Comparative Literature

This class focuses on travel writing from English and German speaking countries after 1945.  From the 1970s onwards, travel writing has displayed a strong tendency towards hybridity. The course covers works such as Bruce Chatwin's "In Patagonia;" The Middle Passage" by V. S. Naipaul, and W. G. Sebald's "The Rings of Saturn." 

The course also deals with some eminent representatives of German-speaking travel writing like Roger Willemsen and Christoph Ransmayr, whose works will be read against the background of the aforementioned classics. Last but not the least, this course will give a short overview of the history of travel writing, discussing the role of ethnology and topics like orientalism, primitivism and postcolonialism.

The course explores select classic and contemporary plays, poems, short stories, and novels by Norwegian authors. It analyzes literary texts and reflects on their intersections with gender, place, and history. Texts include folktales, an Ibsen play, novels, and other works of fiction. Through lectures and class discussions, the course develops proficiency in close reading and an understanding of the cultural contexts of literary expression.

This course practices the methodology of textual analysis using an anthology of texts of different genres from the 16th to the 21st century. 

This course will invite famous novelists and new writers at home and abroad to give lectures or a series of lectures, which will be open to all students in the form of elective courses. Three to seven writers will be invited for the course. The invited writers are expected not only to be highly established, original and representative, but also to have deep theoretical thinking in fiction. Through this course, novelists share their creative experience with students, introduce their creative theories and experiences, stimulate their creative enthusiasm, and encourage and guide their writing and communication. At the same time, it can also cultivate students' sentiment and achieve the good purpose of aesthetic education.

This course considers the relationship between the noir genre and social criticism, particularly from the perspective of the Situationist International group which was active between 1957 and 1972. It compares texts from the Situationist International and several novels by Jean-Patrick Manchette, in particular Ô DINGOS! O CASTLES! (1972), one of the first novels of the writer, very marked by situationist themes (critique of architecture, play, merchandise); THE LITTLE BLUE OF THE WEST COAST (1976), which marks a shift towards a more perceptible formal research while continuing the critique of daily life alienated; and THE POSITION OF THE PRONE SHOOTER (1981), where social criticism seems to take a back seat in favor a return to the violent and very refined action novel.

An annexed territory and the only colony of settlement in the French Empire, Algeria was officially a part of France, and its loss represents not only a dramatic territorial amputation (more than twice the size of metropolitan France) but also a traumatic symbolic and ideological shift. Long repressed, cloistered and today fragmented and manipulated, the painful and sensitive memories of the colonization of Algeria and the subsequent War of Independence have contributed to the construction of a deeply divided society in France. This course examines the multiple relations between Franco-Algerian history, memory, and minority identities as represented in contemporary France (Algerian immigrants and their "French" descendants, Sephardic Jews, Harkis, Pieds-Noirs, mixed-race individuals). Other groups of people living in France participated in the Algerian War, such as conscripts, professional soldiers, porteurs de valise (French who supported the Algerian nationalists), and all claim different and often conflicting histories. The course material consists of scholarly texts (articles from different disciplines), literature (three novels), and a few films. The course examines how these different resources elaborate memorial discourses carrying public claims of Franco-Algerian identity. The different minority stances often contradict the official French (and, incidentally, Algerian) narrative(s) while being in conflict with the State’s interest. Through interdisciplinary critical readings, this class studies in depths the concept of "representation" and its several meanings: the mental representation (memory of a historical trauma), artistic representation (literature, films), historical representation (conventional narratives and non-conventional approaches), and political representation (representativeness). The analysis of diverse forms of discursive practices about the French colonial past in Algeria, leading to contemporary processes of minority identifications and "community" dynamics in France, allows the class to deepen its understanding of current debates about “wars of memory” and “competitive victimhood” in French society, while reflecting upon issues of citizenship and possible ways to think of conflicted identities as a legacy of colonialism and immigration.

What is “the contemporary”? How has contemporary literature since the turn of the twenty-first century engaged with some of the most pressing social, political, and cultural concerns of the current moment? This course takes the experience and representation of time as its central analytic for examining these questions. Through a range of novels written since the turn of the twenty-first century, the course introduces the emergent social, political, and cultural concerns currently occupying the contemporary imagination.

The course introduces students to the study and representation of the everyday, the mix of sweeping trends and little things that make up the day-in, day-out of life. Via key themes (such as private and public space, rhythms and routines, streets and houses, interaction and alienation, boredom and surprise) we will analyse a selection of filmic, photographic and literary texts in which the everyday is portrayed (such as city symphonies, photobooks, literary fiction and documentaries).

This is a tutorial for the course LITERATURE OF THE ANGLOPHONE WORD: SHAKESPEARE. It focuses on close readings of two Shakespeare plays: one tragedy, HAMLET; and one comedy, AS YOU LIKE IT. 

This course analyzes the theme of "crossing borders" in geographical, scientific, political, psychological, social, cultural and gender-orientated terms, building on literary skills which students have acquired through study at Level 1. It focuses on the human motivations behind, and the consequences of, various "crossings" as well as the exploration of otherness, secrets, mysteries, and taboos.