Comparative Literature

This course introduces students to five key Scottish ghost-fiction writers and their most memorable fantastic fictions: James Hogg, J.M. Barrie, Margaret Oliphant, Robert Louis Stevenson, and George MacDonald. It invites students to think about the role that the supernatural continues to play in Scottish writing through exploration of its representation in Romantic and Victorian fiction. Through closely analyzing excerpts from these writers and discussing the various wider cultural, social, and political anxieties and fears that can be expressed via the supernatural, students explore the historical context and literary impact of the Scottish Gothic.

The course introduces students to the phenomenon of historical and contemporary diasporic literature and literatures of migration. Topics covered include: the ways in which literary works reflect on the experience of migration; how narratives and poems contribute to the imagination of cultural and political collectives; and how exile and displacement trigger efforts to imagine cultural belonging outside of national confines. In the wake of globalization, the world has become increasingly interconnected, and the course studies how different literary texts respond to this new situation, offering students insights into how literature reflects on cross-cultural encounters and contributes to our understanding of experiences of displacement and diaspora. This is the second course of the specialization Literature Across Borders.

This course offers a survey of modern Irish literature, from the Irish Dramatic Revival with the founding of the Abbey Theatre in 1904 to the late twentieth century. Irish authors are often studied as part of English literature, but Ireland has its own unique cultural history. While the focus of the course is drama, it also covers some poems and short stories. The course enhances students' understanding of Irish culture and history: Celtic mythology, Irish landscape, fairies and folklore, Catholicism and the Protestant ascendancy, British colonialism, independence, and the Celtic Tiger. We read representative work by major Irish authors, including W. B. Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory, J. M. Synge, Sean O`Casey, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, and Marina Carr. We explore how these authors respond to the idea of Irishness, as their works show persistent interest in Irish history and Irish identity. 

This course introduces major works of ancient Near Eastern, Hebrew, Greek, and Roman literature to explore the cultural and historical foundations of Western civilization. Texts such as the Hebrew Bible, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and Virgil’s Aeneid, are read and analyzed with a focus on themes of heroism, divinity, and human experience. Emphasis is placed on close reading, literary analysis, and active participation through discussions, quizzes, written responses, and group presentations.

This seminar discusses how writers from different times and places have reacted to upheaval in different ways and examining the space where personal storytelling and political intent intertwine. It analyzes how the personal circumstances of those writers influence their respective writing, to gain clues as to how students' own individual conditions interact with their writing. Topics include how can fiction capture the turbulence of its times and can the world of fiction make sense of the complex causes of anger arising from sociopolitical change?

The fin de siecle (end of the century) is an important phenomenon in European literature and culture at the end of the 19th century. The works of well-known writers and thinkers such as Wilde, Baudelaire, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and psychologist Freud boldly explore the dark side of human nature and reflect on the decline of civilization, all of which present the cultural characteristics of the fin de siècle. This literature later spread to East Asia with various translated works and artistic creations, arousing enthusiastic responses in Japan and China in the 20th century. Through imitation, dialectics and transformation in the literary and art circles, complex cross-cultural issues emerged.  

This course introduces works in modern Chinese literature that are deeply influenced by European "fin de siècle" literature and culture. It explores poetry, novels, dramas, and reviews spanning the entire twentieth century. It adopts the research method of comparative literature; compares and carefully reads Chinese and foreign works; sorts out transnational literary context and ideological origins, and explores their rich implications, to gain a deep understanding of "fin de siècle" literature and culture and its influence. 

This course explores moving image works and related media forms through the lens of migration and diaspora. It will look at the role of aesthetics, affect, gender, race, temporality, and intimacy in the stories that historically marginalized makers tell, and the kinds of narrative and formal experimentation they develop to critically revisit notions of home, memory, and community across different geographies. Readings from film and media scholarship, transnational cultural and ethnic studies, queer and gender studies as well as short creative and personal writings will guide our theoretical framework and help us articulate the various ways in which media are deeply imbricated with both the violent and reparative realities of border-crossing.

Literature is a cultural and aesthetic phenomenon that takes on many different forms in different periods, regions, and languages. In all of these forms, literature reflects in one way or another the society from which it emerges. This course focuses on the complex relations between literature and society and to write and speak about them in an academic way. The course considers the characteristics of narrative, interpretation, poetics, and textuality, and place literary texts and analyses in specific historical and cultural contexts. In this course students consider key literary debates via the analysis of different texts from a number of different perspectives in literary studies. Students learn to see literature as a cultural phenomenon and are able to reflect academically on ethical and aesthetic aspects of literature; become familiar with different theoretical and critical movements; know a number of case studies, in which literary texts have influenced ethical debates; are able to write and speak about these kinds of issues in an academic way; acquire a supra-lingual perspective on literature.

This course introduces students to the study of Comparative Literature through 19th-century novels from France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Spain, and the UK. All texts are read in English translation. Students are introduced to a representative and canonical range of fictional works, with focus on one literary genre - the novel - and one over-arching theme. Lecturers, seminar leaders, and secondary criticism all model a variety of comparative approaches for students and promote discussion of the discipline.

This course explores the impact that the complex relationship between humans and nature has on climate and biodiversity. It discusses the historical evolution of humanity's approach to nature and those representations in Latin American literature. It focuses on the cultural/environmental implications of extractivism, histories of land use, the social impact of economy on bodies and the biosphere, the political use of nature, non-human/human relations, the emergence of Latin American environmental thinking, ecocriticism, modern Latin American literature, and some of the most important political and cultural debates of the continent in recent history.