Comparative Literature
The undergraduate program in Comparative Literature prepares students to play an active and creative role in today’s globalized world by exploring literature and culture across languages, and investigating the intersections and inter-connections among literatures, cultures, media, and disciplines. Undergraduates may pursue a Concentration, and Secondary Fields in Comparative Literature and in Translation Studies.
Director of Undergraduate Studies: Sandra Naddaff
Undergraduate Program Coordinator: Isaure Mignotte
Gateway Courses
Spring 2024
CompLit 100: Contemporary Southeast Asia through Literature and Film
Annette Lienau
This course will explore contemporary literature and cinema across Southeast Asia, focusing on regional developments after the Asian financial crisis of 1997 through the present. Themes discussed include literature’s relationship to economic turmoil and political change; questions of class and social mobility; anti-authoritarian writing and issues of censorship; literature, youth culture, and new media landscapes; and literary explorations of gender and sexuality. Readings will include a selection of critical essays to foreground these central themes of the course, along with poetry, short fiction, and films from: Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Timor-Leste, and Vietnam. Readings will be taught in English translation and films will be screened with English subtitles.
CompLit 133: Global Shakespeare
Marc Shell
This course examines literary, theatrical, and cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays in Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Students learn how artists, including Shakespeare, have used creative production of the past to understand and address concrete issues and problems of the present, including political scandal and persecution, imperial domination, and racial and ethnic biases and oppression. We also explore the continued vitality worldwide of theater and the arts, as well as their constant transformations throughout time and space.
For a full list, please visit the department's website.