PhD candidate Mei M. Nan’s article, “Imperial Media Mix: Japan’s Failed Attempt at Asia’s First Transnational Girl Group,” has been published in volume 16, issue 1 of Mechademia: Second Arc…
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!
In this course we will examine how media and communication technologies both drive and depict the complex set of processes known as globalization. We will explore case studies from sixteenth century maps to twenty-first century supply chains, as well as Huallywood, Hollywood, Bollywood, and Nollywood films. In the process, we will grapple with major questions and tensions that have defined the modern era. Why have human societies become more closely connected over the past few centuries than at any prior time in human history? How has this interdependence changed the ways that we understand ourselves and one another? What new visions and freedoms has it created? Why has it made us more unequal than ever before?
By the end of the semester, students will have gained skills necessary for analyzing media that are produced and consumed across national and linguistic borders. You will have earned familiarity with a number of key analytical and historical categories that will prepare you for advanced coursework in the humanities and social sciences. And you will have applied and developed course concepts and skills through both creative and critical projects.
Above all, you will have learned new ways of thinking. Today, when the words on this page can reach you after traveling, as data packets, through undersea cables or outer space satellites, all media are global. At the same time, increasingly ubiquitous networked computation has turned almost everything on earth into a medium of data. Throughout this course, we will seek to unsettle what we think we know about who, and where, we are–gaining insights into how our lives connect to others, past and present, near and far.
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.
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.
How do queer and crip accounts of love and desire redefine “modernity” in Greater China and Latin America? How do the Sinophone and Hispanophone worlds encounter each in translation and transmediation? What is the relationship between love and passion, infatuation and desire? How are conceptions of love culturally contingent? How do cultural, economic, social and political factors shape expressions and narratives of love and desire in Sinophone and Hispanophone contexts? How do myth, illusion, and projection influence our romantic philosophies? In what ways do non-normative, non-ableist, queer and crip accounts of gender, sexuality, and desire redefine “modernity”?
In this course, we examine modern and contemporary Sinophone and Hispanophone “love stories” and their transmediated afterlives (films, plays, operas, digital archives, and so forth), with an emphasis on romantic encounters in queer literature, magical realism, dystopian, and sci-fi/speculative fiction. We cover a range of works by Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Sandra Cisneros, Julio Cortázar, Rosario Ferré, Isabel Allende, Kenneth Pai, Eileen Chang, Liu Cixin, and Wang Xiaobo, paired with transmedial adaptations by Zhang Yuan, Wong Kar-wai, Jonathan Basile, Manuel Antín, Jason Brauer, and Fernando Frías. Course evaluation will be based on discussions, oral presentations, thesis-based papers, and creative assignments.
The poetics (or songmaking) of Sappho will be studied from a wide variety of perspectives, suited to the interests of the students enrolled.
Note: For those taking the course as COMPLIT 235, there are no particular language requirements. The emphasis for students, in this case, is to engage creatively with Sappho’s songmaking in a variety of English translations, or to compare with other poetry or songs (composed in whatever language). Students are free to bring into the educational experience a pursuit of their personal interests. For graduate students taking the course as CLASPHIL 235, research will involve reading the original texts in Greek, and comparing texts of other classical Greek and Latin poets like Euripides and Catullus.
Check out our Prospective Concentrators and Peer Advisors
pages for more information.
Contact our Director of Undergraduate Studies,
Dr. Sandra Naddaff.
The Department of Comparative Literature has recently completed two tenure-track searches during the academic year 2023-2024: one in Translation Studies, the other in Media History and Archeology. No searches are anticipated for 2024-2025.
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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