Reading, translating, thinking about how we use languages, asking questions about what's just and beautiful—these things help us build communities, and they are fundamental to our everyday lives. Comparative Literature takes root in them and helps you share and grow your interest in or commitment to them.
Comparative Literature is an exciting interdisciplinary program that promotes the study of literatures in different languages and encourages reading in translation. It also explores relationships between literature and other areas of culture, disciplines, and practices, such as the visual and performing arts, philosophy, history, politics, religion, and the sciences. Among the critical perspectives that it fosters 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.
Courses in Comparative Literature typically have no pre-requisites and satisfy a range of college requirements. All courses are available to first year students except COLT 72. We welcome everyone, regardless of your class standing, in our topics courses with high course numbers. We encourage you to explore the breadth of what we offer and to meet our wonderful faculty. If you would like to be more methodical about exploring Comparative Literature, we recommend either COLT 001: Read the World or COLT 10: Introduction to Comparative Literature.
Talk to us!
If you are looking ahead to a possible major in Comparative Literature, this is a good time to talk to us and your first-year advisor about developing competence in at least one language other than your mother tongue. This will help you could work with original materials, which we do require of all our majors. If you are already competent in two languages or more (congratulations!), Comparative Literature is a meaningful way to put your knowledge to use.
If you think about translation as an everyday thought process, as part of yours or your family's life in society, and a literary activity—or if you would like to start thinking about it—talk to us about taking translation-themed courses in Comparative Literature and explore our Translation Studies minor.
First-year students are allowed to enroll in any of our courses except COLT 71 and 85:
COLT 001 Read the World Fall -Tarnowski - 12, Spring - Parati 2 hour
COLT 10: Intro to Comparative Literature:
SELECTED FALL TERM COURSES (COLT)
001 Read the World (F/S)
Do you know how to read? Faces. Words. Pictures. Bodies. Games. Books. People. What are you really doing when you read the world? This course teaches comparative methods designed to confront the (mis) understandings and (mis) translations that constitute reading across the world's languages, locations, cultures, historical periods, and expressive forms. Classwork consists of hands-on exercises that engage ancient and modern myths and materials drawn from various media: text, movies, video games, anime, and digital arts.
10.26 Autobiography and Autofiction - Caplan - 2
Although 'giving an account of oneself' is a narrative practice that extends back to the era of late antiquity, the idea of creating a distinct genre dedicated to creating a literary self-portrait seems to be a specifically modern idea. Traces of the genre's origins can be traced back to early Christian lives of saints and in particular the spiritual confessions of St Augustine, but the creation of the autobiographical genre is one of several signal transformations in the way that the self as a philosophical subject changes through the consolidation of social, economic, political, and psychological processes understood as modernization. To narrate one's own selfhood is an act of self-assertion in a culture for which 'the self' has become the basic unit of social organization. For groups that have been excluded from the functions and institutions of modernity because their subjectivity has been excluded from the consensus of selfhood—specifically members of religious, ethnic, or sexual minorities, along with women of all social affiliations—the act of narrating the self signifies a specifically political assertion. This class will focus on examples of autobiographical and (no less significant) pseudo-autobiographical writing from Jewish, African American, and Arab sources. The commonality of perspective and narrative techniques among these sources will demonstrate the historical similarities of these cultures on the margins of modern culture, while suggesting the oppositional character of their relationship to modernity.
COLT 19.01 Translation: Theory and Practice- Morsi -10A
Translation is both a basic and highly complicated aspect of our engagement with literature. We often take it for granted; yet the idea of meanings "lost in translation" is commonplace. In this course we work intensively on the craft of translation while exploring its practical, cultural and philosophical implications through readings in theoretical and literary texts. All students will complete a variety of translation exercises, and a substantial final project, in their chosen language.
SELECTED WINTER TERM COURSES:
COLT 10.24: Family Matters - Martin - 10
All COLT 19 courses fulfill the LRP requirement:
For more information about the major.
For more information about the minor in Translation Studies.