"Comparative Literature's New Horizons" by Sara Cordovez Lopez
Comparative Literature is born out of a resistance to the limitations of national literatures in an incredibly connected but paradoxically, fragmented planetary consciousness. Nowadays, this young discipline stands in the doorway of its greatest challenges to date, and the attitude towards these challenges remains engaged and deeply convinced of its importance.
What are these challenges then? Keep on reading Sara's post by clicking here "Global Literature & the Canon"
by Catrin Harris "Reading Literature as Culture?" It seems that the objects of comparative literature study could be all those issues related to culture. The texts we study are not only literature texts, but also those much broader including politics, media, entertainment, history, geography and even some hard science. So, it brings about a question of where is the position of literature in this comparative study. It seems that everything related to human being can be summarized and embraced into the discourses of culture. However, I think we may have the need to find the position of literature in this intercultural and cross-disciplinary study.
We can dig out many cultural elements from a literature text and try to interpret and explain literature texts from a perspective of culture, which I think can drag literature study approaching to daily life. But not every text we encounter could be understood as a literature text and put into the domain of literature study. GENRE/S & FORMS OF KNOWLEDGE
"I prefer to see anthologies as a theoretically interesting form whose potential for opening up discourse has yet to be sufficiently explored; moreover, I believe that the academic anthology, situated at the intersection of public and private readings, of tradition and cultural change, best embodies this potential. Such an anthology's various constitutive parts – its visibly constructed table of contents, preface, and editorial apparatus (footnotes, headnotes, extended essays, ancillary materials); its self-reflexive identity (always aware of its situation vis-à-vis the audience); and finally its virtual reality as a paradigm enacted differently in each classroom – bring to the surface a web of communicative relationships that might otherwise remain obscure."
Sarah N. Lawall, "Anthologizing 'World Literature'" THE AMBITIONS & EXPECTATIONS OF A YOUNG COMPARATIVIST
Publishing, academic teaching, research and journalism are the most
common destinations for graduates with an MA in Comparative Literature but the civil service, teaching or employment as a translator or copywriter are becoming increasingly attractive alternatives. Recent career destinations include:
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"Literature and Performance"
by Jia Dong In early 2017, Wayne McGregor adapted Virginia Woolf’s novels into a ballet triptych entitled Woolf Works and performed it at Royal Opera House in London. One of the triptych’s sections, ‘Tuesday’, is based on Woolf’s most experimental poetic prose The Waves (1931).
Virginia Woolf’s texts attracts me for their unique style—not just rich of fictional imaginations but also exquisite in poetic imagery and rhythm. Keep on reading Jia's text by clicking here.
"Literature & the World"
by Aloyssios Wong What is the relationship between Literature and the world, is it a projection or a parallel universe? Literature works have different time span in narrative, for example, in Stoner Williams portrays lifetime experience while in Ulysses Joyce focuses on a day-long circumstance. Given the concept of time is artificial and the subjective feeling towards it varies, are the two identified works share equal effects in projecting our life? According to Derrida and Bergson that the duration of consciousness is differ from the objective time, thus in the larger views both works captured a certain part of a unrepresentative whole. Till here I found myself hard to continue the topic, and this gives me motivation in furthering my study in this area.
AFTER BABEL "Comparative literature listens and reads after Babel. It posits the intuition, the hypothesis that, far from being a disaster, the multiplicity of human tongues, some twenty thousand of which have at various times been spoken on this small planet, has been the enabling condition of men and women's freedom to perceive, to articulate, to 'redraft' the existential world in manifold freedom."
George Steiner, "What is Comparative Literature?" LEARNING EXPERIENCE
"The collection of sharp, insightful people and thought-provoking topics of study have made for excellent class discussions and a wonderful experience, overall."
Jason Beckman, MA Comparative Literature 2015/16. "The small seminar groups enable you have in-depth discussions on the reading material or theories discussed in the individual weeks and are very thought-stimulating." Sophia Althammer, MA Comparative Literature 2015/16. |
"Thoughts on the State of the Discipline" by Alice Signell
Did you say you study comparative literature? What is that…do you like…compare books? As an undergraduate comparative literature student, this is a response I am met with regularly. To be completely honest, I didn’t really know what I was studying until a few weeks into my first term of lectures and seminars. I have gradually come to understand what studying comparative literature means, however a question I ask myself on a weekly basis is what I am going to do with what I’ve learnt; where I can apply this allegedly very niche set of knowledge; why study comparative literature?
After a short lecture by Professor Mads Rosendahl Thomsen I have accepted the idea that there is no clear answer. Keep on reading Alice's text by clicking here. A EUROPEAN FAILURE? "Europe has not managed to view its literature as a historical unit, and I continue to insist that this is an irreparable intellectual loss. Because, if we consider only the history of the novel, it was to Rabelais that Laurence Sterne was reacting, it was Sterne who set off Diderot, it was from Cervantes that Fielding drew constant inspiration, it was against Fielding that Stendhal measured himself, it was Flaubert’s tradition living on in Joyce, it was through his reflection on Joyce that Hermann Broch developed his own poetics of the novel, and it was Kafka who showed García Márquez the possibility of departing from tradition to 'write another way.'"
Milan Kundera, "Die Weltliterature" RESEARCH THEMES #2
INTERSECTIONS Themes we examine include colonialism and postcolonialism, cultural history, digital humanities, feminist theory, film, gender, language and language learning, linguistics, literature, history, history of analytical psychology and psychoanalysis, intellectual history, literary criticism, manuscript studies and book history, memory, national identity, politics and political philosophy, queer theory and gay studies, translation studies, travel writing, women’s writing, visual art.
ENCOUNTERS
The Institute of Advanced Studies is delighted to host this roundtable discussion organised by the UCL Comparative Literature Programme. Challenging the focus on global scale in transnational and intercultural studies, we wish to explore how cross-cultural encounter is quotidian, not exceptional; but also how our experience of the everyday (in fiction, in life) does not always and necessarily destabilise cultural constructions of otherness, even in moments (and spaces) of intimate encounter (and despite the overly optimistic belief that familiarity produces integration).
MOVING BETWEEN CULTURES "It is not just about comparing two texts written in two different languages or even the reception of a text in different cultures, but it is also about new perspectives, new angles, travelling, migrating concepts, the experience of moving between cultures and the experience of globalization."
Dr Florian Mussgnug |