Comparative Literature
451 College, Rm 202, 432.2760
M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.
Chair
David Quint
Director of Graduate Studies
Cyrus Hamlin (cyrus.hamlin@yale.edu)
Professors
Dudley Andrew, Peter Brooks, Katerina Clark, Shoshana Felman,
Roberto González Echevarría, Cyrus Hamlin, Benjamin
Harshav, Michael Holquist, Carol Jacobs, David Quint, Katie
Trumpener
Associate Professor
Ann Gaylin, Pericles Lewis
Assistant Professors
Ala Alryyes, Alexander Beecroft, Vilashini Cooppan, Catherine
Labio
Fields of Study
The Department of Comparative Literature introduces
students to the study and understanding of literature beyond
linguistic or national boundaries; the theory, interpretation,
and criticism of literature; and its interactions with adjacent
fields like history, culture, language, psychology, law, and
philosophy. The comparative perspective invites the exploration
of such transnational phenomena as literary or cultural periods
and trends (Renaissance, Romanticism, Modernism, Postcolonialism)
or genres and modes of discourse. Students may specialize
in any cultures or languages, to the extent that they are
sufficiently covered at Yale. The Ph.D. degree qualifies the
candidate to teach Comparative Literature as well as the national
literature(s) of her or his specialization.
Special Admissions Requirements
Applicants must hold a B.A. or equivalent degree and
should normally have majored in Comparative Literature, English,
a classical or foreign literature, or in an interdepartmental
major that includes literature. They must be ready to take
advanced courses in two foreign literatures in addition to
English upon admission. The GRE General Test is required.
A ten- to twenty-page writing sample should be submitted with
the application.
Special Requirements for the Ph.D. Degree
Students must successfully complete fourteen term
courses, including at least seven listed under the departmental
heading. The student’s overall schedule must fulfill
the following requirements: (1) at least one course in medieval
or classical European literature, philology, or linguistics
(or their equivalents in other cultures); one course in the
Renaissance or Baroque (or equivalents); and one course in
the modern period; (2) three courses in literary theory or
methodology; (3) course work dealing with texts from three
literatures, one of which may be English or American. Any
course may be counted for several requirements simultaneously.
Languages: Literary proficiency in four languages (including
English, at least one other modern language, and one classical
or ancient language, such as Latin, Sanskrit, Provençal,
or Biblical Hebrew). The fulfillment of this requirement will
be demonstrated by a written exam consisting of a translation
of a literary or critical text, to be held by the end of the
sixth term; or by an equivalent level in the student’s
course work.
Orals: An oral examination in two parts, to be taken in the
third year of studies, demonstrating both the breadth and
specialization as well as the comparative scope of the student’s
acquired knowledge. The first part consists of six topics
that include texts from three national literatures and several
historical periods (at least one modern and one before the
Renaissance). The topics should also include representatives
of the three traditional literary genres (poetry, drama, narrative
fiction) and one question on theory or criticism. The second
part consists of the student’s presentation of a topic
based on his or her original work.
The Ph.D. dissertation, supervised by a dissertation director
(or directors) and approved by the departmental faculty, completes
the degree. Its initial step is a dissertation prospectus,
to be submitted and approved by the dissertation director
and the faculty in the course of the seventh term of study.
Admission to candidacy for the Ph.D. is granted after six
terms of residence and the completion of all requirements
(courses, languages, orals, prospectus) except the dissertation.
Teaching: Training in teaching, through teaching fellowships,
is an important part of every student’s program. Normally
students will teach in their third and fourth years.
Combined Ph.D. Programs
Comparative Literature and Classics
The Department of Comparative Literature also offers, in conjunction
with the Department of Classical Languages and Literatures,
a combined Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Classics. For
further details, see Classics.
Comparative Literature and Film Studies
The Department of Comparative Literature also offers, in conjunction
with the Program in Film Studies, a joint Ph.D. in Comparative
Literature and Film Studies. For further details, see Film
Studies. Applicants to the joint program must indicate on
their application that they are applying both to Film Studies
and to Comparative Literature. All documentation within the
application should include this information.
