Littérature Sans Frontières
I'm starting to get really excited about going back to school. I found this really pretty (and tantalizingly Marxist) description of complit on the UCLA website, and I'm keeping it here as a reference for when my usual three-word description of complit, "literature without borders," isn't enough.
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Comparative Literature Scope and Objectives
Standing at the forefront of innovative literary analysis and criticism, comparative literature is one of the most exciting fields in the humanities. As a discipline it requires exceptional linguistic ability and high intellectual caliber. UCLA's program offers students the opportunity to work with faculty in any of the University's language and literature departments as well as with the Comparative Literature Department faculty.
Comparative literature at UCLA focuses on those elements which define literature in general, such as genre, period, theme, language, and theory. Courses are designed to provide students with a historical understanding of the concepts of genre and period by studying specific genres and periods or literary movements. Paradigmatic or thematic courses offer another way of examining literature synchronically or diachronically regardless of language boundaries.
Courses in literary criticism and theory inquire into the premises of specific critical approaches, and of criticism itself, in order to provide further insight into the intellectual and moral concerns of literature and the world it reflects. Thus, through the study of these various assumptions and aspects of literature and criticism, students learn not only to cross linguistic boundaries, but to join them -- to compare and to contrast, to analyze and, finally, to synthesize the text and the subtext, the structure and the history which define, undermine, and transcend the text and its reader.
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Comparative Literature Scope and Objectives
Standing at the forefront of innovative literary analysis and criticism, comparative literature is one of the most exciting fields in the humanities. As a discipline it requires exceptional linguistic ability and high intellectual caliber. UCLA's program offers students the opportunity to work with faculty in any of the University's language and literature departments as well as with the Comparative Literature Department faculty.
Comparative literature at UCLA focuses on those elements which define literature in general, such as genre, period, theme, language, and theory. Courses are designed to provide students with a historical understanding of the concepts of genre and period by studying specific genres and periods or literary movements. Paradigmatic or thematic courses offer another way of examining literature synchronically or diachronically regardless of language boundaries.
Courses in literary criticism and theory inquire into the premises of specific critical approaches, and of criticism itself, in order to provide further insight into the intellectual and moral concerns of literature and the world it reflects. Thus, through the study of these various assumptions and aspects of literature and criticism, students learn not only to cross linguistic boundaries, but to join them -- to compare and to contrast, to analyze and, finally, to synthesize the text and the subtext, the structure and the history which define, undermine, and transcend the text and its reader.