Overview

Early 20th-century literary critics Joseph Collins, Hermann Hesse, and Percy Lubbock concluded that the pages of a book present a succession of moments that the reader visualizes and reinterprets. They feared that few would actually commit themselves to memory, and that most were likely to soon disappear. As you turn these pages, you will (re)discover the value of the literary canon through the Self. My objective is to examine how the Self is formed, lost, and regained through creative strategies that confront and define its shapes and distortions on nearly every page of a canonical work. You can consider Confronting / Defining the Self: Formation and Dissolution of the ‘I’ from La Fayette to Grass as offering an apology for the study of literature and the humanities in an era when technology and commerce dominate our consciousness, drive our daily expectations, and shape our career goals.

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“Comparative Literature contributes to a sense of being at home in a world that is heterogeneous and fractured, rather than affirming a monolithic canon marked by territory and homogeneity.” This is what our editors wrote in the introduction of the 200th jubilee volume Taking Stock – Twenty-Five Years of Comparative Literary Research (2019). The past volumes in this series provide a look into the history of Comparative Literary Studies of the last three decades. Having started with ‘classical’ literary studies, the series opened to contemporary approaches such as migration studies, memory studies, and human-animal studies. Thus, it is ready for its future. Norbert Bachleitner, Universität Wien, Austria - Juliane Werner, Universität Wien, Austria

Author Information

John A. McCarthy was Professor of German & Comparative Literature at Vanderbilt University. His interests ranged from the European Enlightenment, to readership studies, the history of Germanics, Romanticism, the relationship of social history, philosophy, science, and law to literature. He edited Shakespeare as German Author: Reception, Translation Theory, Cultural Transfer (2018) and co-edited Taking Stock – Twenty-Five Years of Comparative Literary Research (2019). John A. McCarthy passed away in August 2022 during the preparation of this manuscript for publication.

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