ABSTRACT

RENÉ ÉTIEMBLE (1909-2002) WAS the enfant terrible of French comparatism. He fi rst gained notoriety also beyond France with the publication, in 1963, of Comparaison n’est pas raison: la crise de la littérature comparée, a pamphlet meant as rejoinder to René Wellek’s famous 1958 address on “The Crisis in Comparative Literature,” given to the Third World Congress of the International Comparative Literature Associaton. Étiemble was a polyglot, with an intimate knowledge of especially Arab and Chinese culture. He published widely on the concomitant literatures, and on their relation to European literature, as for example his two-volume L’Europe chinoise (1988-89). At the Fourth World Congress of the ICLA, held in Fribourg, Switzerland, in 1964, Étiemble held an impassioned plea for extending world literature to really include all of the world’s literatures, and not just a few major European literatures. His provocative speech, entitled “Faut-il réviser la notion de Weltliteratur ?” was published in 1966 in the proceedings of the 1964 Conference edited by François Jost. In the preface to his Essais de littérature (vraiment) générale (1975; Essays in [Truly] General Literature ), in which his 1964 ICLA speech was included, Étiemble gave an example of how Japanese literature rendered void all theories of literature based on European examples, and he concluded that “any literary theory built only on European phenomena will not fare any better from now on” ( toute théorie littéraire qui s’élabore a partir des seuls phénoménes européens ne vaudra pas mieux désormais ). Albert Guérard, though in a much less provocative way, had already in his 1940 Preface to World Literature lamented that in what commonly passed as the canon of world literature (his concrete example and point of departure had been a list drawn up by Sir John Lubbock in 1885 but he maintained that things had not really altered much for the better since then) “the East is woefully under-represented.” Étiemble enlarged Guérard’s argument to encompass the entire world, and he abundantly referred to authors from the most diverse, yet always non-European, origin. We here offer the (to our knowledge) fi rst English translation of Étiemble’s text.