http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_Literature
http://www.uoregon.edu/~clj/About%20Us--new.html
The emergence of Comparative Literature as a concept in the western world may be dated from Goethe's (1749-1832) use of the term "world literature," which he coined in the last decade of his life as a reaction to Romantic -- even pre-Romantic -- literary criticism, breaking through the traditional limits of Occidental literature by revaluating popular poetry and the literatures of the Middle Ages and of the Orient. "I am more and more convinced," Goethe remarked, "that poetry is the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere and at all times in hundreds and hundreds of men . . . I therefore like to look about me in foreign nations, and advise everyone to do the same. National literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach." Speaking to his young disciple Johann Peter Eckermann in January 1827, the seventy-seven-year-old Goethe used his newly minted term Weltliteratur, which passed into common currency after Eckermann published his Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens in 1835, three years after the poet's death. It is mere speculation (but certainly a speculation that the comparatist can take as her point of departure) to wonder whether the imperial ambitions of napoleon and the consequences which the German principalities faced because of the aggressive cultural and political ascendance of France in Europe led Goethe to term “nationalism” as unmeaning, and proceed to cast literature in the guise of an equalizer, a weapon of peace rather than war. The idea of Comparative Literature, then, is from its very inception a radical idea that refigures divisive antagonisms based on given and assumed parochialisms into relations of engagement and exchange – in other words, an idea and ideal for the future.
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