Comparative Literature

This course explores Berlin through the lens of émigré and exile literature, examining works by writers who either left Berlin or found refuge within it. Through close readings of texts spanning from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to contemporary works, students analyze how experiences of exile, migration, and displacement shape literary imagination and cultural identity. The course moves through Berlin's key historical moments—from the Russian émigré communities of the 1920s, through the forced exile of Jewish writers, to post-war Turkish-German literature and contemporary refugee narratives. By pairing literary texts with theoretical frameworks and conducting original ethnographic research, students investigate how different waves of migration have transformed both Berlin's physical spaces and its literary landscape. Special attention is paid to how writers represent specific Berlin neighborhoods and how various communities have shaped the city's cultural geography. Through engagement with memoir, fiction, poetry, and first-hand accounts, students explore themes of memory, nostalgia, linguistic displacement, cultural adaptation, and the evolving relationship between place and identity in émigré writing.

This topical course covers Twentieth-Century American Crime Fiction. This is one of the most popular genres worldwide—especially in the United States. Despite its enormous impact on popular culture, this genre remains one of the least developed areas in terms of recognized literary value, which makes it a fascinating subject for study. In this course, we read a variety of crime fiction works that have captured the American imagination throughout the twentieth century, and we will: 1. Examine each text in detail, discussing its aesthetic, stylistic, and thematic qualities; 2. Explore how the genre has evolved in conversation with popular culture, in order to better understand the sociocultural significance of crime fiction in America; 3. Use crime fiction as a lens through which to critically engage with existing theories of genre in literary criticism. 

This course explores images drawn from the mythical and literary traditions of Ancient Greece and examines their impact on modern and contemporary literary works. Emphasis is placed on symbolic and psychological interpretations, highlighting how classical imagery continues to shape literary expression and cultural imagination.

Literature is deeply embedded within socio-cultural context. This elect course focuese on the multi-dimensional intersection between literary studies, feminist literary critique, and western social hisotry, to emphasize the impact of literature on social development by way of examining women's relationship to reading and writing in a broad historical spectrum. Methodologies involved include literary and cultural analysis, feminist movments, and critical understanding and discussion on issues of women and family, marriage, motherhood, education, social engagement, intellectual history, and agency.  

This course introduces students to five key Scottish ghost-fiction writers and their most memorable fantastic fictions: James Hogg, J.M. Barrie, Margaret Oliphant, Robert Louis Stevenson, and George MacDonald. It invites students to think about the role that the supernatural continues to play in Scottish writing through exploration of its representation in Romantic and Victorian fiction. Through closely analyzing excerpts from these writers and discussing the various wider cultural, social, and political anxieties and fears that can be expressed via the supernatural, students explore the historical context and literary impact of the Scottish Gothic.

The course introduces students to the phenomenon of historical and contemporary diasporic literature and literatures of migration. Topics covered include: the ways in which literary works reflect on the experience of migration; how narratives and poems contribute to the imagination of cultural and political collectives; and how exile and displacement trigger efforts to imagine cultural belonging outside of national confines. In the wake of globalization, the world has become increasingly interconnected, and the course studies how different literary texts respond to this new situation, offering students insights into how literature reflects on cross-cultural encounters and contributes to our understanding of experiences of displacement and diaspora. This is the second course of the specialization Literature Across Borders.

This course offers a survey of modern Irish literature, from the Irish Dramatic Revival with the founding of the Abbey Theatre in 1904 to the late twentieth century. Irish authors are often studied as part of English literature, but Ireland has its own unique cultural history. While the focus of the course is drama, it also covers some poems and short stories. The course enhances students' understanding of Irish culture and history: Celtic mythology, Irish landscape, fairies and folklore, Catholicism and the Protestant ascendancy, British colonialism, independence, and the Celtic Tiger. We read representative work by major Irish authors, including W. B. Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory, J. M. Synge, Sean O`Casey, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, and Marina Carr. We explore how these authors respond to the idea of Irishness, as their works show persistent interest in Irish history and Irish identity. 

This course introduces major works of ancient Near Eastern, Hebrew, Greek, and Roman literature to explore the cultural and historical foundations of Western civilization. Texts such as the Hebrew Bible, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and Virgil’s Aeneid, are read and analyzed with a focus on themes of heroism, divinity, and human experience. Emphasis is placed on close reading, literary analysis, and active participation through discussions, quizzes, written responses, and group presentations.

This seminar discusses how writers from different times and places have reacted to upheaval in different ways and examining the space where personal storytelling and political intent intertwine. It analyzes how the personal circumstances of those writers influence their respective writing, to gain clues as to how students' own individual conditions interact with their writing. Topics include how can fiction capture the turbulence of its times and can the world of fiction make sense of the complex causes of anger arising from sociopolitical change?

The fin de siecle (end of the century) is an important phenomenon in European literature and culture at the end of the 19th century. The works of well-known writers and thinkers such as Wilde, Baudelaire, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and psychologist Freud boldly explore the dark side of human nature and reflect on the decline of civilization, all of which present the cultural characteristics of the fin de siècle. This literature later spread to East Asia with various translated works and artistic creations, arousing enthusiastic responses in Japan and China in the 20th century. Through imitation, dialectics and transformation in the literary and art circles, complex cross-cultural issues emerged.  

This course introduces works in modern Chinese literature that are deeply influenced by European "fin de siècle" literature and culture. It explores poetry, novels, dramas, and reviews spanning the entire twentieth century. It adopts the research method of comparative literature; compares and carefully reads Chinese and foreign works; sorts out transnational literary context and ideological origins, and explores their rich implications, to gain a deep understanding of "fin de siècle" literature and culture and its influence.