ABSTRACT
A. OWEN ALDRIDGE (1915-2005) WAS EDUCATED at Indiana University, the University of Georgia and Duke University, where he received his PhD in English in 1942. In 1952-53, he started the Fulbright Program in France and earned a second PhD in comparative literature at the Université de Paris in 1955. He taught in the Department of English at the University of Maryland and in 1967 became professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Illinois. His fi rst fi eld of expertise was the spread of Enlightenment ideology, particularly Deism ( Shaftesbury and the Deist Manifesto , 1951), and cosmopolitan fi gures with transatlantic careers, such as Thomas Paine ( Man of Reason: The Life of Thomas Paine , 1960), Benjamin Franklin ( Benjamin Franklin, Philosopher and Man , 1965), and Voltaire ( Voltaire and the Century of Light , 1975). Another fi eld to which he made important contributions was colonial American Literature ( Early American Literature: A Comparatist Approach , 1982). It has been argued that his approach in this fi eld anticipated the current hemispheric turn. Later on he became interested in a third fi eld, East-West Studies. In 1963, together with Melvin J. Friedman, A. Owen Aldridge founded Comparative Literature Studies . This journal every two years devotes one of its regular issues to East-West literary relations. Aldridge has been honored with a separate Festschrift for each of these three fi elds. i
Fluent in several modern languages, Aldridge mastered Japanese in his sixties. In 1963 he used the parallels of a poem by Victor Hugo with a Chinese poem to illustrate René Étiemble’s technique of comparison. His more intense involvement with Asian literatures, however, began some years later, when he was invited to attend the fi rst international conference on comparative literature held in Taiwan in 1971, where he presented a paper on the infl uence of China on Voltaire. From then on he became fascinated with Asian literatures. His most important contributions to East-West Studies are Fiction in
Japan and the West (1985), The Reemergence of World Literature: A Study of Asia and the West (1986), and The Dragon and the Eagle: The Presence of China in the American Enlightenment (1993). “While most scholars increasingly narrow their optics as they grow older,” as Friedman put it, “Aldridge has vastly enlarged his.” ii
“The Universal in Literature” is the second chapter of The Reemergence of World Literature . Aldridge’s main argument takes as its point of departure the acknowledgement that a “revived awareness of world literature” needs to recognize “Africa and Asia as equal partners” (1986: 9). After surveying the history of comparative literature in West and East and illustrating the key concept of East-West Studies, namely, typological affi nities, Aldridge advocates an understanding of world literature in accordance with his assertion that the “most important of all literary relationships is that between literature and life” (Introduction to the fi rst issue of CLS at Illinois).
