Comparative Literature

The fear of conspiracy functions as a recurring motif in many American cultural forms including novels, film, television, certain genres of music like hip-hop and rap, graphic novels, and social media. After considering early articulations of conspiracism in the US, this course focuses on 20th and 21st Century mediations and figurations of conspiracy fears and theories. The course considers conspiracism through key events that have unsettled epistemic certainty and fuelled hermeneutic activity, including the assassination of JFK, 9/11, the election of Barack Obama, and the Covid-19 pandemic.

This course provides a study of Korean classical literature for cultural contents on the basis of storytelling for movies, exhibitions, and performance arts. It examines how Korean classic literature transforms into media and its methodology.

Students familiarize themselves with the basic concepts of evolutionary theory and cognitive science in order to able to evaluate the controversies and debates within the framework of an evolutionary perspective on art, literature, and music. Several themes are discussed, such as: the mating mind; artistic universals; human nature: blank or pre-wired, the rhythm of poetry; the science of art; the origins of music, grooming, gossip, and the novel; art as adaptation vs. art as by-product. At the conclusion of this course, students are able to evaluate and apply Darwinist approaches to practices in art, literature, music, and religion.

This course introduces the poetic and literary features of English modernism through close study and discussion of a series of modern poets, beginning with G. M. Hopkins and ending with Seamus Heaney. Through analysis of perspectives and background, students learn about the relationship of modern poetry with its evolving cultural and political surroundings.

This course explores perspectives on gender found in literature across Europe. The course begins with an introduction to the development of the field of gender studies including concepts such as suffrage, second and third wave feminism, and gynocritics. It includes three primary themes: representations of the body and sexuality; gender and discrimination based on age, disability, and speciesism; gender and the personal and/or political. 

This seminar first develops a brief overview of the form and theory of the essay as a literary genre. Primarily, however, the course reads and analyzes essays North American women writers who, in particular from the 1960s onwards, appropriated and henceforth shaped the form and tradition of the essay. To understand the profound aesthetic and social influence and the cultural work of women authors after World War II, the course devotes some time to canonical authors such as Susan Sontag and Joan Didion. Not least because of the very cultural authority of these writers and their early and pivotal periods of production in the era of counterculture and the women's movement in the United States, the Cold War and accelerating globalization, the course explores how these - and other - women essayists wrote about the Other, about the world. Frequently, in the essay itself and in research on it, the "I," the introspection of the writer, takes center stage. While this is highly relevant to an understanding of the genre, the course wants to venture a shift of perspective and ask: What forms of observation and description, what ethics of regarding the Other (or lack thereof) can be found in these texts? What imagery, cultural valences, and political implications can be distilled from the essays? In addition, the course pays special attention to works by African American women writers such as Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and June Jordan. African American writers in particular used the essay as a medium of political self-authorization, social critique, and literary renegotiation of cultural knowledge and female and minority subjectivity. Which distinct aesthetics of factual writing did they develop, how did they inscribe themselves in canonical essay traditions, yet how did they also perform productive fractures and critiques of these and develop alternative forms of essayistic thinking and writing?

Students analyze and discuss works and texts that reflect different trends in Norwegian literature in the period from approximately 1850 to about 1980. Particular emphasis is placed on the relationship between literature and the social and cultural context. Students orientate themselves in literary history and literary debate. The teaching is adapted for students with a foreign language background. That is, emphasis is placed on clarifying the linguistic and cultural aspects of the syllabus literature. The student also receives written and oral feedback on their Norwegian language skills. Students give presentations in the seminar group on literary works or texts and write a compulsory assignment on a literary topic.