Comparative Literature

This course focuses on the role that the "modern city” played to the social life and literature in Taiwan. The “modern city lifestyle” in Taiwan appeared in the period of Japanese colonial rule, but has its roots in Western culture. As a site of intensive interactions and conflicts, the "modern city" has fostered many sensitive artists and writers who created great works and critiques. Therefore, it’s necessary to adapt the theoretical perspectives of sociology and history to understand how the literature writers response to their ages. Three kinds of readings are included: sociological analysis: theoretical essays about metal life, inner structures, communities, subcultures, new urban sociology, and growth machine, etc.; historical knowledge: important social and cultural historical writings about the cities in Taiwan; urban literature: about 20 of the most important novels and films from 1930s to today in Taiwan.

This course examines the European-wide ferment in the arts of both the “Avant-Garde” and “High Modernism” in the first third of the twentieth century. Throughout the course, students read five novels and four plays in their entirety, plus selections from a number of other texts – primary and secondary – from the modernist period. Students are required to pursue an individual research project (for a semester-final paper) according to their own interests using primary or secondary material from the class or integrating outside Modernist material, and are especially encouraged to work in their chosen second foreign language (French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish) in addition to working in the collectivity of the seminar on the main material, in English or in English translation. 

This course introduces modern Turkish literature, by addressing its origination, formation, and impact on the cultural milieu. It focuses on the making and predicament of modernity, its innate contradictions, and the implications of nostalgia, anxiety of influence, and globalism. It studies Turkish authors (particularly novelists), as caught between a past that was read, misread, or misunderstood, and a present that has a large body of challenge, attraction, and difference. They fathom the cultural underpinnings of the Ottoman past and non-western legacies while negotiating a western legacy of many facets. The course reads criticism in line with novelistic production, the role of the novelist as public intellectual (terms and applications are defined and set in ethnic, national, social, and cultural terms and contexts).

This course examines the different ways in which contemporary writers in Japan and South Korea respond to the challenges of capitalist developme nt and ecological precarity. Topics include The Buzz of Everyday Life, Narrating Disaster, Trauma and Cultural Memory (novella), Self-Renunciations and Transformations (novel), and Exilic Imagination (short stories).