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The Saussy report is primarily a report on American comparative literature, and Meltzl’s significant role in the report is therefore likely to tell us more about the state of comparative literature in the United States today than about Meltzl’s own project in the nineteenth century. It may be useful, then, to take a look at the past and present of American comparative literature.

Just as Meltzl’s ostensibly anti-nationalist journal was really an appeal for Hungary to demand “its own Weltliteratur,” the later history of comparative literature was similarly dominated by a series of attempts to negotiate the particular through the universal, the national through the cosmopolitan. The study of national literatures emerged in the early nineteenth century and marched on gloriously, enjoying the full support of the new nation states. When its position became problematic, toward the turn of the century, the main reason was quite simply its success: the study of literature had fulfilled its role of contributing to the creation of national identities.⁴

The fact that literary studies survived their role was partly due to comparative literature – which, although roughly contemporaneous with the national literature disciplines, became prominent only toward the end of the century, when it hastened to save them in the name of supranational bonds and/or anthropological theories about literature.

If all this is not entirely clear from Meltzl’s journal, it should be more evident from other proponents of the new discipline. The May 1886 issue of Meltzl’s journal announced the arrival of a new rival, Max Koch’s Zeitschrift für vergleichende Litteraturgeschichte, which quickly became much more prestigious and widely read than its predecessor. In Koch’s journal, the new comparative approach proved merely to be a way of camouflaging the very same national or even nationalistic ambitions that triggered the study of national literatures.

Certainly there were also genuine attempts to cross the national boundaries; around the Second World War and even more so afterwards, these attempts were often motivated by anti-fascist ideas and had their own metahistorical agendas. Auerbach’s Mimesis, for instance, is informed not simply by a general Hegelian sense of history as a gradual coming to self-consciousness of humankind, but also by the Kantian idea of perpetual (and cosmopolitan) peace.

As the crimes of the war were gradually disclosed, this Kantian project began to sound increasingly utopian, and the cultural conservatism that was based on it came to be regarded by many as cultural elitism. Thus comparative literature, like many of the other disciplines, emigrated to the country in which the war had had an entirely different impact on historical consciousness. For whereas in Europe the war, and the Shoah in particular, called into question not only all former Heilsgeschichten but also the possibility of metaphysics as such, in the United States, the victory of the allied forces on the continent reinforced not only a teleological view of history but also the belief that the United States had a distinct role in this process.

The first comparatists in the United States were either from or closely associated with the historicist, conservative-liberal tradition that, from Jacob Burckhardt to Eric Auerbach, represented an old, cultural elitist and to some extent anachronistic worldview whose uttermost value was culture in history but also against or despite history – and of course both culture and history meant Western culture and history. But when, a few decades later, post-war French philosophy arrived in the United States, comparative literature fell under the sway of the novel ways of thinking.

Few people cared that the “new” philosophy was doing something that aesthetics and philosophy had been doing for a long time. What mattered was rather the way in which the new philosophy created a new space for this old way of thinking. In the seventeenth century, America had begun to see itself as a community that was potentially outside the history of other nations. It must have been exciting to see, then, that the post-war, a-historicist and often anti-historicist aesthetic thinking that structuralism and most versions of post-structuralism embraced was grounded not in a position outside history, but in a position after history. Unlike a variety of former generations of immigrants from the puritans to Auerbach, all of whom had fled from within history, French philosophy claimed to be coming from a Europe that had outlived its history.⁵

The so-called French storm marked the arrival of post-histoire in the country that had traditionally regarded itself as outside European history – the perfect match, one might say. The consequences soon became visible in almost all the human and social disciplines, and particularly in comparative literature, which was becoming increasingly associated with so-called “continental” philosophy. But ironically, the main impact of French philosophy was not philosophical, but ideological and methodological. Armed with its new philosophical aspirations, comparative literature hastened to join the grand post-war project of transforming academia in the United States. The price of this project was significant: a strong and ever increasing alienation from the public, the consequences of which became particularly apparent in the early 1990s. The university was both asylum and quarantine for revolutionary scholars, to the great chagrin of their more conservative colleagues with whom they were now incarcerated, safely isolated from the public.

Meanwhile, in disciplinary terms, “interdisciplinarity” became the new catch-word of the humanities. Such interdisciplinarity was most visible in comparative literature’s consistent reliance on theories that originated in other disciplines: most eminently in philosophy and in particular hermeneutics and phenomenology, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, and to a certain extent even analytical and post-analytical philosophies of language. But, as Richard Rorty argues in “Looking Back at Literary Theory,” this interdisciplinarity usually had the effect that philosophies, upon their arrival in the territory of comparative literature, underwent an uncanny metamorphosis: what was originally philosophy now became “theory.” Philosophies, that is, complex and self-containing cosmogonies and cosmologies,⁶ were distilled into methodological tools to deal with literature and, when even this became too tiresome, with themselves.⁷

The Bernheimer report grew out of this situation, and, still displaying some of the enthusiasm of the 1960s and ‘70s, promoted a “new” comparative literature, one that appeared as the representative of multiculturalism, both in its ideology and methodology, and defined itself in sharp contrast to both the 1965 Levin and the 1975 Greene reports’ Eurocentric, aesthetic cosmopolitanism. It was a vision that sought to justify itself by taking a critical stance towards the history of the discipline, just as post-histoire was a defining element of deconstruction.

The Saussy report, by contrast, is redolent with disappointment over the project of multiculturalism. Not surprisingly, then, the book is characterized by a sometimes more, sometimes less explicit ambition to re-anchor comparative literature in the past and to return from the post-historical, alienated position to the materiality of history. Meltzl becomes an emblem of this return, albeit in different ways, representing now the charming amateur literate of the emerging Monarchy, now the prophetic advocate of anti-globalization. It is ironic that Meltzl emerges as this emblematic character precisely when the United States is increasingly facing debates about its own identity about sovereignty, nationhood, and empire building. For with this, the back and forth movement between history and philosophy, a movement whose abstract generality always willingly yields to the particular political and ideological circumstances of the day, seems to continue into our own times.