Comparative Literature

The Comparative Literature Graduate Program enables students to study the production, reception and interpretation of written texts and related media from a comprehensive perspective involving at least two national literatures. Comparative literature has long crossed national linguistic frontiers. The discipline today questions the very basis of such boundaries, exploring the construction of national literatures, languages and traditions and, insofar as this can be read in and out of verbal and other media, of nations and national consciousness itself. Extending its reflections on limits still further and in dialogue with other disciplines, the interpretive perspectives of comparative literature are not only crossdisciplinary, multi-media and multilingual, but global. The aim is to analyze the world’s cultures both as expressions of the various interdependent histories that have framed them, and as manifestations of the multifacetedness inscribed in the different forms by which human beings shape and communicate their experience. These forms can range from a single literary genre, period, movement or tradition to larger concepts and constructs such as gender, sexuality, theory or culture. Areas of analysis may also include authorship and the literary work, literacy, genre, literary history and the canon. Students wishing to pursue graduate work in comparative literature should read the guidelines for the MA degree in this field, which is available at complit.colorado.edu.

Course code for this program is COML.