Comparative Literature

451 College, Rm 202, 432.2760
M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.

Chair
David Quint

Director of Graduate Studies
Katie Trumpener (katie.trumpener@yale.edu)

Professors
Dudley Andrew, Katerina Clark, Roberto González Echevarría, Cyrus Hamlin, Benjamin Harshav, Carol Jacobs, David Quint, Haun Saussy, Katie Trumpener

Associate Professors
Ann Gaylin, Catherine Labio, Pericles Lewis

Assistant Professors
Ala Alryyes, Alexander Beecroft, Moira Fradinger, Barry McCrea

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. Additionally, students in Comparative Literature are eligible to pursue a supplemental M.Phil. degree in Medieval Studies. For further details, see Medieval Studies.

M.A. (en route to the Ph.D.). Students enrolled in the Ph.D. program may receive the M.A. upon completion of ten courses with at least two grades of Honors and a maximum of three grades of Pass, and the demonstration of proficiency in two of the languages, ancient or modern, through course work or departmental examinations.

No student is admitted to a terminal M.A.

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 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 517bu, Interpretation and Authority.  Carol Jacobs.
T 1.30–3.20
The seminar explores the writings of four theorists of the twentieth century who meditate on the concepts of authority and interpretation. Our method entails close readings of these works in which much of what goes on is not only in the ostensible contents of the works, but also in the performance of the writing. One is confronted in each case with writers who question the relationship between text and simplistic notions of truth. The obvious problem we encounter, then, is how, in turn, to read texts which claim to unsettle that relationship. The issues raised are those among interpretation and authority, both textual and political. Works by Sigmund Freud, Roland Barthes, Paul de Man, and Walter Benjamin. Also GMAN 605bu.

CPLT 518a, Fredric Jameson: The Poetics of Social Forms.  Nigel Alderman.
W 10.30–12.20
This course examines the work of Fredric Jameson from his earliest forays into method to his revision of narrative theories to his mapping of periods and systems. By so doing, we cover virtually all the major theoretical and philosophical models of the postwar period as well as a range of cultural works including medieval romance, nineteenth-century novel, modernist poetry, postmodern architecture, film, and music. Also AMST 928a, ENGL 987a.

CPLT 525a, Literary Genres and World Cultures.  Wai Chee Dimock.
T 10.30–12.20
This course uses the concept of “genre” as an entry point to the dynamic interactions between the local and the global, between the persistence of words and the transformative forces of migration, translation, and hybridization. The history of genres is, in this sense, a history of the diverse cultures of humankind. We read clusters of texts in this light: Homer's Odyssey with Derek Walcott's play of the same title, Walcott's Omeros, and Wole Soyinka's “The Eye of the Cyclops”; Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe with J. M. Coetzee's Foe, Coetzee's 2003 Nobel Lecture, Walcott's “The Castaway,” “Crusoe's Island,” “Crusoe's Journal,” “The Figure of Crusoe,” as well as “The Adventures of Lo Bun Sun” in Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men; Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter with Maryse Condé's I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, Arthur Miller's The Crucible, and Bharati Mukherjee's The Holder of the World. Doing so, we explore the inflections wrought by local cultures on generic terms such as “drama,” “epic,” “novel,” and “lyric.” Also AMST 927a, ENGL 985a.

CPLT 527a, Art and Ideology.  Katerina Clark.
W 1.30–3.20
Examination of texts identified as ideological art, focusing on the relationship between the conventions they use and the ideology they seek to advance. Theoretical readings include works by Benjamin, Jameson, Lukacs, Bakhtin, Marx, Althusser, and Judith Butler; literary works by Balzac, Brecht, Tretiakov, Ostrovsky, Orwell, Koestler, and others; films by Eisenstein, Leni Riefenstahl, and others. Also FILM 828a, RUSS 746a.

CPLT 541au, Complexity: Theory of Meaning and the Literary Text.  Benjamin Harshav.
W 1.30–3.20
The course presents a comprehensive and systematic theory of works of literature as the highest sign-complexes in human culture. Departing from the basic concepts of meaning and reference in linguistics and philosophy of language, a theory of semantic integration is developed. Departing from the basic assumptions of narratology and the philosophy of fictional worlds, a theory of works of literature as complex and open-ended constructs is offered. Also PHIL 704a.

