Humanism In Comparative Literature

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3. Significance of the Problem This project has various reasons to justify itself as an original research that can bring new light to the significant subject of comparative literature. Iranian scholars have already exhausted different aspects of the life and works of Sa‘di and encyclopedic publications have been devoted to him. In a similar vein, Alexander Pope has been the subject of innumerous studies with different approaches; however, it is for the first time that a student well acquainted with the two poets and their respective cultures is investigating deeply into the wise optimism of their philosophy, the subtle social and political satires they have achieved to create, as well as their humanistic systems of morality. Furthermore,…show more content…
The shift in the focus of comparative literature in the 20th century gave rise to a new form of analysis of the discipline. In presenting a comparative cultural analysis the researcher will follow the theoretical convictions observed by Totosy de Zepetnek in his writings. Totosy de Zepetnek has proposed a union of the literary with the cultural and has nominated a comprehensive framework and methodology for a comparative cultural analysis in his works. He mainly favors what he calls a “systemic and empirical approach” (“Comparative Cultural Studies” 4), yet he believes that other approaches would also prove useful in a comparative cultural…show more content…
This necessary tension concerns both field and method; the comparative approach puts its object in tension (identifies tensions between its objects), makes it its business to study objects whose differences it seeks to bridge, in whose apparent similarities it seeks differences. At the same time, comparative criticism requires an approach that is itself in tension: if as comparatists we establish boundaries and their significance, if we are the ones who create, who impose, a certain type of tension over the object of examination, therefore, as comparatists, we always have to interrogate not only what boundaries exist, but how those boundaries are formed, historically and in our own practice, and what their implications are. What I am describing is a discipline that refuses to take itself for granted, that is constantly self-aware and constantly calls into question the premises on which it operates
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