ABSTRACT
Moretti's quarrel with comparative literature focuses on its parochialism, on its failure to live up to the Weltliteratur visions of Goethe, and of Marx and Engels: comparative literature has not lived up to these beginnings. It's been a much more modest intellectual enterprise, fundamentally limited to Western Europe, and mostly revolving around the river Rhine. The real drawback in Moretti's method is its total imperviousness to intertextual activity. By abandoning the text, he has also abandoned the generative principle of world literature and in its place has put a world literature already interwoven, only to be apprehended in its history, in its various equations. To distinguish between English metrics as stress-timed and French metrics as syllable-timed has some initial usefulness, in terms of comparative emphasis, but in the end it is likely to mislead.
