Introduction to Comparative Literature

This introduction to the study of literature in comparative contexts focuses on the essay in writing, film, and photography. As a form that wonders and wanders, taking readers down circuitous paths, in playful, exhilarating, and disturbing ways, the essay makes a habit of leaving us with more questions—often without the comfort of tidy closure or a domesticated subject. As students of the essay, we will analyze its exploratory disposition toward writing while developing a robust critical language to describe the work of the essay and its social implications and engagements. What kind of work do essays do? How has the essay been a crucial resource for thinking, for scholars, students, and creative writers? How does the essay differ from other literary forms and what makes an essay essayistic? What particular capacities does the essay have to engage with questions of identity, race, class, gender, sexuality? To address these questions, this course considers the essay in relation to theory and philosophy, queer and trans studies, the archive and historiography, to name just a few. Although we will read essays from earlier centuries, we will focus on essays written in the 20th and 21st and explore how the essay is currently being reshaped and reimagined, such as in hybrid and lyric forms.

We will apprentice ourselves to the various forms in order to develop our own approaches to writing essays in conversation with our readings. Essayists will include some of the following: Theodor Adorno, Hilton Als, Mary Austin, James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Anne Carson, Teju Cole, Diamela Eltit, Harun Farocki, Hal Fischer, Michel Foucault, Cristina Rivera Garza, Robert Glück, Saidiya Hartman, Erica Hunt, Charles Lamb, Audre Lorde, Bhanu Kapil, Chris Marker, Claudia Rankine, Christina Sharpe, Julietta Singh, Zadie Smith, Juliana Spahr, Agnes Varda, Rosmarie Waldrop, Virginia Woolf.

Students must have completed the R&C series to participate in this course.