CPLT 572b, Toward a Bioaesthetics: Burroughs, Warhol, Deleuze.  David Joselit.
T 1.30–3.20
The vogue for organic forms and biological metaphors that has arisen from the recent discovery of the human genome is only the latest in a wave of “biologisms” in the twentieth century. Rather than tracing their history directly, this seminar approaches three major intellectual figures of the twentieth century, a writer (Burroughs), an artist (Warhol), and a philosopher (Deleuze), in order to lay down the tools for a twentieth-century bioaesthetics. In each of three units the texts (both visual and literary) associated with these figures are explored in depth. Also HSAR 695b.

CPLT 583a, Plato's Legacy.  Carol Jacobs.
W 3.30–5.20
German thinkers such as Schleiermacher, Hegel, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Arendt have pondered what it means to read Plato. As they do, a constellation of issues inevitably takes form. How are we to come to terms with the relationship between language and what we tend to call truth? How is language, in turn, fundamental to broader questions of epistemology, ethics, and the political? Our intensive readings in Plato's Republic are coupled with the sometimes unsettling readings of the German tradition. What considerably complicates this enterprise, in those who write about Plato no less than in Plato himself, is the uneasy disjunctions one often encounters between what is said and what is performed. Thus we want to analyze the way in which Socrates and his later readers formulate their arguments. In their own contributions to the seminar, students are encouraged to take this constellation of ideas into a variety of literatures or other relevant media. Also GMAN 635a.

CPLT 584bu, Literary Criticism and Rhetoric from Plato to Vico.  Olivia Holmes.
M 1.30–3.20
A survey of major works about literature and rhetoric, with special concentration on the classical and Italian traditions. Critics have tried to answer such basic questions as what literature is, what purposes it serves, and whether it is a good thing. We examine alternating attitudes toward figurative language, which has been seen over time as a dangerous seduction, a tool for teaching ethics, and a necessary first step in understanding reality. Authors include Plato, Aristotle, Horace, St. Augustine, Boccaccio, Sidney, and Vico. Also ITAL 505b.

CPLT 585b, Introduction to Middle High German Literature.  William Whobrey.
TTh 11.30–12.45
A survey of the major works of German vernacular literature from 1150 to 1250, including selections from courtly love poetry, heroic epic, Arthurian romance, crusader songs, and religious narratives. Works are read in the original Middle High German, and aspects of reading and translation are closely linked to an examination of the development of the German language. Special attention is given to the development of vernacular literature, the broader context of Latin culture, and the problems of manuscript transmission. Works to be read in whole or part include: Nibelungenlied, Parzival, Tristan, Minnesang, Gregorius, and Der arme Heinrich. Also GMAN 585b.

CPLT 591a, Saussure dans son siècle.  Haun Saussy.
W 10.30–12.20
Sometimes described as a watershed in the history of linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale is a patchwork of student notes transcribed and condensed into a continuous text. We read the 1916 Cours against a background of nineteenth-century linguistics, trace the history of twentieth-century “Saussurianism,” and contrast the above with Saussure's manuscript Ecrits de linguistique générale, rediscovered in 1996.

CPLT 628b, Visuality and German Writing, 1750–1820.  Brigitte Peucker.
T 3.30–5.20
Focusing on sight and the senses, this course explores vision and affect, problems of spectatorship, and the visual arts as they are articulated primarily, but not exclusively, in the German tradition. Texts are read against the backdrop of theories of visuality, both past and present, including essays on the picturesque, on landscape gardening, on physiognomy, and texts by Addison, Diderot, Walter Benjamin, E.H. Gombrich, Michael Fried, Jonathan Crary, Barbara Stafford. Authors include Winckelmann, Lessing, Lichtenberg, Goethe, Wackenroder/Tieck, Schlegel, Kleist, Hoffmann. Also GMAN 628b.

CPLT 630au, German Literature, Thought, and Culture in the Age of Goethe.  Cyrus Hamlin.
TTh 1–2.15
Interdisciplinary survey of German culture, literature, philosophy, music, and the arts during the Romantic era (1770–1830). Focus on concepts of the individual and self-consciousness, freedom and self-development, the rise of alienation, pessimism, and despair in the early nineteenth century. Among authors to be studied: Kant, Goethe (Werther and Faust), Mozart (Magic Flute), Schiller, and Hölderlin; music by Beethoven and Schubert; Romantic literary criticism and theory (the Schlegels, Novalis); stories by Kleist and Hoffmann; painting by C.D. Friedrich and architecture by C.F. Schinkel; philosophy of Hegel and Schopenhauer. No prerequisites. Readings and discussion in English. Also GMAN 630au.

