Modernism as Comparativism

Recent developments in modernist studies have taken the field in an intercultural direction, with an enhanced emphasis on planetary modernisms in the plural.
That modernism is nothing if not international has long been acknowledged; its overlap with the emerging discipline of comparative literature, however, has rarely been explicitly examined. And yet comparison – across countries and continents, centuries and cultures – is in many ways the defining characteristic of modernism, eclectic and ecumenical as it undoubtedly was. What, after all, is the modernist mania for intertextual allusion, if not a form of comparison?
By surveying some of the main currents of comparison – from reception studies to world literature, from close to distant reading – Professor Hutchinson proposes in this lecture to explore what it means to understand modernism as comparativism. In doing so, He hopes to show that comparative literature is not just a concern of critics, as is generally assumed; it is also the province of writers.

Ben Hutchinson has been Professor of European Literature at the University of Kent since 2012. His research ranges widely across European - and especially, German - literature; publications include the monographs Rilke’s Poetics of Becoming (Legenda, 2006), W.G. Sebald. Die dialektische Imagination (De Gruyter, 2009), Modernism and Style (Palgrave, 2011), Lateness and Modern European Literature (Oxford University Press, 2016), Comparative Literature: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2018), and most recently The Midlife Mind (Reaktion/Chicago, 2020). He is currently finishing a collection of essays, On Purpose, due to appear with 4th Estate in 2023. His books have been translated into numerous languages including Chinese, Korean, and Persian.

Mr Hutchinson  has lectured at institutions across the world, including at Oxford, Heidelberg, Harvard, Jerusalem, and the ENS Paris. In 2005-7, he was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach; in 2011, he was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize; in 2012-13, he was a Visiting Professor at Montpellier III; in 2015, a Visiting Fellow at the Forschungsverbund Marbach-Weimar-Wolfenbüttel; in 2021, he won the Forum for Modern Languages Prize. He has evaluated research across Europe and has undertaken numerous roles as external examiner and programme reviewer both in the UK and abroad. 

• To find out more, visit the Modernitas research centre website