by Georgia Soares, PhD candidate Graduating in May 2025
Manuel Bandeira’s poem “A Morte Absoluta” (“Consummate Death”), first published in Portuguese in 1940 and newly translated by Candace Slater in 2018, contemplates…
Congratulations to our 2023-2024 Graduates!
Congratulations to our seniors for turning in their senior theses!
Congratulations to our seniors for turning in their senior theses!
Congratulations to our 2023-2024 Graduates!
Congratulations to our seniors for turning in their senior theses!
Congratulations to our seniors for turning in their senior theses!
What makes Jewish American literature Jewish? What makes it American? This course will address these questions about ethnic literature through fiction, poetry, drama, and other writings by Jews in America, from their arrival in 1654 to the present. We will discuss how Jewish identity and ethnicity shape literature. We will consider how form and language develop as Jewish writers “immigrate” from Yiddish, Hebrew, and other languages to American English. Using the collection, Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology, we will read a variety of authors, including Isaac Mayer Wise, Emma Lazarus, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Celia Dropkin, Abraham Cahan, Anzia Yezierska, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Allegra Goodman. Students who take this course will explore the ways that Jewish culture intertwines with American culture in literature.
The novel has been described as the quintessential literary form of modernity, but do we know what a novel actually is? And is it just a modern form? In this seminar we will look at a range of pathbreaking works that have bent the norms of prose fiction and have opened up new ways of understanding the world, from antiquity to the present. Readings will include selections from The Odyssey, The Tale of Genji, and Don Quixote, together with a range of modern novels, informed by several important statements on the novel, especially by the writers themselves.
This course will explore contemporary literature and cinema across Southeast Asia, focusing on regional developments after the Asian financial crisis of 1997 through the present. Themes discussed include literature’s relationship to economic turmoil and political change; questions of class and social mobility; anti-authoritarian writing and issues of censorship; literature, youth culture, and new media landscapes; and literary explorations of gender and sexuality. Readings will include a selection of critical essays to foreground these central themes of the course, along with poetry, short fiction, and films from: Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Timor-Leste, and Vietnam. Readings will be taught in English translation and films will be screened with English subtitles.
Spring 2026 + Spring 2027: A re-examination of “Lyric” as occasion as well as genre. Central questions to be explored will include: how do the “lyrics” of composed song come alive in performance? For example, how do the two librettists of Puccini’s opera “La Bohème” contribute to the making of a masterpiece in song? Shared readings include “The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology”, edited by Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins. Students are free to select as their focus of research any particular “lyric” traditions, composed in whatever language. No previous knowledge of literary theory is presumed.
Reflecting the ongoing paradigm shift of comparative studies from an almost exclusive focus on Western European traditions to a newly global awareness, our faculty ranks have expanded in recent years to encompass a world-wide range of languages and cultures.
Check out our Prospective Concentrators and Peer Advisors
pages for more information.
Contact our Director of Undergraduate Studies,
Dr. Sandra Naddaff.
During the academic year 2026-2027, the Department of Comparative Literature will be carrying out an open rank search in the field of Yiddish Studies.
Founded as a graduate program in 1904 and joining with the undergraduate Literature Concentration in 2007, Harvard’s Department of Comparative Literature operates at the crossroads of multilingualism, literary study, and media history.
© 2023 President and Fellows of Harvard College
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