Skip to main content

Studying Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies in Modern Languages

Overview

  • Credit value: 30 credits at Level 7
  • Convenor: Dr Ann Lewis
  • Tutors: all teaching staff in the subject area
  • Assessment: two 2500-word essays (50% each)

Module description

This module provides a critical and theoretical introduction to the fields of comparative literature and cultural studies as developed with reference to individual modern languages.

The first part of the module provides foundational readings in both fields in order to acquaint you with the traditions from which the study of culture’s political and ideological implications emerge (cultural studies), while making visible the principle of comparativity internal to the chosen texts’ mappings and conceptualisations (comparative literature). In so doing, it prepares you to use critical and theoretical frameworks productively in your writing in your chosen areas of specialisation, which you will further develop in other modules in the course, and in the second part of this core module.  

Indicative syllabus

Research skills

  • What is postgraduate study?
  • Electronic library resources
  • Researching and writing an essay at postgraduate level

Part 1

We will examine the work of thinkers like Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Stanley Fish, Georg Brandes and Edward Said in order to explore notions of comparative and world literature. Following this, we will move to cultural studies, looking at a variety of theoretical perspectives (via, for example, Antonio Gramsci, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Raymond Williams, Judith Butler and Rosi Braidotti).

Part 2

Two strands allow you to make connections across a wide range of themes and cultures:

Strand 1: Comparative Literature (sample topics)

  • Introduction: key concepts in comparative literature, especially translation - a case study
  • Modernism sans frontières: Proust and Joyce, Woolf and Sarraute
  • Cross-cultural themes: Dylan Thomas and the French Symbolists
  • Cross-cultural themes: Orientalism and Self-Orientalism - the case of Japan
  • Cross-cultural themes: violence and the ‘other’
  • Cross-cultural themes: the poet as seer and the poet as witness
  • Cross-cultural themes: epistolary encounters: writing gender in the eighteenth-century novel

Strand 2: Self and Other in French Studies

  • Hypothetical beginnings: the social self in Jean-Jacques Rousseau
  • Exotic encounters: sociability and sexuality: Denis Diderot
  • The social construction of consciousness vs individual 'authentic consciousness': Henri Bergson
  • The social construction of gender and of female identity as the 'other': Marguerite Duras and Simone de Beauvoir
  • The need for communities in the modern world: Simone Weil
  • Reality, simulacra and the culture of simulation: Baudrillard
  • Social reform and political militancy: Alain Badiou
  • Capitalist constructs of society: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
  • Deconstructing European society after the fall of the Berlin Wall: Jacques Derrida

Learning objectives

By the end of this module, you will be able to:

  • competently reflect on and critically engage with the tradition of literary criticism within modern languages and, emerging from it, that of comparative literature
  • understand the emergence of cultural critique and its connections and implications for the study of modern European languages and beyond (including, for example, Japanese and Latin American studies)
  • understand the historical, philosophical, methodological and political differences implied in the different approaches to the study of modern languages and cultures
  • make comparisons and connections across time periods, spaces and disciplines
  • analyse and critically assess some of the dominant themes, salient authors and cultural objects within each strand and cultural tradition
  • demonstrate skills in close textual analysis
  • show critical awareness of the meanings and functions of cultural production within the social and cultural contexts of their production and reception
  • engage with complex cultural and historical criticism material.