Introduction to Comparative Literature

In many genres and periods, marriage has been the privileged choice for marking a text’s “happy ending.” Why should this one social institution have come to stand as the symbol of the plot’s resolution? What assumptions about both marriage and narrative does this choice imply? In this class, we will examine not only texts in which the marriage plot plays its predictable role but also texts in which it is thwarted, parodied or inverted. We will approach these texts both from the viewpoint of narrative structure and from the viewpoint of social or ideological frames of meaning. We will mostly focus on three genres (drama, lyric poetry and the novel), and on three periods (classical Greece and Rome, early modern Italy and England, nineteenth-century England and France). Among the authors we’ll be reading are Shakespeare, Petrarch, Catullus, Trollope, Austen, Balzac and Wilde. We will also read some selected scholarship and theory to help us orient ourselves to the important questions in the texts.