Admission by permission of the Program in Middle East Studies, normally for junior and senior minors in Middle East studies, and for qualified juniors and seniors from other departments. Offered both semesters each year.

Readings in the original language (or in certain cases translations) of literary texts read in or closely related to a course taken with a faculty member appointed in comparative literature. Admission by permission of the instructor and the program director. Students are encouraged to contact the instructor during the prior semester, and proposals must be submitted in writing to the director by the end of the first week of classes.

This course presents a variety of practices and positions within the field of literary theory. Approaches include structuralism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, gender and queer studies, cultural studies and postcolonial studies. Emphasis on the theory as well as the practice of these methods: their assumptions about writing and reading and about literature as a cultural formation. Readings include Freud, Lacan, Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Bakhtin, Gramsci, Bhabba, Butler, Said, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Žižek.

A study of the major writers and diverse literary traditions of modern Africa with emphasis on the historical, political and cultural contexts of the emergence of writing, reception and consumption. We pay particular attention to several questions: in what contexts did modern African literature emerge? Is the term “African literature” a useful category? How do African writers challenge Western representations of Africa? How do they articulate the crisis of independence and postcoloniality? How do women writers reshape our understanding of gender and the politics of resistance?

Same as ENG 202. Texts include The Iliad; tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides; Plato’s Symposium; Virgil’s Aeneid; Dante’s Divine Comedy. Lecture and discussion. CLT 202/ENG 202, like CLT 203/ENG 203, is among the courses from which comparative literature majors choose two as the basis of the major. Students interested in comparative literature and/or the foundations of Western literature and wanting a writing-intensive course should take 202 or 203 or both.