Comparative Literature at UMass Amherst
is actively engaged in defining new paradigms and problems
within the discipline. The relationship between translation
and transnationalism, theory and media, the future of national
literatures in the era of globalization, gender and cultural
formation across time, literary history and psychoanalysis, "East"-"West" cultural
encounters, human rights and global censorship, postcolonial
and diaspora studies, the aesthetics of late modernity, studies
in the moving image--these are among the conceptual fields
strongly emphasized within the graduate curriculum.
Graduate
courses in Comparative Literature at UMASS cover a wide
range of primary texts and critical theories. What
distinguishes our discipline from other fields in the
humanities is the emphasis on reading and working in original
languages;
theoretical perspectives that question the premises of
national canons or what constitutes communities of readers
and texts,
and which recognize the age-old dialectic between word
and image or moving image; constructs that allow for the
comparative
study of literary movements, genres and aesthetic formalisms
that transcend national or chronological boundaries;
investigations of the relation between literary and cinematic
studies
and other disciplines, from geography, psychology and medicine
to art history, music and philosophy; and deep concern
with
a logic of the humanities that questions universalist
foundationalism while attending to particulars of language,
meaning and
local knowledge, and which investigates the terms of comparability
itself.
|
