Natalie Melas All Books: Cultural Comparison sku-32733406

Natalie Melas's hardcover "All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison" examines culture and comparison through the history of comparative literature and its relationship to the positivist comparative method. It discusses how the discipline excluded non-European literature or ranked European literature above it using evolutionary models.

Melas argues that including more works leaves the basis for treating them as equivalent unexamined. She considers incommensurability, where works share grounds for comparison without being equivalent, as an approach to the tension between relativism and universalism. Chapters read Joseph Conrad, Simone Schwartz-Bart, Aimé Césaire, Derek Walcott, Edouard Glissant and Jean-Luc Nancy.

The book is in the Cultural Memory in the Present series and is listed under All Books. SKU sku-32733406.