CPLT 650a, Ideology, Religion, and Revolution in German Thought.  Henry Sussman.
Th 3.30–5.20
This is a course, pivoting on the close reading of its materials, whose challenge is to explore the cross-currents of conservatism and radicality in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German thought. It begins with Nietzsche's critique of Christianity and religion in general, in the Genealogy of Morals and the Anti-Christ (selected passages). It proceeds to a section on Marx, one including the formative first volume of Kapital and Derrida's surprisingly heartfelt tribute, Specters of Marx. Through readings of Moses and Monotheism and some of the metapsychological essays, we trace both the radical and counterrevolutionary politics inherent to Freudian psychoanalysis. Among sources of illumination on this material, we consult Ernesto Laclau, Fredric Jameson, and David Harvey. Collateral literary readings, read in the context of the aforementioned authors, include Zola (Ladies' Paradise), Brecht (Saint Joan of the Stockyards), and Döblin (Berlin Alexanderplatz). Students are welcome to do their reading and writing in German, French, and/or English. Also GMAN 545a.

CPLT 696b, Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel.  Ruth Bernard Yeazell.
Th 1.30–3.20
Studies in visual and verbal realism, which take their cue from the nineteenth-century practice of comparing the novel to seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish painting. Readings include selected art theory and criticism from Reynolds to the present, and novels by Balzac, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy. Also ENGL 819b, HSAR 600b.

CPLT 723b, The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade. Christopher L. Miller.
Th 10.30–12.20
An analysis of the Atlantic world that was created by the slave trade, in its French version, as seen through history, philosophy, and literature from the eighteenth through the twentieth century. Readings from Voltaire, the journal of a slave-trading sailor, Rousseau, Madame de Duras, Baron Roger, Mérimée, Sue, Césaire, Sembene, T. Mandeleau. In English. Also AFAM 854b, AFST 739b, FREN 939b.

CPLT 725au, Postcolonial Theory and Its Literature.  Christopher L. Miller.
Th 10.30–12.20
A survey of theories relevant to colonial and postcolonial literature and culture. The course focuses on theoretical models (Orientalism, hybridity, métissage, créolité, “minor literature”), but also gives attention to the literary texts from which they are derived (francophone and Anglophone). Readings from Said, Bhabha, Spivak, Mbembe, Amselle, Glissant, Deleuze, Guattari. Taught in English. Also AFAM 846a, AFST 746a, FREN 946au.

CPLT 855b, Dickens and the Grotesque.  Alexander Welsh.
W 1.30–3.20
A seminar on the nineteenth century's enthusiasm for the grotesque, as mediated by Shakespeare and other Renaissance texts. Theory of Hugo, Ruskin, Bakhtin; practice of Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert, and chiefly Dickens. Also ENGL 806b.

CPLT 900, Directed Reading.  Faculty.

CPLT 901, Individual Research.  Faculty.

CPLT 913a, Empire and Its Double.  Sara Suleri Goodyear.
W 3.30–5.20
A course that concentrates on readings of Empire as a “secret sharer” of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British narrative. Rather than solely focusing on images of orientalism, we examine infiltrations of alterity that lie too close for comfort. While attempting to undo the idea of exoticism, we simultaneously address what E. M. Forster calls “aspects of the novel” in order to consider the question, What does the novel want? Texts include Edmund Burke's storytelling in Parliamentary debate, Dickens, Austen, Wilkie Collins, Kipling, Forster, Salman Rushdie, Bapsi Sidhwa, Agra Shahid Ali. Our examination of Conrad's trope of the secret sharer causes us to question the singularity of imperial stories and their slippage into theories of nation. Also ENGL 913a.

CPLT 916bu, Russian Film.  John MacKay.
Th 7–8.50 p.m., screenings M 9 p.m.
An historical overview of the development of Russian film with special attention to the classics of directors like Eisenstein and Vertov. Russian film examined in terms both of its contribution to film theory and practice and of the specific historical and cultural contexts of the major films. Also E&RS 692bu, FILM 773bu, RUSS 744bu.

