In this luminous work, Claudio Guillen meditates on the elusive field of comparative literature and its vicissitudes since the early nineteenth century. These pages ring with the authority of a scholar who has keenly observed his discipline during recent decades, when the predominant interest in contrasts, comparisons, influences, and interrelationships gave way to what Guillen terms "the systematic study of supranational assemblages."

This book is a powerful call to abandon the ethnocentric view of literature and to face the tension between the local and the universal. Guillen shows how literature catapults us into supranationality. Poetry provokes and inspires his reflections. Aiming to write a book that approaches the nations of the world, "drawing close to them, listening to them, yielding their best voices, reproducing whenever possible their exact words," Guillen presents the work of Cervantes, Borges, Dante, Garcia Marquez, Neruda, Dario, Ortega, Whitman, T. S. Eliot, Czeslaw Milosz, Alberti, Lorca, Jorge Guillen, Rilke, Milton, Beckett, Stefan George, and the great rang poets, as well as Nahuatl literature and Quechua elegies. As he proceeds, the essential components of literary communication unfold before us—its channels, forms, themes, genres, and use of literary history.

Not since Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism has any great critic provided us with so commodious a framework for understanding literature in all its variety. In Guillen's hands, Babel becomes not chaos but a beautifully diverse unity, transcending the boundaries of the individual and the nation. A brilliant exploration of a field, The Challenge of Comparative Literature will be required reading for all who seek a renewed view of literature and its voices throughout the world.