Approaches to Comparative Literature

We will read two seminal works of literary criticism and theory from the mid-twentieth century, one that follows the evolution of Western literature from antiquity to modernist fiction (Auerbach’s Mimesis), the other that puts forth a series of far-reaching propositions about language, literature, and the course of literary history (Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination).  We will try to see in what ways these two works might provide valuable perspectives for the study of literature and in what ways they involve assumptions that could be qualified or challenged. In conjunction with Auerbach and Bakhtin, we will read two foundational texts of the Western tradition, the Odyssey and the Book of Genesis, and one modern work, Joyce’s Ulysses, which makes bold and revisionist use of both earlier texts. Through these readings, the large theoretical topics with which we will be concerned are: the representation of reality in literature (what that might mean, how assumptions about its meaning shift), the role of language in literature (as well as in the social reality out of which language evolves), and intertextuality as an essential dimension of literary expression and literary tradition.