Approaches to Comparative Literature

This seminar is an introduction to graduate study in Comparative Literature for incoming Comparative Literature Ph.D. students. Our readings and discussions will attempt to at least begin a formal, critical-theoretical, and historical overview—including considerations of influential critiques of the discipline—of Comparative Literature.  Along the way, we’ll look at developing notions of how scholars, critics, and literary historians (not to mention artists) have understood terms like text, form, genre, history, culture, theory, criticism, methodology, and, of course, literature and comparison themselves. We’ll read classical and revisionist works in literary history, critical theory, and comparatist analysis, ranging from contributions by Herder, de Stäel, and Goethe, to Auerbach, Lukács, Wellek, Paz, Glissant, Said, Spivak, and others, while also treating the legacies and contestations of Anglo-American New Critical formalism, along with parallel developments in Russian Formalism, psychoanalysis, strucuturalism, and postructuralism, as well as a somewhat later emergence and reception of criticism and theory focused on feminism, gender, sexuality, and queer theory; postcolonial critique, new historicism and cultural materialism, and varieties of marxian and neo-marxian critique; and the burgeoning field of affect theory. Our seminar will be coordinated with Comparative Literature 201, the Comparative Literature proseminar for incoming Ph.D. students. Students will make one 10-15 minute questions-presentation (designed to spur discussion of the day’s readings), and will write a seminar paper of about 20 pages (due at semester’s end) which will comparatively engage two literary and/or cultural texts of their own choosing in relation to two or three of the critical/theoretical approaches we’ve studied.