Comparative Literature

This course focuses on English literature and its internalization from the end of the Second World War to the present day, and the critical analysis of literary discourses and specific texts from that period. Students engage with the historical and cultural foundations of British society between the 20th and 21st centuries and topics include the analysis, criticism, creation, editing, and publication of texts.

This course introduces students to the literature of the English Renaissance through a combination of close reading and contextualization in the cultural, social and political milieu. It focuses on the study and analysis of the most significant authors and works, particularly those by William Shakespeare. In working with texts from this period, students build on critical and discursive skills developed in previous courses, as well as increase their literary and historical knowledge.

This course cultivates social innovation capacity by approaching K-content as a single bowl of bibimbap. Just as bibimbap blends diverse ingredients while preserving their distinct flavors, this course places classical and contemporary Korean literature, web novels and webtoons, dramas and games into one bowl and reads them together. K-content is treated not merely as a collection of stories but as an experimental apparatus for thinking about and testing future societies. 

In this process, students examine the tensions and collisions produced as generation and class, gender and region, and platform cultures intertwine, and to treat this hybridity not as proof of “Koreanness,” but as a starting point for social innovation. Through the course, students discover social problems that have not yet been named and learn to nurture them as both citizens and creators who can articulate those problems through new narrative forms. 

By observing specific idol, drama, game, or webtoon fandoms, recording their voluntary care practices, informal rules, and conflict mediation methods, and translating these organizational forms into prototypes for small-scale civic projects or public campaigns, students approach fandom not as a mere consumer group but as a hybrid governance model capable of experimenting with social innovation 

Furthermore, this course does not stop at reading K-content as an object of cultural consumption. It operates as an “imagination workshop” that uses SF imagination and speculative social design to experimentally envision future societies. Students analyze narrative worlds while also engaging in creative practices that design possible social institutions, technologies, and forms of community.  

Topics include What does Science Fiction imagine, Worldbuilding and reading worlds, Speculative imagination, Korean SF and K-content, Transitioning social problems into SF, K-webtoons and platform SF, K-movies and future societies, K-pop and narrative universes. 

This course explores the development of modern British drama from the late 19th century to the present, focusing on major playwrights and their works. We approach the history of British drama in three parts: the emergence of modern drama (Oscar Wilde & Bernard Shaw) at the turn of the twentieth century, two major trends in postwar Britain (John Osborne & Samuel Beckett), and the political and experimental theatre of the late 20th century onwards (Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Sarah Kane, Caryl Churchill). Keeping in mind that dramatic texts are realized on stage, we pay attention to theatrical elements and genres, including melodrama, social realist drama, the theatre of the absurd, the comedy of menace, the play of ideas, in-yer-face theatre, and political theatre. Films and other visual materials are used to enhance students’ understanding and engagement with the plays.

This first year course introduces fundamental terms and strategies for reading deeply into literature, film, and other texts. Basic theories of literary criticism, film, visual and culture studies are introduced. Students explore different approaches and reading strategies and learn how to apply critical tools to a diverse range of texts and mediums. Topics include the following: Basic and extended definitions of text, author, and reader; cinema, modernity, urban culture; gendered readings; race and ethnicity; popular culture; visuality and materiality; photography; ecocriticism and narratives of travel and migration. Writing assignments are designed to help students secure their knowledge of the vocabulary and tools of analysis necessary for more complex work in the field of comparative literary and cultural studies.

This course considers the most prestigious literary award in the world: the Nobel Prize in Literature. Starting with an overview of the award’s history and the way in which it has been administered, the course then examines the contemporary cultural contexts of Great Britain, Ireland, the United States, Russia and Czechia. The Nobel Prize in Literature, first awarded in 1901, has been intended for ‘the person who shall have produced…the most outstanding work of an ideal tendency’. Engaging with the literary scenes of the five countries under review, the course discusses the work and legacy of some of these ‘persons’ – including W. B. Yeats (who received the Prize in 1923), Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1970), William Golding (1983), Jaroslav Seifert (1984), Toni Morrison (1993), and others. It considers these outstanding literary artists’ most significant works, evaluating their contribution to the world of letters, and to humankind. The course concludes with an informed discussion about the relationship between literature and society, and the role of literature in our contemporary world.

This course introduces one interpretive key to the understanding of modernity and its relationship with postmodernity: the cultural process of secularization and the mental and social changes that secularization brought with it. 

The course searches for deeper insight on our contemporary world and examines the necessary elements to judge some of its cultural trends.  

Students conduct independent research on folklore in addition to reading works of modern literature, and consider how myth and religion continue to affect the ways modern people engage in political activity as well as influence their understanding of how the world works. Students also explore what stories are the most meaningful in their lives or in the lives of their friends and contemporaries. 

This literature and philosophy interface explores the origins of drama as theorized by two major thinkers, Friedrich Nietzsche and René Girard, and then moves on to test their hypotheses by reading major plays in the dramatic canon. The first part of the course explores Nietzsche’s interpretation of the Dionysian origins of Greek drama and René Girard’s belief that early drama attempted to resolve a metaphysical crisis with reference to a surrogate victim. The arguments for and against the role of the god, Dionysos, in the dramatic tradition are taken up in theory and practice. Dramatists read include Euripides, Shakespeare, Dryden, and Camus. This course, which combines seminar and lecture, is intended for majors in English and Comparative Literature but should also interest students in philosophy, psychology, and the social sciences.

The course examines the relationship between film and literature, focusing on narrative structure, genre, and adaptation. Using key films such as The Birth of a Nation, Citizen Kane, and works by Alfred Hitchcock, it explores concepts of film syntax and the role of the auteur. Literary and cinematic genres like melodrama and the Western are studied through texts such as The Ox-Bow Incident. The course also analyzes major adaptations, including The Turn of the Screw, Much Ado About Nothing, and Atonement, highlighting the dialogue between literary and cinematic storytelling.

This course offers a study of Anglo-American writer-critics from the transition between the 19th and 20th centuries. It focuses on the critical ideas of Matthew Arnold, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot, though attention is also be paid to New Criticism.