Introduction to Comparative Literature

In this course, we will use the complex notion of the archive to analyze and compare a wide range of texts: Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, and novels by Sebald, Saramago, Murakami, Roth, and Morrison. What is an archive? How does it reflect the relationship between memory and forgetting, preservation and destruction? What does it mean to conceive of the literary tradition as an archive? How does the archive help us understand the relation between literature and politics, literature and psychoanalysis? In the class, we will bring out the interpretive effects that stem from comparing how the texts thematize the archive or invite us to read them as archives. We will also try to gauge how the exercise of comparing literatures—gathering bodies of texts together—constitutes an archival operation in its own right.