Comparative Literature

This seminar examines the close relationship of textuality, storytelling and subjectivity in three canonical modernist texts: Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness; James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; and Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse. Students study the period of Modernism and the distrusts and questions of the claim of human reason to be a reliable means for understanding and controlling the world. Key topics include narrative strategies within a newly structured world, textual experiments as empowering spaces for the shaken subject, and textual patterns emphasized in order to compensate for the loss of a more tangible world order. Additionally, the texts focus on textual representation served as a 'hyper-realist' depiction of the chaotic state of decay whereas story telling provided a potential panacea in a world devoid of meaning. 

This course examines Existentialism and Phenomenology in terms of their unique and considerable contributions to the Western, and particularly French, aesthetic tradition. Students examine views on art by some of the best-known modern theorists to gain understanding of the philosophical issues motivating French aesthetic thought at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th Centuries. The course then covers a shift from a broadly existentialist view of literature to one influenced by the growing structuralist movement and reviews philosophical investigations of the arts in relation to theories of perception.  

This course provides basic knowledge of the culture of the Viking Age, such as it is presented in contemporary sources and in interpretations and applications from the past two centuries with a special focus on how this culture has gained considerable importance then and in modern times, in the Viking homelands, and the surrounding world. The course provides skills in interpreting, understanding and discussing certain contemporary sources both written (Old Norse literature, rune inscriptions, chronicles) and archaeological, and to analyze the nature of Viking culture's depiction in high and popular culture in fiction, film, media, monuments and cultural-political contexts with a certain emphasis on its relationship with the romantic tradition. The course highlights how the modern spread of Viking culture has been marked by academic and political disagreements.

This course offers a comparative approach to fairy tales that highlights their transnational circulation and their contributions to shaping European values from the late 17C to the present. The course will give students a powerful sense of the hybridity and fluidity of cultures and of the way tales are appropriated to consolidate national, social and gender identities. By studying fairy tale adaptations in different media (including film), students will develop new techniques of interpretation. And by writing a fairy tale for our times, students will stretch their imagination and creativity. This course is well suited to students of Comparative Literatures and Cultures and of Modern Languages, as it will build on and stretch your understanding of how cultures function and interact. More broadly, this course will also be of particular interest to students interested in the cross-fertilization between cultures and nations in the history of Europe.

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.