Comparative Literature and Renaissance Studies
The Department of Comparative Literature also offers, in conjunction
with the Renaissance Studies program, a combined Ph.D. in
Comparative Literature and Renaissance Studies. For further
details, see Renaissance Studies.
Master's Degrees
M.Phil. See Graduate
School requirements. Alternatively, the Department of
Comparative Literature offers, in conjunction with the Medieval
Studies program, a joint M.Phil. degree. For further details,
see Medieval Studies.
Program materials are available upon request to the Director of Graduate Studies,
Department of Comparative Literature, Yale University, PO Box 208299, New Haven
CT 06520-8299.
Courses
CPLT 501, Introduction to Renaissance Studies. David
Quint [F], Lawrence Manley [Sp]. Th 1.30–3.20 [F], W
3.30–5.20 [Sp]
An introduction to major texts, issues, bibliography,
and methods in the interdisciplinary study of the Renaissance.
Emphasis in the first term on the literature of Italy and
in the second on northern Europe. Also ENGL 565a/b, RNST
500a,b.
CPLT 511bu, Introduction to Theory of Literature. Paul
Fry. TTh 11.30–12.20, 1 HTBA
An examination of concepts and assumptions present in
contemporary views of literature. Theory of meaning, interpretation,
and representation. Critical analysis of formalist, psychoanalytic,
structuralist, post-structuralist, Marxist, and feminist approaches
to theory and literature. Graduate students meet at same times
and are required to do a term paper.
CPLT 515a, Problems in the Theory of Literature. Benjamin
Harshav. M 1.30–3.20
Introductory proseminar for all first-year graduate students
in Comparative Literature. Critical readings of basic texts
in modern literary theory on questions such as the discipline
of comparative literature; theory, history, and criticism;
interpretation and evaluation; theories of “the language
of poetry,” narrative, and “fictional worlds”;
literature and ideology; periods and genres; postmodernism
and feminism.
CPLT 529a, American Literary Globalism. Wai
Chee Dimock. W 10.30–12.20
What is the relation between American literature and
world culture? How important are cross-time translations,
and what does it mean for Emerson, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller,
Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, and W. S. Merwin to be practitioners
in this genre? How important are global roots to authors such
as Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, and Leslie Silko?
This course explores “globalism” as the broadest
possible frame for American literature, bringing together
authors across centuries, across racial divisions, and across
the customary division between poetry and prose. Also
AMST 925a, ENGL 925a.
CPLT 530bu, The Drama and Theater of Bertolt Brecht. Cyrus
Hamlin. TTh 11.30–12.45
The major plays by Bertolt Brecht are studied in the context
of their performance in the theater under his direction, specifically
in Berlin during the 1920s and after World War II from 1949
to 1956. Among the works to be studied are Baal, Drums
in the Night, In the Jungle of the Cities, Man is Man, Threepenny
Opera, Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, The Measures
Taken, Saint Joan of the Stockyards, Mother Courage and Her
Children, Life of Galileo, The Good Woman of Setzuan,
and Caucasian Chalk Circle. Reading and discussion
in English. Occasional viewing of video materials. Also
GMAN 613bu.
CPLT 531a, Poetics of Representation: Sebald, Rilke,
Yeats. Carol Jacobs. T 1.30–3.20
Readings of the works of three twentieth-century authors
who, in very different ways, challenge conventional modes
in which to consider the relationship between literature and
what we tend to call reality. Inevitably we have to take into
account on the one hand Sebald’s and Yeats’s difficult
stances toward what we tend to call the political, as well
as Rilke’s apparent withdrawal from the realm of such
worldly concerns. We necessarily also ask how to think the
performance of art and its implicit theorizations as crucial
to these questions. Also GMAN 560a.
