The Graduate Program in Comparative Literature

The Graduate Program in Comparative Literature offers an opportunity for talented, original, and dedicated students to work with and think through a variety of questions related to texts. Transcending national and linguistic boundaries, and drawing on a richly diverse faculty, the program aims at helping students construct and analyze the field of textual relations that underlies literary concepts such as genre, theory, movement, and canon. Areas of particular importance, in this respect, are literary theory, the social history of literary and cultural production, comparative East-West poetics, and the relationship of literature with other fields. Beyond the provinces of academic specialization, however, it is the very distinction between literary and nonliterary discourses that is ultimately put in question, and thus redefined, throughout a curriculum which, while carefully constructed, allows students the freedom to develop their own course of study.

The faculty's diversity and commitment to the program's enterprise create a uniquely stimulating and innovative intellectual environment. Accordingly, the program seeks students who will develop modes and lines of inquiry that traverse conventionally defined national, disciplinary, ethnic, and sexual categories.