Comparative Literature Here and Now

The field and the academic discipline of comparative literature have taken a few turns and made a few shifts in focus since the nineteenth century. And the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin, Madison has made its own turns and shifts since it began as a program in 1917 and was founded as a department in 1926. As were its founders -- Professors Philo Buck, Hazel Alberson, Gian Orsini -- the faculty of the Department of Comparative Literature continue to be part of a lively and engaging intellectual community in the department and beyond. In collaboration with our undergraduate majors, our graduate students, and our interested colleagues from across the campus, we raise questions in both our teaching and our research of the comparative, of literature, its original languages and its translations, and of the interdisciplinary. And we seek to address those questions in open discussion, based on careful thought, on informed analysis, and sometimes (we hope) on epiphanic insight. Our course offerings, as the scholarly work of our faculty and the emerging scholarship of our students, engage with a wide range of languages and literatures, of disciplinary and theoretical questions, of popular and literary cultures, and of problematics--of the comparative in a global age, of the nation, of race and ethnicity, or the modern, the early modern, the ancient and the classical, of the visual, of history, lyric, drama and performance, or narrative.

We welcome to the study of comparative literature, then, students with a wide variety of backgrounds and a diversity of interests and skills, including (but not limited to) fluency in foreign languages. For comparative literature is the study of literature in its original languages from a carefully conceptualized cross-cultural perspective. Comparison between the literature of one culture with that of other cultures represents the most common comparative work done in our intermediate courses. But the study of Comparative Literature at U. W. Madison also includes more complex questions of comparison and of the study of literature in relation to other disciplines (e.g., philosophy, history, area studies) and to other arts (e.g., painting, cinema, architecture, music). And Comparative Literature encompasses the history of literary criticism and important historical and contemporary issues in literary theory.

Students in the Department of Comparative Literature have the opportunity to study texts from various historical periods and cultural and literary movements and to develop the intellectual fluency necessary to pose and begin to answer fundamental questions regarding the place of the literary text in society, in cultural traditions, and in aesthetic thought generally. They may also pursue more advanced questions of specific modes of literary analysis and of the function of the literary.

Literary fluency in specific languages is the foundation of all work in Comparative Literature. With that fluency as a basis, the student of Comparative Literature might engage in an exploration of problems in genre, mode, literary period, or movement; in an exploration of the of literary form; in the analysis of existing theoretical and critical approaches; in the formulation of necessary critical distinctions; of the interaction of literature with other arts and disciplines; or, of the political, social and intellectual contexts of literature.

The study of Comparative Literature at the U. W. Madison is a lively and often exciting discussion about these and other questions. We invite you to participate in that conversation.