Comparative Literature

This literature-focused course surveys major English-language texts of the 19th century, emphasizing literary analysis and critical interpretation. It examines works by Coleridge, Shelley, Austen, Dickens, Eliot, and Conrad, analyzing themes such as industrialization, social order, morality, and the supernatural. The course encourages students to view literature both as a product of its time and a vehicle for challenging dominant ideologies, while honing analytical writing and interpretive skills.

This course focuses on contemporary fiction that looks to our future as radically dystopian. It explores the reasons for dystopia and the way we construct, through film and literature, images of an uncertain future and the challenges we face as a society. This course also discusses speculative fiction, specifically the impact of scientific and technological development on our society as constructed and proposed through literature and film.   

Pre-requisites: Advanced knowledge of Spanish 

This course investigates key literary works from the 18th century to the present that mark turning points in English-language literature. Beginning with the emergence of the English novel and continuing through Romanticism, Gothic literature, Modernism, Postmodernism, and contemporary identity-driven and decolonial narratives, the course emphasizes how literature both reflects and shapes historical change. 

This course offers a historical and thematic journey through European literature of the 16th to 20th centuries with a focus on Spanish works. It explores key literary movements from Humanism to Modernism, and how themes such as autonomy, realism, conflict, and social commitment have shaped modern writing. This course focuses on female writers and female representation, combining close reading with class discussion and critical analysis. 

Pre-requisites: C1 level of Spanish 

Through an exploration of texts and visual representations of Fortune, this course examines how instability and change were represented and written about during the Renaissance.

The course engages with the self-legitimizing and framing of agency and identities —ethnic, gender, socio-economic— in the works of a range of early modern writers some of whom did not live in accordance to the contemporary expectations of their biological gender— from diverse locations across Hispanic territories in Europe and the Americas. Materials can include letters, novellas, drama, poetry, autobiography, chronicles and historical records from canonical authors as well as previously marginalized voices. Students explore the early modern Hispanic world from metropolitan, colonized and colonizing perspectives and engage with questions of (self-)representation within artistic, social and political structures in the early modern world. The study of various genres allows students to consider the multiple ways and implications of creating, defending, and circulating notions of identity as well as recording agency in this period.

This course focuses on theater from the 1600-1700s. It focuses on two works, Racine's BERNICE and Beaumarchais's LE MARIAGE DE FIGARO, a tragedy and a comedy. The course discusses specific playwriting rules from the era and how the time period affects the way that these plays were written and performed. 

This comparative literature course focuses on the articulation between poetry and animality, and allows students to discover the approach proposed by zoopoetics, to reflect on the modalities of animal presence in poetry while enriching their poetic literary culture. The course discovers zoopoetics, enhances literary and poetic culture, and reflects on the modalities of animal presence in poetry. It develops skills in analysis of literary texts: comparative method; scientific writing method: reading a critical corpus, appropriating it, citing it; developing and structuring a long-form essay. Each lesson is dedicated to an animal figure, studied in comparison with a corpus of poetic texts.

This course is not for the faint-hearted. It will look at ghosts and other supernatural phenomena in multiple genres and media: spooky ghost stories, scary movies, body horror stories and films, gothic tales, “romantasies,” and stories of nostalgic haunting. 

Among the questions to be explored will be: What fears do the works provoke and examine? What kinds of longing do hauntings evoke? How might we understand the paranormal socially and psychologically? We look at selected short stories by Edgar Alan Poe, Stephen King, Mariana Enriquez, Mo Yan, Yoko Ogawa, and Bora Chung.

Films to view together (in class) and explore will include the American horror classic The Shining, the baseball fantasy Field of Dreams, the Japanese horror film Ringu, the Spanish tale of haunting and heartbreak The Orphanage, and the recent body-horror hit The Substance. The course will end with selected episodes of the K-drama Goblin. 

The ghost is a paradoxical figure: does it belong to the world of the dead or to the world of the living? Is it a revenant from the beyond, or the projection of the “fantasms”—the words share the same etymology—of the person who sees it? Keeping these questions in mind, and focusing on effects of surprise, ambiguity, and evocation, this course examines the adaptations and transpositions of the ghostly figure between literature and cinema. In the first part of the course, devoted to cinematic and operatic adaptations of Henry James’s THE TURN OF THE SCREW, the course explores the methods of adaptation—from straightforward illustration to the transformations required by the specific tools and languages of opera and film. How does each medium make the ghost “appear”? The second part of the course attempts a bolder comparative exercise by putting Charles Nodier’s short story INÉS DE LAS SIERRAS dialogue with Alfred Hitchcock’s film VERTIGO. The course pays close attention to the thematic resonances (the woman, the double, the investigation) that exist between these two works separated by more than a century, as well as to the distinctive ways in which each of them employs music and painting.