Rebuilding a Profession: A Bibliometric Analysis of the Linguistic Culture of Comparative Literature in the United States and Spain

Abstract

This article discusses why it is necessary to rebuild comparative literature in terms of a geopolitics of comparison. “Geopolitics” is understood here, following Gearóid Ó Tuathail, to mean a distinctive genre of geo-power which brought about the systemic closure of the surface of the globe. Comparative literature has been part and parcel of this process by extending a Eurocentric concept of “(national) literature” worldwide. A rebuilt comparative literature has, on the one hand, to bring to light significant evidence of the discipline’s history within the historical and geographical context of power relations and, on the other hand, confront the coloniality of knowledge on three levels—locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary. Here only the locutionary level is addressed by examining two journals—Comparative Literature and 1616: Anuario de la Sociedad Española de Literatura General y Comparada / Anuario de Literatura Comparada—from a bibliometric-analysis perspective.