Comparative Methodologies: On Conversation as Method

We are delighted to host Radhika Koul (Literature, Claremont McKenna). We can also look forward to a response from Shu-han Luo (English, UC Berkeley).

Koul argues that literature's capacity to reproduce emotion across time, space, and culture—an anachronistic phenomenon underacknowledged in literary criticism—must be embraced as a methodologically productive foundation for comparative literary critique. She contends that this shared experiential subjectivity, in which thought and feeling are inseparable, justifies conversation as a critical comparative methodology: one that is creatively anachronistic, affectively sensitive, and, in Eric Hayot's phrase, "open to the world." Such a methodology circumvents two of the most naturalized organizing principles of Anglophone literary study—national literary history as the primary horizon of analysis and periodization as the container of literary production. In their place, these conversations constitute what Rocco Rubini, invoking the hermeneutist Emilio Betti, calls the "communion of the living and the dead": humanism enacted as ongoing practice rather than static doctrine, generating unstable but generative spaces of discovery that are irreducibly present and personal to the critic mediating them. Like the best conversations, they produce a remainder—consider the estrangement that arises when Abhinavagupta is brought to bear on Hamlet, a reading briefly demonstrated here. Both the exchange and its estrangement constitute a leveling of the playing field, which is precisely where the postcolonial payoff of such a praxis lies. By treating this shared subjectivity as legitimate ground for conversation, we create conditions for a more equitable, more human, and more humanistic literary criticism—one that cannot relegate non-Western traditions to the margins and makes previously unthinkable exchanges not only licit but productive. The article proceeds in three movements: first, distinguishing empathic from hegemonic universals; second, recovering historical precedents in critics working before the "temporalization of history"; and third, outlining conversation's defining characteristics as critical practice.

This event is hosted by Comparative Methodologies, a research group in the DLCL Research Unit. Please write to Harry (harrycar [at] stanford.edu (harrycar[at]stanford[dot]edu)) with any questions. We hope to see you there! 

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