CPLT 538b, The Galaxy of Modernisms: Ideologies
and Poetics. Benjamin Harshav. M 1.30–3.20
An interdisciplinary seminar on the ideologies and principles
of poetics of the major trends in twentieth-century literature
and the arts. Italian and Russian Futurism, Expressionism,
Acmeism, Imagism, Dada, Surrealism, Postmodernism in German,
Italian, Russian, French, English, Hebrew, and other cultures.
The discourse of Modernist trends, their similarities and
divergences. Readings of manifestos and recent scholarly books.
Emphasis on art and literature, with several trends in film
theory (Eisenstein) and architecture (Bauhaus vs. Postmodernism).
Slides and films are shown.
CPLT 571a, Promised Lands: Slavery, Literature, and Modernity
in Russia and the United States. John MacKay. T
1.30–3.20
Close, comparative, contextualized examination of literary
and other forms of cultural production associated with U.S.
slavery and Russian serfdom. Special attention is paid to
the relation between bondage and national, cultural, and personal
identity; the role of bondage in definitions of “aesthetic
experience” in the pre- and post-emancipation periods;
the relation between literacy and the literary; literature
of protest in the two countries; and connections between geographical
and subjective space within cultures of enslavement. We examine
works by Pushkin, Aksakov, Gogol, Simms, Cooper, Crèvecoeur,
Radishchev, Karamzin, Goncharov, Tolstoy, Kennedy, and the
“plantation novelists,” Stowe, Melville, Turgenev,
slave and serf autobiographers, freedman’s textbooks,
Fet, Lanier, Page, Chesnutt, and Bunin; historical treatments
by Kolchin, Genovese, and others; theoretical works by Said,
Jameson, Saidiya Hartman, Bakhtin, and others. Requirements:
in-class presentations; research paper. No knowledge of Russian
required. Also AMST 926a, RUSS 675a.
CPLT 583bu, Mania and Mass Psychology. Eric
Schwab. W 3.30–5.20
Exploration of the correlation between traditional concepts
of mania (from enthusiasm to bipolar disorder) and the psychology
of human masses (from groups and crowds to mass culture and
religious and political movements). Readings from theoretical
and literary works (including Freud, Kant, Benjamin, Brecht,
Reich, Schreber, Canetti, Theweleit) as well as films (Metropolis,
Triumph of the Will, Kuhle Wampe) that attempt to describe,
explain, and/or transform the “mass” mentality
in some way. Topics include rhetoric and propaganda, communism
and fascism, violence and sexuality, schizophrenia and mass
media. Also GMAN 583bu.
CPLT 677b, Performing Arts in the Twentieth Century:
The Russian Stage. Katerina Clark. W 1.30–3.20
Covers most of the performing arts: ballet, opera, theater,
mass spectacle, and film. Theory of the performing arts, including
selections from the writings of some of the most famous Russian
directors such as Stanislavsky, Meierhold, Eisenstein, and
Balanchine. Their major productions and some of the major
Russian plays of the twentieth century (e.g., by Chekhov,
Mayakovsky, Bulgakov, and contemporary dramatists). No knowledge
of Russian is required. Students taking the course for credit
in Comparative Literature can write their papers on texts
in other languages. Also RUSS 699b.
CPLT 681a, The Mock-Heroic Moment: Milton to Eliot. Claude
Rawson. M 1.30–3.20
The course begins with Milton’s critique of military
epic in Paradise Lost. It deals with the changes in
the status of the heroic following the decline of the traditional
military epic in the seventeenth century, partly under the
pressure of increasing anti-war sentiment, and of the domestication
of subject matter which led to the so-called “rise of
the novel.” Deals with Boileau, Dryden, Swift (Battle
of the Books), Pope, Gay, Fielding, Byron, Shelley, Eliot,
Joyce, and Auden. Also ENGL 681a.
CPLT 687b, Tragic and Sacred Drama in the Seventeenth
Century. Blair Hoxby. M 3.30–5.20
Authors include late Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher,
Corneille, Calderon, Dryden, Racine, and Otway. Topics include
conditions of performance; the representation of the passions
on stage; the relationship of the tragic, the sacred, and
the ritual; and the place of the theater in seventeenth-century
society. Also ENGL 700b.
