Comparative Literary Traditions

Europe at night

Some medieval Platonists, like some modern ecologists, conceive of the entire world as a single living organism. The program in Comparative Literary Traditions, less ambitious, proposes thinking merely of all Europe rather as a closely-knit family, whose members may be different in many ways, but possess a common heritage, have shared many transformations in common, have influenced and continue to influence each other profoundly, and in all likelihood share a common destiny. In studying the evolution of this complex entity, the CLT program is especially interested in its higher cultural manifestations: not only literary works in the narrow sense, but any products of human art which can be said to bear a meaning and are expressive in some way of a culture. What we wish to investigate is not so much how Europe has developed concretely at various stages of its history, but rather how it has imagined itself, and how its self-imagination has developed.

The program also includes in its purview other parts of the world that have adopted European languages as their own and whose cultural traditions are at least in part European.

For that matter, Europe itself was not born and did not grow in a vacuum, but in relation and reaction to other civilizations around it, civilizations likewise proceeding along their own paths, and yet never in total isolation. Because of this give and take between European and non-European traditions, while the CLT program focusses on Europe, it is in principle willing to study imaginative manifestations anywhere in the world. To combine a couple of phrases of Paul Claudel, the goal of our study is, to a significant degree, la Co-naissance de l’Ouest.

Imago operum auctorum Europæorum multitudinis

For information on Fall 2008 CLT courses, go to CLT Fall.

For more information on this major, go to our CLT Programs page.

Contact person: Prof. Robert S. Dupree