Comparative Literature

This course explores how literature shapes our perspective on the past and identity. By studying Patrick Chamoiseau's LE DIMANCHE AU CACHOT and Josephy Boyden's DANS LE GRAND CERCLE DU MONDE, this course considers how authors can use fiction to reconquer a painful past to better reconstruct an identity and a perspective that has been hidden.

This course examines anticolonial and decolonial thought. It will study and analyze primary texts by key anticolonial thinkers from South Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America.

This course provides an introduction to Ibsen’s dramatic production, emphasizing its historical context. It analyzes the plays as part of and influenced by social, political, and cultural forces, and as part of changing aesthetic and artistic norms. The course examines selected works against the background of changing literary, theatrical, and cultural paradigms in Ibsen’s own time and pays special attention to Ibsen’s renewal of the dramatic tradition. It investigates his plays not only as dramatic texts but also through historical performances from Ibsen’s time.

This course provides an introduction to the literature of the English Renaissance, studied in a variety of historical contexts—poetic, intellectual, religious, and political. It offers a broad understanding of the most important literary trends in Renaissance England, analyzes the trends as connected with the ideas and socio-political development of the period, and develops critical reading and writing skills in English.

This course focuses on three thought leaders of anti-colonialist social movements in 20th century Latin American: Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and Fausto Reinaga. It analyzes their main written works with an emphasis on themes of race, culture, and colonial condition.

This course surveys American literature and literary history, examining how major American authors from the early colonial period to the present contributed the American literary tradition. Authors, including such canonical writers as Bradstreet, Franklin, Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville, Whitman, Frost, Williams, Faulkner, Lowell and Morrison, and their selected writings in various genres are read in relevant historical, social and cultural contexts so as to offer a broad understanding of American literary history.

This course explores the characteristics, phases of development, trends, works, and authors of 20th century Latin American literature. Topics include: the pro-indigenous novel; reality transfigured; the current panorama of Latin American literature; modernity and post-modernity.

This reading-intensive course explores the meaning of the Age of Extremes by examining how violence, the state, and society interacted with one another to create a turbulent 20th century. This course addresses crucial questions by reading canonical texts on violence, civil disobedience, and decolonization, including writings by Thoreau, Arendt, Gandhi, Fanon, and King, among others. 

The first part of this course explores one of the founding works of Chicano literature, Rudolfo Anaya’s BLESS ME, ULTIMA (1972), a coming-of-age novel combining magical realism with an exploration of the social and identity issues faced by Chicanos in the modern United States. The second part of the course focuses on Henry Fielding’s THE HISTORY OF THE ADVENTURES OF JOSEPH ANDREWS AND OF HIS FRIEND MR. ABRAHAM ADAMS (1742), the author’s first full-length novel self-defined as a “comic epic poem in prose.” The course studies narratological issues as well as the social, political, and gender dimensions of the texts.

This course explores the fluctuating significance of racial slavery for the development of American and African American literary tradition. It departs from investigation of the idea that particular approaches to selfhood, writing, and freedom arose from the institution of slavery and in particular grew with the slaves’ forced exclusion from literacy and their distinctive relationship with Christianity. Using Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a central point of reference, students look at the development of abolitionist reading publics and the role of imaginative literature in bringing about the demise of slavery. That controversial text also provides a means to consider the relationship of sentimentalism to suffering and identification as well as the problems arising from the simultaneous erasure and re-inscription of racial categories, as oppression and as emancipation. When formal slavery ended, new literary habits emerged in response to the memory of it and the need imaginatively to revisit the slave past as a means to grasp what the emergent world of civic and political freedoms might mean and involve. Other issues covered include the disputed place of imaginative writing in the educational bodies that were created for ex-slaves and their descendants, the issues of genre, gender, and polyvocality in abolitionist texts, the problems of representation that arose in the plantation’s litany of extremity and suffering, and the contemporary significance of slavery in the culture of African American particularity.