Reading Literature Globally

The B.A. in Comparative Literature and Literary Translation allows students to choose between two tracks—Comparative Literature and Literary Translation—as they situate literary and cultural production in a global perspective.  

As a scholarly discipline and an undergraduate major, its focus is both particular works of literature, broadly defined, and on global politics and culture. This major offers a transnational mode of comparison that takes as its point of departure the commitment to understanding cultural differences and cross-cultural conversations, aiming to develop a critical understanding of the ways literature functions in its social, cultural, and historical context.  

Program Learning Outcomes

1. Formal Understanding: Students will be able to combine close attention to textual practices with a global perspective on literature, using methods of studying texts across national and linguistic boundaries.
2. Historical Understanding: Students will be able to identify and articulate how texts are related to social and cultural categories (e.g., race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, ability) as well as ideologies and belief systems (e.g. philosophy, science, politics, religion, education).
3. Interpretation: Students will be able to interpret literary works in conversation with a range of critical and theoretical frameworks and to identify and articulate the ways difference, power, and inequality shape the production and reception of literature.
4. Argumentation: Students will be able to “join the conversation” that is always ongoing among critics and scholars regarding texts, authors, contexts, and paratexts, developing analytical arguments in accordance with developing conventions of comparative criticism; they will also be able to provide and to receive feedback from peers.
5. Craft: students in the Literary Translation track will be able to, through a research process that includes engaging, interpreting, and responding to model texts, create an original work that thoughtfully transmits both textual and cultural features of a work in a language other than English