Comparative Literature

This course invites students to do a thorough reflection on what it means to be an educated human being. Starting from the classical concept of the artes liberales, it explores the different forms this concept has taken on throughout Western history, such as the humanistic ideal of the "homo universalis," the 19th century concept of Bildung, and the late 20th and 21st-century ideal of "global citizenship." The course also examines the most important challenges which liberal education has faced throughout its long history: e.g. utilitarianism (Plato against the sophists), scholasticism (Lorenzo Valla’s critique of medieval "obscurantism"), and the challenge posed by the 19th-century concept of "professional science." Moreover, the course explores the surprising ways in which ideals of liberal education have spread by means of literature, e.g. through the "Bildungsroman" (H. Hesse), the "epic theatre" (Bertolt Brecht) and even the modern detective (Sherlock Holmes). Lastly, the course invites students to write a conclusive statement on the value of liberal education by asking students to rethink how liberal education has formed their character in previous years and how it is likely to bear on life choices that are upcoming in the future.

This course introduces the area of Czech fairytales as a genre within its broader historical, geographical, and cultural context. Furthermore, it describes and surveys the changes in the approach to fairytales within the development of scholarship about them. The course presents historical, psychoanalytical, and philosophical interpretations, as well as anthropological and religious types of theories, and biological and gender or feminist methods of their interpretation. The course respects the connection of the fairytale to other folklore narrative forms like legends, fables, and myths; however, it defines the fairytale as a specific genre. It includes topics such as ethical and moral principles in fairytales, gender and social roles, and historical and political influences on fairytale adaptations.

This course presents British and Irish literature through texts related to historical periods and major aesthetic currents in the history of Britain and Ireland. It provides tools for analysis, reading, and argumentation for written and oral expression. The course covers the methods of literary criticism and enriches literary culture through the reading of canonical texts. 

Visions of the end of the world have become common in the for the past decades both in literature and in popular culture. This course examines the narratives dealing with the collapse of civilization and the rebirth of a new society. How have novels and films in the post-World War Two era confronted the fears of social disintegration, ecological disaster, and technological cataclysms? What might these narratives tell us about the world in which we are currently living, which appears perched on the edge of drastic and possibly calamitous changes? The course analyzes novels by George Stewart, Kurt Vonnegut, and Lionel Shriver and views classic and recent films dealing with the end of the world, of humankind, or even of culture itself. Students analyze speculative fiction and develop their own ideas about the future by extrapolating from the narratives studied in the course.

This course provides a survey of the conflict between literary creativity and control by society, in a wide historical, European context. A series of case studies on controversial texts and authors are discussed in connection with the regulations imposed to suppress or regulate the distribution of these works. Official secular and religious censorship, the development of copyright, and protests against “inflammatory”, “blasphemic”, or “amoral” texts are studied through authors like Erasmus, Montaigne, Vondel, Spinoza, Stuart Mill, Nabokov, and Rushdie who used literary strategies to avoid censorship and repression, such as the use of metaphor, humor, satire, or hiding their name.