CPLT 927bu, European Cinema in the Wake of Italian Neorealism.  Francesco Casetti.
W 3.30–5.20
World War II saw modernism enter cinema via Italian neorealism, leading to New Waves in France, England, Germany, and Eastern Europe. Famous auteurs exploited both the “realism” and the “reflexivity” of the medium. This seminar examines strategies of narration through a cultural approach. Also FILM 731bu, ITAL 597bu.

CPLT 928bu, Germany and Eastern Europe: Literature and Film.  Katie Trumpener.
MW 2.30–3.45
Juxtaposing German with selected Polish, Czech, Hungarian, and Russian texts, this course explores the twentieth-century encounter between Central and Eastern Europe, and the ways German expansionism (from imperialism to Nazism) shaped cultural identity in both Europes. Particular focus on divergences in German and Eastern European cultural memory, on postwar German attempts at expiation and “decolonization” (particularly within the shared communist framework of the Warsaw Pact), and on how local cultural and political conditions shaped regional versions of modernism, magical realism, and feminist analysis. All texts available in English translations (although knowledge of relevant languages welcome). Texts by Musil, Roth, Hasek, Döblin, Jiri Weiss, Tadeusz Borowski, Christa Wolf, Miron Bialoszewski, Grass, Bobrowski, Herta Müller. Films by Pudovkin, Munk, Konrad Wolf, Szabo, Jonas Mekas, Egon Günther, Petra Tschörtner. Also E&RS 628bu, FILM 769bu, GMAN 928b.

CPLT 930bu, Nazi Cinema.  Brigitte Peucker.
Th 1.30–3.20
An examination of German film during the Nazi period, including the propaganda film, the entertainment film, and the documentary. Special attention to the expression of ideology through cinema and to the development of a fascist aesthetic, its origins, and its aftermath. Films by Fritz Lang, Leni Riefenstahl, Detlef Sierck (Douglas Sirk), G.W. Pabst, Veidt Harlan, and others. In English; films with subtitles. Also FILM 763bu, GMAN 795bu.

CPLT 931a, French Film: History, Theory, Pedagogy.  Thomas Kavanagh.
M 9.30–11.20
This seminar focuses on three related topics: the history of French cinema, how film theory conceptualizes and inflects that history, and the role of film studies in a French Studies curriculum. Neither strictly historical nor strictly theoretical, this course approaches the films we study through groupings of secondary texts (criticism, theory, literary works) that raise issues concerning the use of film in the broader study of French culture. We look at films by such directors as Lumière, Méliès, Vigo, Buñuel, Carné, Duvivier, Renoir, Resnais, Godard, Truffaut, Varda, Marker, Zonca, and Leconte as well as at critical and theoretical positions taken by Arnheim, Pudovkin, Eisenstein, Mitry, Bazin, Barthes, Metz, Baudry, and Deleuze. Conducted in French. Also FILM 621a, FREN 753a.

CPLT 932b, Cinema as Art, Institution, Discipline.  Francesco Casetti.
M 3.30–5.20
Because cinema's status as an artform depends on the functions it serves in cultural contexts, it is also an institution with which spectators negotiate in a complex act of rhetorical communication. This seminar studies how cinema disciplined specific forms of viewing which shaped a gaze. This gaze adapted itself to cultural cues (the desire for a “total vision,” the presence of individual perspective, the desire for heightened perception, the requirement of an organized look, etc.). Texts and films from 1910s to the 1960s are examined. Also FILM 801b, ITAL 810b.

CLPT 941b, Fiestas cubanas.  Roberto González Echevarría.
W 2.30–4.20
A study of the fiestas marking the Cuban calendar from the nineteenth century to the present, how they respond to cultural and political transformations, and how they are inscribed in literature, particularly the narrative. The feast as the representation of time and social and political change. The work of anthropologists and theorists of literature such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marcel Mauss, Arnold van Gennep, and Mikhail Bakhtin, along with that of Latin American and Cuban anthropologists and writers such as Fernando Ortiz, Lidia Cabrera, José Arrom, Manuel Moreno Fraginals, Miguel Barnet, and Octavio Paz. Fiction by Cirilo Villaverde, Alejo Carpentier, José Lezama Lima, Severo Sarduy, Reinaldo Arenas, Daína Chaviano, and others. In Spanish. Also SPAN 942b.

Next: Computational Biology and Bioinformatics