0000373 - COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

1)Knowledge and understanding

Attending this class, students will understand and reflect on some recent trends in comparative literature, literary theory, media studies, and related fields, and will do so through a “glocal”, transcultural perspective.

After this class, students will have acquired, elaborated on, and consolidated: 1)interdisciplinary critical instruments; 2)the related critical/cultural vocabulary and structures of expression.

2)Applied knowledge and understanding

At the end of this class, students will be able to apply the critical and theoretical instruments and critical vocabulary they have consolidated to: 1)specific case studies proposed by the teacher; 2)materials and creative items proposed by themselves, during classes and/or for the final exam. In both cases, the textual/creative objects will be from a plurality of cultural contexts, and students will apply their critical tools while at the same time testing their cross-cultural feasibility.

Literary texts, and other forms of creative/artistic expression, will be discussed in their articulateness and complexity, as well as in their relation to both cultural specificity and the increasing existence of an integrated, worldwide cultural sphere. Specific attention will be devoted to literature as part of a worldwide web of interconnected media, nowadays inevitably shaped by digitization.

Additional Goals:

3)Autonomy / Making Judgments

Students will learn how to select, position, and assess individual cultural/literary items from various context against the background of a consciously articulated critical framework. They will be required to propose a broad and complex critical framework for their readings, emphasizing both commonalties and differences, both cultural transits and cultural barriers.

4)Communication Skills

Students will learn to articulate their points of view, and to build dialogical spaces which connect texts and contexts cross-culturally – in an academic discourse environment, a hypothetical professional context, and beyond.

5)Learning Skills

Students will be involved in a self-evaluation process and will be encouraged to become self-conscious in their process of acquisition of advanced critical categories and concepts. Such acquisition and awareness will boost their ability to tackle, in the long run, literature, other media, and culture in general as complex phenomena at the crossroads of different languages and experiences, in the present as well as in future directions. Students will eventually develop awareness of their actual and potential role in the transmission of knowledge, culturally and interculturally.