Looking to put together a self-study for Comparative Literature.

June 11, 2009 5:58 AM

I'd like to study about Comparative Literature, but as I've looked around at CompLit university departments it appears that there isn't really anything like an introductory course or textbook.

I'm not looking for a program to join, although the possibility exists that I may incorporate CompLit into a future graduate degree. Right now I'd like to learn a little about the foundations of field and the theories that underlie it; I'm particularly interested in translation theory.

Any suggestions of texts or journal articles would be welcome. If there are any course materials available through OpenCourseWare or Berkeley's webcasts (or something similar), that would be fantastic. I've looked through both of those sites, but because of the interdisciplinary nature of Comparative Literature and the fact that there doesn't seem to be a conveniently labeled foundational course, it's hard to know what would be a good starting point.

posted by elfgirl to education (5 answers total)

This only answers part of your question, but I know a great professor who teaches translation, and for that class she assigns her book. Looking for her work also brought up this textbook.
posted by dreamyshade at 11:53 AM on June 11, 2009

The search term you want is "Literary Criticism" - like this:

A History of Literary Criticism

No idea if that's a good book or not, but that's what you should be looking for, anyway.
posted by donblood at 12:09 PM on June 11, 2009

I'm in a slightly different field now but did comp. lit. for my undergrad. As I understand it, comparative lit. has very few works of theory that would be considered canonical, for a couple of reasons: 1) it's a fairly young discourse; and 2) the notion of canonicity is itself a problematic term for the discourse.

That said, here are a few works you might enjoy reading:

Yves Bonnefoy's "Translating Poetry," found here.
Walter Benjamin's "The Task of Translation," which is here. (Also, Lawrence Venuti, who put that text together, is a translation scholar, so check his introduction out too.)
Vladimir Nabokov's "Problems in Translation: Onegin in English," which is here.

Also, translation studies have as much currency as a New Historicist approach comp. lit. takes toward the text (and I'm sure some would disagree with me here). That is to say, the critical byword is that the text is inseparable from the culture(s) that created it.

Start with the New Historicist wiki link for an idea of the authoritative texts in the field, but be aware that you probably won't need to become terribly familiar with anyone but the superstars until grad school.

I'm not a great thinker with this kind of stuff, but I can suggest more titles if you want.
posted by hpliferaft at 12:19 PM on June 11, 2009

The Norton Anthology and The Norton Anthology of Poetry would be a fantastic place to start.
posted by JoannaC at 6:34 PM on June 11, 2009

Thank you, dreamyshade and hpliferaft. Those are great suggestions for translation theory. I'll look them up!

donblood's suggestion, while not what I was looking for, led me to the Wiley site, where searching for 'Comparative Literature' brought up Susan Bassnett's book, Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction, which is precisely the type of text I was looking for. Doing a little more searching using Bassnett's book as a jumping off point garnered me LOTS of material.

For those who might come across this later, looking for information on the same topic(s), here is a list of books that includes most of the books I've seen listed as foundational texts on Comparative Literature. The list is taken from the syllabus for Intro to Comp Lit @ Georgetown, taught by Prof. Nicoletta Pireddu.

The following texts can guide you to a deeper examination of the objectives and problems of comparative literature as a discipline and a methodology:

S. Bassnett, Comparative Literature. A Critical Introduction (Blackwell, 1993)
C.Bernheimer ed, Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism (Johns Hopkins UP, 1995).
Littérature Comparée, ed by D.Souiller and W.Troubetzkoy (P.U.F. 1997)
Chandra Mohan, Aspects of Comparative Literature. Current Approaches (India Publishers and Distributors, 1989)
Claudio Guillén, The Challenge of Comparative Literature (Harvard UP, 1993)
H.J.Schulz and P.H. Rhein, Comparative Literature: The Early Years (U of Carolina P, 1973)

posted by elfgirl at 8:06 AM on June 13, 2009