About Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies teaching program
Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies teaching program investigates the form and function, as well as theory and practice, of literature, aesthetics and culture. We compare and contrast different literary traditions, and study the way literature helps shape cultural identity.
Our program divides into three key strands:
- Comparative Literature explores the historical, sociological, philosophical or psychoanalytic underpinnings of literature.
- Cultural Studies examines literature in its social and political contexts, and its relationship to other arts and media. From avant-garde Swedish cinema to popular soap operas, post modernist novels to international print media conglomerates, it explores social dimensions and structural forms the textual and verbal world.
- Critical Theory refers to a range of contemporary approaches and interpretations of literature and culture drawing on the theories of various modernist thinkers – from Freud and Marx the great traditions of European philosophy, from hermeneutics to deconstructionalism, semiotics to feminist theory, ecocriticism to structuralism.