What’s new? What’s next? Seminars in Comparative Literature, Spring 2027
Comparative Criticism I
Professor Charlotte Eubanks
“Comparative Criticism: Classical to Neoclassical”
CMLIT 502 is one half of a theory survey, required for all graduate students in the department of Comparative Literature and open to any graduate student with an interest in conceptual and theoretical approaches to cultural texts. In this iteration of the course, we will explore three sets of questions, each of which is fleshed out more fully in the syllabus:
- What is literature?
- How do we engage with literature?
- What does engagement with the literary do?
Greek, Latin, and medieval European texts regularly populate anthologies of premodern literary theory and form the core of most premodern theory survey courses. We will read many of those works. But, in this course, we will also seek, as much as possible, to center Arabic, Sanskrit, Chinese, African, and Indigenous American and Pacific concepts to inform more fully – and potentially transform more broadly – awareness of premodern thinking about literature, word, voice, text, sound, and language. In this venture, not all the texts we read will be “premodern” and some of the texts we think with may not appear at first to be “theory.”
Literary Relations
Professor Mandisa Haarhoff
“Postcolonial Theories and Literature: Sovereignty and Indigeneity”
This graduate seminar centers on postcolonial theories of sovereignty and indigeneity. Our objects of analysis include literature from settler colonial contexts such as the Americas, southern Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. The course addresses discourses of race, indigeneity, land, origin narratives, and the afterlives of settler colonialism, drawing on comparative Indigenous frameworks as well as theories from settler colonial studies. We examine how literary, visual, and oral forms articulate belonging, dispossession, memory, resurgence, and refusal. Through novels, drama, oral traditions, photography, and critical theory, students will investigate how writers and artists challenge ethnographic violence, unsettle colonial categories, and reimagine Indigenous futures.
Forces in Contemporary Literature
Professor Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra
“Fields, Markets, Systems: Understanding Literary Institutions, Production, and Circulation”
This course offers an expansive survey of scholarship on the material, social, and political forces that condition the production and circulation of literature—or, on what the US scholar Mark McGurl described as “the hard and soft machines” by which literature is made (2009, 3). It will begin with an introduction to the “sociology of literature,” a field that emerges from the sociology of culture and now includes both sociologists and literary scholars, as well as to the recent “institutional turn” in (Anglo-American) literary studies, where scholars have paid increasing attention to the role of institutions (MFA programs, publishers, prizes, governmental and non-governmental funders, festivals) and individual actors (editors, literary agents) in the making and dissemination of literature.
But the larger aim of this course is to look beyond the “capitals” of what Pascale Casanova denominated as “the world republic of letters” (1999/2004). Having mapped an outline of the literary system, we will look to the much larger body of scholarship that critically engages with the forces that have conditioned the production and circulation of writing from parts of the world now referred to collectively as the Global South. This portion of the course will include case studies such as the Cold War and the Latin American “boom” of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as a consideration of the dynamics of production (e.g. the informal workshop versus the MFA) and circulation (book sales versus the second-hand market or the photocopy) that are illegible to those dominant critical frameworks. Some works of fiction that engage with the dynamics discussed will also be included.
Students in this course will be encouraged to connect the material discussed to their own areas, regions, and languages of expertise.
Global Sinophone
Professor Nicolai Volland
“Global Theories of Chineseness”
What does it mean to be Chinese? This seminar offers an interdisciplinary survey of critical discussions about Chineseness. How have writers, artists, thinkers, and philosophers thought about their identity, about what constitutes “China,” and about the implications of being (not) Chinese? Our critical inventory will cover a range of disciplines, including history, literary studies, diaspora studies, Indigenous studies, and others. Topics will be selected with view to the interests of seminar participants, but may include the writings of intellectuals and scholars such as Kang Youwei, Sun Yat-sen, Lu Xun, Tu Wei-ming, Wang Gungwu, Shu-mei Shih, David Der-wei Wang, Ng Kim Chew, and others, as well as a wide range of literary texts. Issues under scrutiny may include Chinese constructions of race and nationality from the early modern to the contemporary period, New Qing history, Sinophone Studies, Taiwan and Taiwaneseness, the Chinese diaspora, and more.