Literatura porównawcza w dwudziestym pierwszym wieku [przeł. Iga Noszczyk]
Reflections on Comparative Literature in the Twenty-First Century [trans. Iga Noszczyk]

Summary/Abstract: This essay touches upon issues of comparative studies, translation, post-colonialism, multivoicedness and reader’s reception, set in an arrangement that implies their mutual clarification and entering into various configurations. The article’s main thesis claims that a necessity has been recognised to approach comparative studies and translation studies not in terms of disciplines but rather, methodologies that mutually affect one another and develop in a context of various methods of reading. The crisis of comparative studies occurs as this discipline grows excessively normativised and, instead of getting open toward postcolonial multivoicedness, it becomes enclosed within some preset limits and superimposed theories. An act of comparison occurs in the course of reading process (always fresh as it is) whose essential element is translation as a tool of literary renewal and innovation. Ms. Bassnett admonishes us – the Europeans – against losing the awareness of where we are relative to our own history of literature and its canon. As part of the said history, it is translation that has been the primary means enabling the flow of information; hence, the necessity to position the history of translation in the centre of comparative studies.

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