Comparative Literature

A topic-based survey class of American Literature, this course focuses on understanding and analyzing the main changes and important aspects of American culture, society, politics, and history by exposing students to the works of various kinds of American literature authors. Class readings include not only prose writings but also letters, diaries and several official documents written by American influential writers from the 15th century to the 19th century. From time to time, the course will also analyze rare photographs, musical CDs, and films. Students are expected to be interested in basics of modern literary theory which are widely associated in American literary studies. As we challenge the process of creating the notions such as “America,” “American History/Literature,” “race,” “class,” and “borders,” our readings will sometimes go beyond narrowly-defined “American” texts. Through these readings and analyses, students will learn various cultural aspects to approach social issues seen in American society, past and present. This course is conducted in a mixed style of lecture/seminar, and research works at the main library; therefore, participants will be assigned to make presentations, discussion, research and other activities. In the library survey sessions, students are expected to write and submit 2-3 page long paper each time during the class hours. 

This course explores representations of adolescence from the early 20th through to the early 21st century in literature, film, and popular culture. Students read texts that range across history, psychology, and writings about juvenile delinquency, but the focus is on reading novels, short stories, films, and graphic novels that represent the paradoxes of adolescence from the turn of the 20th century. This may include such works as: Back to the Future, Ghost World, Spring Breakers, The Hate U Give, and more. The course looks at the ways in which the adolescent morphs into the teenage consumer in the 1950s in novels such as Colin MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners. The course considers the adolescent as a site of cultural fantasy and cultural fears in relation to class, race, gender, and sexuality and the adolescent’s relationship to radical politics, subculture, suburbia, and nostalgia. On this experiential course, students explore how Brighton has been central for pushing boundaries and creating new waves in the medium of literature and film. Students also develop a deeper understanding of the construction of the categories of the adolescent and the teenagers in literature, film, and theory. This course may include a field trip to Brighton, following the trail of cult movie Quadrophenia.

This comparative literature course studies literatures of migration. It focuses on two books from different countries that have been translated into French and utilizes the French methodology for textual analysis.

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).