Comparative Literature

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.

This creative writing course examines the concept of literary creativity through a critical analysis of narrative texts and essays. Through the study of the general structure and fundamental components of essays and narratives -- plot, narrator, character, setting, dialogue -- classes emphasize the process of writing and improving narrative works.

This course examines major intellectual, aesthetic, and philosophical trends in East Asian history. By reading translations of original source material, students will be able to see the principal modes of East Asian cultural and literary thought from their origins to the modern period. Cross-cultural issues will also be discussed. 

This course discusses memory and human rights from the perspective of Chilean literary and cultural production of the dictatorial and post-dictatorial period. It reviews some of the most important works published and performed within the last four decades. Selections include three main literary genres each week: the novel, poetry, and theater/film. The discussion of these materials also includes theoretical studies about the period in question and the importance and difficulties of human rights and memory as social practices.

This literature and society elective course examines the relationship between literature and society, including questions of class, race, ethnicity, religion, history and politics. Also included is an analysis of the novel and the theory of art. Particular attention is given to Latin America, especially Mexico, within a general historic sequence. Topics may vary by semester and course instructor.