比较文学、传统与创新:马歇尔·布朗访谈录(英文)

Comparative Literature, Tradition and Innovation: An Interview with Marshall Brown

马歇尔·布朗是华盛顿大学比较文学系教授、《现代语言季刊》的主编。布朗出版了5部关于18、19世纪欧洲文学的专著,主编了《剑桥文学批评史》浪漫主义卷和《朗文世界文学文集》欧洲浪漫主义文学。2014年11月,本文作者受《外国文学研究》的委托,在华盛顿大学比较文学系访学期间以电子邮件的方式对布朗进行了采访。布朗教授首先就比较文学的历史与将来提出了自己的看法。他指出比较文学虽然在体制上陷入困境,但在学术上却充满活力。虽然比较文学面临着各种理论的冲击,但他担心的并不是比较文学的将来,而是比较文学与文学传统的割裂。关于如何处理传统和创新的关系,他指出:尊重传统并不是要回归传统或保留传统,而是要从中认识到我们的局限和不足;传统与创新并不是真正的二元对立,建构与拆除可能更能说明问题。

Marshall Brown is professor of comparative literature at University of Washington Seattle and editor since 1991 of Modern Language Quarterly： A Journal of Literary History. He is author of 5 books on European literature of the 18 th and 19 th centuries and has also edited the Romanticism volume of the Cambridge History of Literary Criticism and the European Romanticism section of the Longman Anthology of World Literature. In November 2014, Professor Yang Gexin, a visiting scholar at University of Washington from Huazhong Agricultural University, China, entrusted by Foreign Literature Studies, interviewed Professor Brown via e-mail. In this interview, Brown shares his farsightedness on the history and future of comparative literature. Comparative literature, for Brown, is institutionally in some difficulty while intellectually dynamic. Brown takes an optimistic view of the future of comparative literature despite some theoretical challenges that have emerged in the past two decades. Yet, he also expresses his worries that comparative literature＇s expansion and openness to the future will be conjoined with the denial of the past literary tradition. As to the relationship between tradition and innovation, Brown points out that respect for tradition is not a plea for regression or even for preservation, but merely an acknowledgment of our limits, and that tradition vs. innovation is a false dichotomy while the more functional one is construction vs. demolition.