Introduction to Comparative Literature

What does literature do in the digital age? How have literature and art confronted their relationship with mass media or broader cultural and historical trends? How do media forms condition our relationship with time, and with identity? How are the literary and critical writing about it “media practices” in themselves, and how do they relate to other kinds of “media acts”?

This course thinks through the relevance of comparative literature and literary studies in the current critical and theoretical moment. Structured as a seminar, the course examines influential arguments about the media in their historical development (new criticism, semiotics, Marxist critical theory, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, gender studies, postcolonial critique) in order to develop a repertoire of critical tools for the analysis and reading of literature and other media structures, including the internet, digital culture, and urban infrastructure.

The course may draw its examples from literature, film, performance and intermedia art, time-based and new media art, television, anime, architecture and urban space. To the extent possible we will supplement our studies with field trips and local symposia, including the conference “Media Theories, Media Histories” in February.

Readings will be available on bSpace and in a reader at Replica Copy on Oxford Street in the first week of classes. Readings include works by Benjamin, Adorno, Foucault, Marx, Fanon, Barthes, Johnson, Melas, Hansen, Proust, Enzensberger, Tôno, Matsuda, Chun, Williams, Illouz, Freed-Thall, and others.