A close reading of the major fictional, dramatic, and essayistic works of Kleist focuses on questions of grace, order, and stability in relation to the antithetical forces of falling and failing, chance and inscrutability, destabilization, uncertainty, and self-consciousness. In addition to developing methods for literary analysis and interpretation, the course further explores issues of Kleist’s historical context and his varied reception across the centuries
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.
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