Comparative Literature

What is the meaning of love? Is it the same for different individuals and cultures at different periods? What is its relationship to desire, language and death? Why do the Greeks have three words for love and the English one? This courses explores the theme of love in a variety of national literatures including Arabic, English, Greek, French and Italian.

This course evaluates the theoretical proposals that emerged from Saussure's structural linguistics and influence of Trubetzkoy's phonology, familiarizing one with the paradigm shift in the social and human sciences introduced by French Structuralism. The course also explores the semiotics of culture and its implications for literary studies, providing opportunities to reflect on the reading process, literary criticism and reception. Last, the course recognizes the impact of race, class, and gender on the reading experience. 

Demons, ghosts, and monsters have populated the cultural landscape in Japan for centuries. Appearing in anime, manga, games, and movies, mysterious creatures continue to form the core of contemporary popular culture, and have sparked a global obsession with Japanese monsters. This course explores the cultural history of the strange and supernatural in Japanese literary, visual, and performing arts. Engaging with primary and critical sources from the eighth century to the present, the course considers the social roles that representations of the "weird" have played in Japan.

This course examines representative texts, problems, and concepts central to the study of colonialism and postcolonialism. Topics include: definitions of colonialism, imperialism and the post-colonial condition; orientalism and occidentalism; colonial discourse and sexuality and gender; race; the nation and nationalism as imagined community; identities and mentalities of the colonized and colonizer.  Representative areas might include the mainland and greater China, but will certainly include some texts from and places within South and South East Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas. 

This course explores masterworks of short fiction from Nobel Prize winners in Literature from across the globe.  

The course covers the following works and authors: John Steinbeck’s classic American novella about migrant workers and class struggle during the Great Depression, Of Mice and Men; the magical realism of several short stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (e.g., A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings); the magical power of fiction in the service of telling gripping stories will be further illustrated by short stories from the Egyptian writer Naguib Mafouz, and the Chinese laureate Mo Yan. 

The course concludes with the most recent Nobel winner Han Kang’s work about resistance and transcendence, The Vegetarian. 

This course explores the 19th- and 20th-century development of crime fiction, with a double focus on the subgenres of detective fiction and of the psychological thriller, which flourished in relation to the relevance psychoanalysis acquired as an interpretative paradigm of the human. Its aim is to illustrate the complexity of a genre that was reductively considered in the past as structurally formulaic and critically uninteresting, but which has recently obtained increasing attention and recognition as a significant literary phenomenon.

This cross-media genre is explored as a ‘field of tension’ in order to study the changing status of both detection/detectives (due to the development of forensic science) and of crime/criminals (due to the continuous reshaping of laws and social norms). The course investigates the interplay between aspects of the detective such as mind and body (thinking machines versus vulnerable detectives), intellect and emotions (how do these apparently opposed dimensions concur to the personality of fallible and infallible detectives?). Students also utilize the critical category of gender to investigate authorial issues and characterization.

Upon completing this course, students acquire an in-depth knowledge of the history of English literature. They obtain critical insight into a selection of literary works and can evaluate their literary qualities, analyzing them with the help of precise critical metholodogies. They acquire the theoretical tools needed to recognize the formal, thematic and stylistic components of the works included in the syllabus, relating them to their historical and cultural contexts. Students discuss, translate, and relate the contents of these works from a linguistic, historical, and philological viewpoint.

This course introduces scholarship, debates, methods, and professional trends in the field of literary studies, considering questions of theory, application, interdisciplinary, and textuality. It trains students in the methods used to conduct literary research in their papers and theses, giving careful attention to library resources and academic style. Thie seminar explores questions of who Indigenous peoples are, what Indigeneity is, and where Indigenous nations exist. It addresses these questions by reading a wide range of theory in the field of Indigenous Studies from around the world and also taking a look at some creative work. The course develops a comprehensive understanding of colonization and decolonization and incorporates that understanding into individual areas of study. 

This course is designed to acquaint students with the concepts and values underlying the rhetorical traditions in China and the West (esp. rhetorical traditions which affect how native speakers of Chinese and English communicate). Students are expected to better understand the differences and similarities which affect the key concepts and values in rhetorical practice across cultures. Materials that will be studied and discussed include the Analects (Chinese and English bilingual version) by Confucius and Aristotle’s On Rhetoric (English translation), and important literature on comparative rhetoric with a focus on Chinese and Western (mainly Greco-Roman) rhetorical traditions.

In order to approach the Feminine/Masculine dichotomy or its complementarity, it is worth taking a diachronic approach that embraces different literary genres and philosophical arguments. From the earliest texts of Antiquity to contemporary novels, it's important to note the clichés and canons of the two genres in order to better reopen representations of binarity. Starting with Plato's myth of the androgyne, which proposes the invention of the sexes, the course works on the definitions of masculine and feminine, as well as their relationships. It then studies extracts from medieval literature to analyze the implementation of a codified image of masculine behavior and feminine posture. This highlights works less frequently found in school anthologies, and discovers original voices that sing of the links between men and women. The Renaissance period is explored through a painting by a man depicting a woman: starting from this banal subject, it sees the stakes, both poetic and aesthetic, in the figuration of the symbols chosen. Crossing the Grand siècle, with its coquettes, inconstants and honest men, the course moves on to the Age of Enlightenment, where the question of gender becomes pressing, with the proposals of Poulain de la Barre, for example. The poetics of uncertain or metamorphosed genders is explored using texts from the 19th and 20th centuries: the castrato, the hermaphrodite, and transvestites are studied. The course looks at new ways of referring to these figures as they find their representation in literature. Intersexuality will thus be examined in the light of works chosen for their literary interest and the philosophical reflection they generate. Finally, it takes a closer look at representations of male and female bodies in contemporary literature, focusing on the poetics of weakness, injury and ageing, with particular reference to the motif of the gaze of a third party and that of the mirror to which one speaks of one's own body.