kind of “normal” working of the human. We comparatists (and Germanists), on the other have been skeptical of such claims for a while.