Comparative Literature and National Literature: Arabic-English Focus.

Abstract

The present paper aims at clarifying the parameters within which comparative literature works, its premises, its major topics, the challenges it faces and its future, to show how it helps deepen our understanding of national literature by shedding light on their specificities and idiosyncrasies. Forms of expression vary from culture to culture and from artist to artist, yet the medium of an art remains as special source shared by many. Every nation has its poets and songs; every continent has its novelists, bards and chronicles. Comparative literature studies literature across national and linguistic boundaries with emphasis placed on the comparison by means of textual analysis. Hence, it helps uncover the uniqueness of every national literature by seeing things beyond social and linguistic horizons. The guiding impulse for comparative studies originates with the assumption that it is fundamentally limiting to confine the interpretation of literatures within specific national or linguistic boundaries.  The comparative-analytical approach is adopted and the main results are that, comparative literature can provide very interesting answers that will definitely deepen our understanding of these great literary work, if we study the nature of the hero or the treatment of themes or the presence of the superhuman.