Comparative Literature

This course engages critically with the relationship between visual culture, written narratives and modern life in selected works produced in Latin America from the late 19th century to the 1930s. In order to create a dynamic space for critical debate, the primary bibliography features short pieces – short stories, chronicles, essays, poems – and various types of images such as illustrations from periodicals, paintings, photography, and cinema. The wide range of texts and images to be discussed includes representative works from Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay.

This course introduces students to the avant-garde literary and artistic movement called surrealism that developed across Europe in the early part of the 20th century. Beginning with an examination of the first theories of surrealism which were written in France, the course looks at the movement’s influence across European media before ending with a discussion of the movement’s continuing international development. This course compares surrealism across national boundaries and literary and artistic disciplines. The emphasis of the course is on the interrelation of different media employed by surrealist practitioners, including but not limited to prose, poetry, periodicals, film, painting, and photography. 

This course examines ancient myth in literature (poetry, drama, historiography, and other genres) and art. It explores different ways of interpreting myths and seek to understand the meaning of myths in their contexts. Prominent themes include creation, gods, heroes, sex/gender, violence, and civilization.

The 20th century was marked by the clash of ideologies—fascism, Nazism, communism—and unprecedented violence. Its literary history, in turn, was shaped by bold formal experimentation (modernism) and the emergence of voices from regions and groups previously underrepresented. Through literature, particularly the novel, the course examines how writers grappled with this apocalyptic century. The novel, with its focus on individual experience and narrative complexity, provides a unique, non-ideological lens to engage with reality and history. It studies it through works by Dostoevsky, Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Kafka, Kundera, Garcia Marquez, Achebe and others.

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.