The Comparative Literature Newsletter
I see in a somewhat dispiriting perspective.
I interpret it as a low-level academic enterprise
whose purpose is to try to evoke a degree of esprit de corps
for a department languishing in social and economic irrelevance
and burdened with the outsize egos of the controlling academic
aristocracy. The professors to whom my essay will be submitted
will barely glance at it, and will almost certainly torpedo on
sight any radical ideas which threaten the legitimacy of the
traditions they espouse. As of today, April 21, 2011, I've had
no response from the secretary who distributed the "call for
papers", and I expect none.  I enjoyed assembling my thoughts, 
although I did so in a somewhat higgledy-piggledy fashion.

Thank you for the seriousness with which you consider my eccentric
notions, and for giving me the opportunity for a more critical
presentation. I wrote:

"The literature which we compare has no unconditional validity.
It is an artifact of cultural politics, an accident of history.
The quality that makes a work classical or timeless is an
illusion.  It has endured not because it is timeless; it appears
timeless on account of its accidental endurance."

I initially ventured a closely related hypothesis in 1993 in
Chapter 1 of my novel "Die Andere":

_                             Nun erkannte er, dasz er trotz,
oder schlimmer noch, wegen all seiner Anstrengungen sein
urspruengliches Ziel verfehlt hatte. Er kam sich vor, wie ein
Wanderer in einer Wueste am Ende seiner Lebenskraefte, dessen
letzte Leistung in der Erkenntnis besteht, dasz es doch nur eine
Fata Morgana war, der er entgegengestrebt hatte. Fuer Doehring
bestand diese abschlieszende Einsicht in der Ueberzeugung, dasz
die literarischen Werke mit deren Studium er sein Leben
verbracht, doch keineswegs den unbedingten Wert, den er
vorausgesetzt hatte, besassen. Vermeintlich waren sie ihrer
Vortrefflichkeiten wegen ueberliefert worden. Blickte man aber
naeher hin, so war nicht zu verkennen, dass ihre Wahl durch den
reinen Zufall, oder was dasselbe ist, durch menschliche Willkuer,
bestimmt worden war. Er konnte sich jetzt den Wert den er ihnen
zugeschrieben hatte nur als die Veraeusserung seines eigenen
Selbstbewusstseins und die Behauptung seines eigenen Willens
erklaeren.

"....dass ihre Wahl ... that their selection was a matter of
pure chance, or, amounting to the same, a matter of arbitrary
human choice..."

A more detailed analysis is possible. An important distinction
is between literature in an unfamiliar language and literature
in a familiar, in a native language. When I read Aeschylus or
Sophocles for example, I am literally learning a foreign tongue,
and for the "beauty and truth" of what I read, I have no criterion
other than the text itself. I assimilate myself to the text; I
memorize and it becomes part of my mental structure, - if you like
physical explanations, imagine that reading and memorizing the
text causes structural, chemical alterations in the nerve fibres
and the nerve cells of the brain. When I read the lines of a poet
like Hoelderlin or Rilke whose language is intimately familiar,
the verse resonates much like music. Such resonance is specific
not only to the language and to the individual reader, but also
to the intellectual/emotional/social ambience. Consider that
Hoelderlin's lyrics, which "we" now consider the greatest in the
language were rejected by both Schiller and Goethe, the recognized
"deans" of German literature in Hoelderlin's day.

With "philosophical" texts the process of assimilation is even more
compelling and dramatic. The reader of Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Husserl,
Heidegger must, for each author, learn a "new" language and assimilate
its meaning. That meaning is projected onto the text not by the author,
but by the reader.

The systematic advertising and promotion of contemporary literature
is to me the most persuasive demonstration that its acceptance is
consequence not of intrinsic value but of social circumstances and
constraints.