Theories of Literature (410-0-20)

Topic

Worlds of Comparison

Instructors

Corey Byrnes
847/467-3314
1880 Campus Drive, Kresge Hall, Office 4-548
Office Hours: Varies quarter to quarter, please check with instructor.

Meeting Info

Kresge 5531 Comp Lit. Sem. Rm.: Thurs 2:00PM - 4:50PM

Overview of class

Worlds of Comparison

This seminar focuses on comparative, interdisciplinary, and relational methods as practiced in (and around) Comparative Literary Studies (CLS) and the Environmental Humanities (EH). It begins with a brief history of CLS and some of its most influential practitioners—Wellek, Auerbach, Levin, Said, and Spivak, among others. Despite their different times and investments, these thinkers consistently looked beyond the geopolitical confines of national traditions to imagine the field of CLS in the most expansive terms possible, as worldly, earthly, or planetary. CLS's concern with the more than national, along with its openness to interdisciplinary methodologies and its foundational sense of crisis, make it an ideal, if rarely acknowledged, counterpart to work in the EH. After examining related examples of comparative and interdisciplinary scholarship in a worldly mode (by Glissant, Lowe, Chow, Buck-Morss, and others), the final part of the course reconsiders the planetary concerns of EH (in the work of Heise, Chakrabarty, Pratt, and others) in light of CLS's commitment to thinking literature and other creative forms in situated and relational terms.