Stepping Towards Integration and Accommodation: Methodological Innovations in Cross-Cultural Comparative Research and Foreign Literature Studies

The sub-discipline, "comparative literature and cross-cultural research", is newly set in the discipline of Foreign Languages and Literatures, and its methodological significance transcends the sub-discipline itself.In the era of "networking and globalization", multi-cultural communication and collision are accelerated and intensified, requiring foreign literature studies to stand in the height of "general literature" and to scrutinize from an overall perspective the literatures of different times and of diverse cultural backgrounds in the spirit of the commensurability of human literature, which means the "integration" of ideas and the interactive use of multiple research methods in the process of comparative research.The foreign literature studies are supposed to break as many cross-nation barriers as possible and to step towards the realm of literary cosmopolitanism, which is also a problem that should be faced squarely in the discipline construction of foreign languages and literatures.