CPLT 772b, The Jungle Books. Roberto
González Echevarría. W 4–6
Journeys to the jungle in poetry, fiction, autobiography,
anthropology, travel narrative, and popular culture and their
relation to imperialism. Particular attention is given to
the origins and evolution of the social sciences and their
reflection in fiction, as well as to popular culture versions
of the journey to the jungle in literature and films, such
as those about Tarzan and Indiana Jones. Texts: Charles Baudelaire,
“Le voyage”; Alvar Núñez Cabeza
de Vaca, Castaways; Alejo Carpentier, The Lost Steps;
André Malraux, La voie royale; Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle, The Lost World; Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness;
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques; Rómulo
Gallegos, Canaima; Mario Vargas Llosa, The Storyteller;
Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Books; William Henry Hudson,
Green Mansions; Jules Verne, Superbe Orénoque
and La jangada; and others. In English; knowledge of
Spanish and French desirable. Also SPAN 949b.
CPLT 789a, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature,
Psychoanalysis, and History. Shoshana Felman. W
3.30–5.20
The course looks at various instances of testimony (literary,
historical, legal, poetical, political, and psychoanalytic)
as part of a general investigation of memory and trauma through
narratives of individual and collective limit-experiences.
In analyzing art’s relation both to death and to survival,
the course probes (in texts and films) the limits of what
can be said and the limits of representation in the face of
events whose reality unsettles common sense, defies imagination,
and resists assimilation. Topics include the tension between
violence and speech, truth and denial, judgment and forgiveness,
and the concrete interrelations between language, silence,
mourning, injury, identity, and cross-cultural exchanges (texts
by Plato, Jacques Lacan, Emile Zola, Oscar Wilde, Virginia
Woolf, Hannah Arendt; syllabus to be posted on the Web in
August). Requirements: two short papers in the course of the
term; oral presentations and ongoing active participation.
Also FREN 789a.
CPLT 812b, Jane Austen and the British Empire. Katie
Trumpener. M 10.30–12.20
Describing the linked emergence of feminism and nationalism
in British-governed Ceylon, Sam Selvadurai’s recent
historical novel, Cinnamon Gardens, underlines the
transformative effect of Jane Austen’s fiction (especially
Mansfield Park) on indigenous readers. Over the last
decade, Western scholars have debated whether Mansfield Park
is implicitly imperial(ist) or explicitly critical of imperial
power. This course seeks to reopen those debates through a
broader examination of Austen’s late fiction (Emma,
Persuasion, Mansfield Park, Sanditon) in relationship
to other Romantic novels concerned with empire and abolition
(including works by Maria Edgeworth, Walter Scott, Mary Hays,
Amelia Opie, Elizabeth Hamilton), and through an examination
of Austen’s formative influence on nineteenth-century
“colonial” fiction, particularly the emerging
English-language novelistic traditions of Canada, Australia,
and British India (including works by Margaret Oliphant, Rudyard
Kipling, Ada Cambridge, Sara Jeanette Duncan, Rabindranath
Tagore, George Moore, James Joyce). Also ENGL 812b.
CPLT 900, Directed Reading. Faculty.
CPLT 901, Individual Research. Faculty.
CPLT 917a, Films and Their Study. Dudley
Andrew. T 10.30–12.20
“Films and Their Study” sets in place some
undergirding for graduate students in various disciplines
who plan to develop a subspecialty or who want to anchor their
particular film interest to something like the “professional
discourse” of this field. Providing a coordinated set
of topics under the rubrics of (a) spectacle, (b) narrative,
(c) realism, and (d) signification, the flow of this survey
is interrupted first by the often discordant relation of history
to theory and second by the obtuseness of the films examined
each week. As the title of this seminar is meant to convey,
films themselves take the lead in our discussions. Also
FILM 601a.
