Comparative Literature

This course reflects on how the novel genre was constructed in awareness of multilingualism and the challenges of translation, based on the most translated novel in the world, DON QUIJOTE DE LA MANCHA. It discusses the numerous rewritings of the novel that have been carried out around the world and studies a certain number of “adaptations” for youth, theater, comics, and film.

This team-taught course introduces students to a broad range of texts, authors, and issues in Irish writing. Students work across genres and forms, encountering canonical and less often studied works. This comparative course proposes various ways of thinking about Irish literary texts, while at the same time providing a sound knowledge of the social, cultural, and political conditions in which these texts were written, produced and read.

Demons, ghosts, and monsters have populated the cultural landscape in Japan for centuries. Appearing in anime, manga, games, and movies, mysterious creatures continue to form the core of contemporary popular culture, sparking a global obsession with Japanese monsters. This course explores the cultural history of the strange and supernatural in Japanese literary, visual, and performing arts. Engaging with primary and critical sources from the eighth century to the present, it considers the social roles that representations of “the weird” have played in Japan.

This course focuses on analyzing 19th century poetry from authors such as Emily Dickenson and Henry David Thoreau.

This course focuses on writing that addresses places of memory by transfiguring them into "happiness machines," recycling the poetics deployed in the works of the program, which become literally a way of reintroducing into a new cycle fragments saved from oblivion in order to achieve a renewed perception of the world.

This course is an examination of Shakespeare's work and the cultural and literary background of the two plays HAMLET and AS YOU LIKE IT, studied in the accompanying tutorial course, SHAKESPEARE TUTORIAL. The course explores particularly the various genres of the plays, the theatrical conditions in Shakespeare's times, as well as more general cultural issues such as the Elizabethan world picture and the religious reformation.

This course is specialized for international students. It studies basic texts of French and francophone literature, with a particular focus on the different styles used and topics approached. The course also discusses French history and how it is reflected in an authors' writing.

This course reads and analyzes Francophone literature written by those of Black descent in order to understand terms like Afrofuturism and Afroprophetism to connect history with the present. The course examines the literary and narrative histories and structure of African and African-related works and considers how the narratives renew the view of Africa in a philosophical sense through literary works. Works studied include Leonara Miano's ROUGE IMPERATRICE, Abdourrahman Waberi's AUX ETATS UNIS D'AFRIQUE, and an anthology collected through a collective project.

This course serves as an introduction into the francophone literature of Sub-Saharan Africa. It discusses a history of francophone literature through the study of two genres: poetry and novel. The first half of the course focuses on the poetry of the négritude movement, reading works from Senghor and Césaire. The second half of the course focuses on novels such as Cheikh Hamidou Kane's L'AVENTURE AMBIGUE, Yambo Ouologuem's LE DEVOIR DE VIOLENCE, and Henri Lopes's LE CHERCHEUR D'AFRIQUES. This course discusses topics such as identity through the lens of francophone literature and explores the question of the connection between literature and socio-historical context. 

This course explores some of the main trends of French and Francophone life writing since the beginning of the 21st century, and evaluates in what ways these trends (and the authorial strategies associated with them) offer new perspectives on the traditional concerns of the literary genre of autobiography, reflecting the increasing gender and ethnic diversity apparent amongst contemporary authors of French and Francophone literature. Questions of personal identity are at the center of this course, with a particular focus on (ethnically) hybrid identities. The course centers on the role of images in contemporary French and Francophone life-writing in order to interrogate the tendency in such works to use images in diverse ways to explore the complexities of identity. Visiting students should have the equivalent of at least two years of study at University level of French.