One of the country’s earliest comparative literature programs, the Department of Comparative Literature boasts a rich history of global and trans-historical thinking, internationally renowned faculty, and eminent visiting scholars. MAPH students can choose to focus all of their coursework in the Department or complement their research in Comparative Literature with classes in other subject areas, such as Cinema and Media Studies, Classics, Gender and Sexuality, Germanic Studies, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, English Language and Literature, Romance Languages and Literatures, Slavic Languages and Literatures, and South Asian Languages and Civilizations.
Selected Faculty
Sample Courses
CMLT 37450 - Stateless Imaginations: Global Anarchist Literature (Anna Elena Torres)
This course examines the literature, aesthetics, and theory of global anarchist movements, from nineteenth-century Russian anarcho-syndicalism to Kurdish stateless democratic movements of today, as well as the literature of “proto-anarchist” writers, such as William Blake, and stateless movements with anarchist resonances, such as Maroon communities in the Caribbean.
CMLT 38740 - Biblical Politics: Literature, History, and Political Thought (Ilana Pardes)
Probing the complexities of minority culture, this course explores the charm of the hybrid, Hebrew-Egyptian characters of Joseph and Moses and the lingering ambivalences toward this hybridity, the explicit and implicit exposure of the Hebrew minority to Egyptian culture, and the role of Hebrew and Egyptian women in the drama. It considers a range of approaches to Genesis-Exodus – from the literary readings of Robert Alter and Mieke Bal to the psychoanalytic writings of Freud and Kristeva.
CMLT 39023 - Returning the Gaze: The West and the Rest (Angelina Ilieva)
This course provides insight into identity dynamics between the “West,” as the center of economic power and self-proclaimed normative humanity, and the “Rest,” as the poor, backward, volatile periphery. We investigate the relationship between South East European self-representations and the imagined Western gaze. Inherent in the act of looking at oneself through the eyes of another is the privileging of that other’s standard. We will contemplate the responses to this existential position of identifying symbolically with a normative site outside of oneself—self-consciousness, defiance, arrogance, self-exoticization—and consider how these responses have been incorporated in the texture of the national, gender, and social identities in the region.
CMLT 39714 - North Africa In Film and Literature (Hoda El Shakry)
This course explores twentieth- and twenty-first century literary and cinematic works from the countries of North Africa. We will focus in particular on the region of Northwestern Africa known as the Maghreb—encompassing Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. Situated at the crossroads of Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, the Maghreb has a layered colonial past culminating in France’s brutal occupation of the region through the 1960s. Inflected by this colonial history, Maghrebi studies tends to privilege Francophone works while overlooking the region’s rich Arabic and indigenous traditions. Understanding the Maghreb as both a geopolitical as well as an imagined space, our course materials reflect the region’s diverse cultural histories and practices. We will consider the Maghreb’s ethnic, linguistic, and religious pluralism in dialogue with broader questions of cultural imperialism, orientalism, decolonization, and globalization.
A more complete listing is available through the Department of Comparative Literature course page.
Recent Comparative Literature Thesis Projects
"The Music in Words in Music, ‘Reprendre à la poésie son bien’: A Comparative Analysis of Debussy and Fauré’s Musical Settings of Verlaine"
Yujia Liu, MAPH '21
Advisor: Haun Saussy
"How is She Not Herself? Queer Temporalities and Transformative Subjectivities in Valencia: the Movie(s)"
Nicholas Taylor, MAPH '20
Advisor: Kris Trujillo
"Lovecraft’s Rupture-Machine: An Ontology of Process Catastrophism and Inhuman Economy"
Dorian Bell, MAPH '19
Advisor: Mark Payne