CPLT 924bu, Readings in Hebrew Poetry. Benjamin
Harshav. W 1.30–3.20
Modernism in Hebrew poetry: close readings of the poetry
of Nathan Alterman, Lea Goldberg, Nathan Zach, Yona Volakh,
Avot Yeshurun. Advanced undergraduate course, open to graduate
students. Prerequisite: a high level of reading Hebrew texts
in poetry and criticism, and permission of instructor.
CPLT 932au, German Cinema 1945–1965: Cold War Film
Culture. Katie Trumpener. TTh 11.30–12.45
Juxtaposing East and West German films, this course explores
their diverging accounts of Nazi and postwar life; the theory
and practice of socialist filmmaking; cinema culture; questions
of genre; the emerging New Waves. Also FILM 729au, GMAN
730a.
CPLT 934b, The Archive of Popular Front France. Dudley
Andrew. T 1.30–3.20; screenings TBA
In 1930s Paris, novelists (Céline, Malraux), intellectuals
(Gide, Benjamin), and filmmakers (Renoir) found themselves
recruited by politics. Using cinema to bracket the Popular
Front (Surrealism on one side, Poetic Realism on the other),
this seminar examines publishing, the art scene, and radical
groups such as the Collège de Sociologie to track the
social changes visible in French culture at the end of the
Third Republic. In English. Also FILM 843b, FREN 931b.
CPLT 950b, Walter Benjamin’s Literary Criticism. Winfried
Menninghaus. T 3.30–5.20
Walter Benjamin’s literary criticism provides a
critical transformation of both aesthetic concepts (beauty,
semblance, the sublime), and rhetorical figures (irony, allegory).
It puts into question the relations of myth, literature, philosophy,
dream, and history. The seminar focuses on a discussion of
Benjamin’s highly influential basic concepts while at
the same time drawing on some of the literary works he deals
with. The second half of the class is devoted to the way the
later Benjamin of the “Arcades Project” transforms
his modes of literary readings into a new kind of reading
societal “dream energies” in fashion, technology,
architecture, interior design, and trends of the visual arts.
Also GMAN 675b.
CPLT 956b, Modernism and Sexuality: A Literary Approach. Laura
Frost. T 10.30–12.20
This course examines the representation of sexuality
in modern fiction through a formal and historical approach.
We consider how literary constructions of sexuality reflect
modernist aesthetics and formal innovation as well as historical
preoccupations such as pseudo-scientific discourses of sexuality
from the turn of the century to the mid-twentieth century.
Topics include sexology and psychoanalysis, Victorianism and
the “repressive hypothesis,” theories of “perversion,”
female sexuality and feminism, modernism and mass culture,
eroticism and pornography, and the politics of pleasure. Primary
authors include T.S. Eliot, Djuna Barnes, Radclyffe Hall,
Henry James, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Mina Loy, Thomas
Mann, Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, and Virginia Woolf. Other
critical readings include Bersani, Boone, Butler, Carpenter,
Ellis, Foucault, Laqueur, Rubin, and Sedgwick. Also ENGL
956b, WGST 720b.
CPLT 979bu, Text, Memory, Identity. Michael
Holquist. TTh 11.30–12.45
The course examines three key concepts that are increasingly
used in literary and cultural studies. We analyze relations
between them as they work together to authorize religions,
create works of art, national imaginaries, and personal identities.
Readings are divided between two kinds of works. Some are
theoretical (on literacy/orality, concept of text in various
ancient and modern thinkers, theories of memory). In addition,
we examine exemplary texts (primarily literary, but also religious
and historical). Theoretical readings include those arguing
“the Homer question,” Jurij Lotman and Mikhail
Bakhtin, Roland Barthes on different textually defined culture
systems, and Plato, Burnett, Halbwachs, Freud, Wertsch on
memory. Exemplary texts include several “simple forms”
(epigraphs, parables), selections from the Bible, short stories
by von Kleist, Gogol, Hawthorne, and Kafka, plus excerpts
from nationalist ideologies (Fichte, Dostoevsky, Emerson).
In addition to a ten-page paper at midterm and a ten-page
final essay, each student is expected to e-mail a one-page
précis of reactions to reading assignments each week.
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