You may be using a Web browser that does not support standards for accessibility and user interaction. Find out why you should upgrade your browser for a better experience of this and other standards-based sites...
Image credit:"Die Malkunst"
Jan Vermeer, 1665
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Comparative Literature is an interdisciplinary program that promotes the
comparative study of literatures in different languages as well as of the
relationship between literature and other spheres of human
activity. It embraces both close attention to language and broader
enquiry into the relationship between literature and other disciplines and
practices, such as the visual and performing arts, philosophy, history, the
social sciences, religion, sciences and mathematics. The program is
devoted to the comparative study of literatures across different time periods
and beyond the geocultural boundaries of any one country or region. It
also fosters critical scrutiny of both western and nonwestern traditions, and
is responsive to the dynamics of canon formation and the shifting definitions
of the noncanonical and marginal. The program provides students
with ample opportunity to study literature and culture from a wide array of
critical perspectives. Among these are rhetoric and poetics, translation
and reception, film theory and media studies, colonial and postcolonial
studies, theories of ethnic and national identities, gender and queer theory,
and psychoanalysis. Comparative Literature majors are expected to develop
competence in at least one language other than their native language, and to
work with original texts in more than one language. Students devise and
pursue a rigorous program of study tailored to their particular interests and
intellectual strengths in close consultation with one or more faculty
mentors.
