UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON

DEPARTMENT OF

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
938 Van Hise Hall
1220 Linden Drive
Madison, Wisconsin 53706-1558
Telephone: 608/262-9767
Fax: 608/262-9723
Email:

Departmental letter to CL Alumni, accompanying CL Flier

Print the CL flier in PDF format.

March 26, 2006

I hope the passing of the "ides of March" has brought the approach of a fragrant and blossoming spring to you wherever you are.

We thought you might like to see the most recent visual account of the mission and curriculum of and degrees offered in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, as well as a current list of our faculty and faculty affiliates.

Recent faculty and student awards and research notices, curricular innovations, and departmental events are (or soon will be!) posted on our departmental website: http://complit.lss.wisc.edu/

A few striking events in the Department in the past year include:

A highly successful small intensive international seminar, Mapping a Diverse Cyprus, conducted in Nicosia Cyprus for three weeks in the summers of 2004 and 2005. The program was made possible by the support of the Evjue Foundation (the philantrhopic arm of Madison's Capital Times newspaper) and Chadbourne Residential College. The seminar, CL 379/779 -- three weeks of meetings and discussions with community leaders and community members, writers, journalists, politicians, poets, and artists preceded by and interspersed with historical, literary, cultural, and social readings, will be offered again in summer of 2006, pending continued Evjue funding. (This funding makes it possible for committed and interested students who would not otherwise be financially able to participate in an international educational opportunity to do so.)

In October of 2005, our graduate students organized an outstanding one-day symposium on The Possibilities of the Comparative. Intellectually and structurally exceptionally well-organized, the symposium opened with an introduction by the L&S Associate Dean of the Humanities, Magdalena Hauner, and had participants and attendees from the department and from across and beyond campus . A special note of appreciation is due to Jeanette Ensminger and Marian Halls for their herculean efforts as organizers.

In November of 2005, 8 students and faculty participated in a departmentally organized roundtable and panel, Memory for Forgetfulness, held at the Midwest Modern Language Association's annual conference, this year in Milwaukee Wisconsin. The participants drove to Milwaukee with some 6 - 8 additional Comparative Literature students to participate in a thought-provoking and productive discussion and attend the days events at the conference as a whole.

In February of 2006, Professor John Guillory (NYU) visited the department and the campus to present a lecture on "The Origins of Close Reading" to a standing-room (or sitting-on-the- floor) only audience. On the following day, Professor Guillory participated in a round-table discussion based on his work on the sociology of literature and the educational institution, on the shape and roles of graduate study in literature in the institution, and on the concept and practice of A evaluation in the humanities. The round-table was serious, engaged, provocative, and well-attended.

This spring, the Department has introduced a new and emphatically comparative introductory course, CL 205: "Introduction to the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity in the U.S. and Beyond," seeking to address a lacuna in campus offerings in satisfaction of the single required course in ethnic studies. Small (for a lecture course -- 120 students), intense, and challenging (you can see our course description and reading list on the website), the course is nearing the mid-point of its first incarnation. So far is it an intensely educational experience, in the best sense of the phrase.

In 2007, following on a graduate seminar on Imagination, the department will sponsor an international symposium on the same topic, organized and directed by Hans Adler.

The Comparative Literature Salon, a lively intellectual collaboration of graduate and undergraduate students, continues into its fourth year with monthly meetings to read and discuss student work.

These are just a few recent events in the Department which were highlights of our collective intellectual, social and pedagogic effort. Thanks to the tremendous commitment and engagement of our faculty, students, and staff, we manage to abide and even flourish in spite of difficult times.

If you're interested, we'd love for you to drop by and visit when you're in town. Give us a little notice and we'll try to re-arrange schedules so you can sit in on a class, meet with our current students, or talk with specific faculty -- or join us for whatever is happening at the time.

And we'd love to hear about what you're doing these days and years. We hope, whatever it is that has captured your attention and fancy, that you're well and flourishing. And we send you our best wishes.

Mary N. Layoun,

Professor and Chair