비교문학과 아날로지

Abstract

The comparative literature has been caught in a crisis because its contents and methodology were not clearly established. This is due to the lack of consideration of the comparison act itself. If we perceive the nature of the act of ‘comparison’ clearly, the question of “what, how and why we compare” will be resolved. In this regard, this article aims to explore the ontology and ethics of comparative literature by relating ‘comparative’ behavior to the principle of ‘analogy’ and ‘irony’, the contrastive framework of world recognition. Analogy, like the comparison, is the kind of rhetoric that puts the bridge through similarities between different things. However, unlike comparison, analogy is not an apparent ‘similarity’, but a belief in the organic relationship that all things in the universe are interconnected. However, with the beginning of the modern era, the harmony between human and world, words and meanings, and appearance and reality is broken by an irony. As the absolute truth is scattered in relative truth, the god hides himself, and the human alienation begins, the novel is born to make up the lost totality of the world. In addition, comparative literature is born with the emergence of nation states and nationalism. The comparative literature that attempts to establish the Weltliteratur is an integrated analogy for treating separative irony. Comparative literature refrains from chauvinistic national literature and serves as a tool for mutual understanding that transcends national borders. It is an antidote to the reductionistic nationalism and the cure of the irony which has torn and divided the world in the name of modernity. Therefore, the comparative literature aims at the totality that disseminates a cosmic harmony in the coexistence of mankind. This, however, is a spiritual and poetic totality unlike the historical and prosaic totality. Poetic totality connects beings and things torn by irony while prosaic totality pursues order and unification. According to Octavio Paz, God creates by talking, and man connects by talking. In a similar sense, Korean philosopher Daseok Yu Youngmo maintains that human being(있음) means connecting(잇음/이음) in Korean language. Man makes everything exist by connecting. Here the act of connection, that is, the act of comparison sublimates into an ontology. In addition, the principle of analogy becomes the ethics of globalism which respects the ‘otherness’ against exclusive globalization.