Amphithéâtre Marguerite de Navarre, Site Marcelin Berthelot
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Abstract

The study of literature is a matter of science, but also, and probably above all, of pleasure. But pleasure can stand in the way of a scientific approach to literature. Fortunately, a comparative study of literature makes it possible to change our relationship with literature by questioning our reading habits and the canons on which our conception of the literary object is based. It renews our understanding of works, insofar as every reading is, unconsciously, a comparative reading: a work makes sense against a background of other works from which it stands out, so much so that changing the background also means changing the perception of the foreground. This kind of decentralization is not easy to achieve, however : it requires an almost existential transformation on the part of the reader himself, who is called upon to abandon the all-too-levelling idea of world literature - a pure product of the emergence of the modern concept of literature at the end of the 18th century - in order to enter into the world of literature this is a world library, infinitely more respectful of the singularity of the objects that make it up, and therefore more likely to bring about the indispensable defamiliarization. A comparative approach must forge a narrow path between, on the one hand, this necessary sensitivity to otherness and, on the other, the increasingly powerful forces that today aim to make cultures hermetically sealed from one another by insisting on the alleged incommunicability of cultural objects.