Introduction to Comparative Literature

This course introduces students to the study of comparative literature.  For any student interested  in what it means to live in a multi-lingual world with rich and diverse forms and traditions of literary, artistic, and philosophical expression, this course serves to cultivate lifelong skills and habits of attentivenes that will prepare you to navigate the world as engaged, critical-thinking cosmopolitan citizens.  For students who would like to major in Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at Barnard, this course serves as the gateway course for the program.  For students who wish to minor in Translation Studies, this course serves as an elective. The course is designed to introduce you to methods and topics in the study of literature across national, linguistic, and cultural boundaries, across historical periods, and in relation to other arts and disciplines.  Readings are selected and juxtaposed in units designed to give you cumulative practice in doing comparative criticism and to foster thereby deepening reflection on underlying historical, philosophical, historiographical, and methodological issues.  We will study works of narrative and lyric poetry, novels, short stories, and film and also works of philosophy, political theory, linguistics, and psychoanalysis.  We will read texts of literary criticism, literary theory, and translation theory.  Topics include: the role of language and literature in different cultures and historical periods, the relationship between genres, the circulation of literary forms, literature and translation, postcoloniality, gender and sexual difference, and the relationship of literature to other arts.  By engaging with the particular combinations of texts in the course, students will learn how to read closely and deeply and make well-substantiated critical connections between textual and cultural phenomena that may yield new, original, and surprising insights. Students in this course typically bring with them a range of languages, but not everyone has proficiency in the same languages.  Common readings will be in English translation, but students capable of reading the texts in the original languages should feel free to do so.  You will be given the opportunity to work with the texts in the original languages in assignments of interpretive and translation criticism.