National and Comparative Literature: a Brazilian perspective

Abstract

In Brazil, comparativism between cultures and literatures was already present in literary works that pre-dated the consolidation of Literatura Comparada as a discipline and teachers and researchers of national literature have always resorted to comparativism: comparing writers and works, ways of writing, ways of approaching literary themes and periods etc. In other words, comparativism is not only practised in the discipline of Comparative Literature, but also in other national literature disciplines. In this paper, I will also argue that "comparables" (always in the plural) are not only orientations, as the historian Marcel Detienne believes, but structures that contain at least two different objects, and theories or ideas that relate them to each other.