Studying Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies in Modern Languages

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 7
• Convenor: Dr Ann Lewis
• Tutors: all teaching staff in the department
• Assessment: two 2500-word essays (50% each)

In this module, you will study the fields of comparative literature and cultural studies as developed with reference to individual modern languages.

The first part of the module provides foundational readings in both fields in order to acquaint you with the traditions from which the study of culture’s political and ideological implications emerge (cultural studies), while making visible the principle of comparativity internal to the chosen texts’ mappings and conceptualisations (comparative literature). In so doing, it prepares you to use critical and theoretical frameworks productively in your writing, in your chosen areas of specialisation, which you will further develop in other modules in the course, and in your chosen strands in Part 2 of the module.  

Indicative syllabus

Part 1

In this part of the module we will examine the work of thinkers like Brandes, Bakhtin, Auerbach, Barthes and Said to explore notions of comparative and world literature.  Following this, we will move to cultural studies, looking at a variety of theoretical perspectives (for example, Gramsci, Horkheimer and Adorno, Williams, Cixous, Lorde and Braidotti).

Part 2

Strand 1. Comparative literature

• Introduction: Key concepts in comparative literature, especially translation - a case study
• Modernism sans frontières: Proust and Joyce, Woolf and Sarraute
• Spaces of otherness: The reception of Leopardi in the English-speaking world
• Cross-cultural themes: Violence and the ‘other’
• Cross-cultural themes: The poet as prophet
• Cross-cultural themes: Epistolary encounters, writing sentiment and gender in the eighteenth-century novel

Strand 2: French studies

• Hypothetical beginnings - the social self: Rousseau
• Exotic encounters - sociability and sexuality: Diderot
• The social construction of gender and of female identity as the 'other': Duras
• The need for communities in the modern world: Weil
• Reality, simulacra and the culture of simulation: Baudrillard
• Capitalist constructs of society: Deleuze and Guattari
• Deconstructing European society after the fall of the Berlin Wall: Derrida

By the end of this module, you will be able to:

• competently reflect on and critically engage with the tradition of literary criticism within modern languages and, emerging from it, that of comparative literature
• understand the emergence of cultural critique and its connections and implications for the study of modern and European languages and beyond
• understand the historical,  philosophical, methodological and political differences implied in the different approaches to the study of modern languages and cultures
• make comparisons and connections across time periods, spaces and disciplines
• analyse and critically assess some of the dominant themes, salient authors and cultural objects within your chosen strand and cultural tradition
• demonstrate skills in close textual analysis
• show critical awareness of the meanings and functions of cultural production within the social and cultural contexts of their production and reception
• engage with complex cultural and historical criticism material.