Approaches to Comparative Literature

This seminar is designed as an introduction to graduate study in Comparative Literature. The readings and discussions consider theoretical models central to the discipline and their influential critiques. We begin with genealogies (origins) of the discipline, questions of reality and representation, and move on to consider the era of disciplinary revision/crisis, “high” theory and New Criticism, psychoanalysis and queer theory, theories of temporality and phenomenology, and postcolonial criticism, ending with  more recent works on affect and new media. Readings include works by Lukács, Auerbach, Benjamin, Adorno, Bergson, Foucault, Johnson, Ngai, Hansen, and others.

The seminar will be coordinated with CL 201 (the Comparative Literature Proseminar) and a series of three or four events and performances on and off campus.

Required texts:

Reader will contain most readings (to be made available at Replica Copy, Oxford Street)

Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton UP, 2003)

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (Schocken Books, 1969)

David Damrosch, Natalie Melas, Mbongiseni Buthelezi, eds., The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature: From the European Enlightenment to the Global Present (Princeton UP, 2009)