The Major

By learning languages and looking at cultures on every continent, comparative literature majors explore images, ideas and aesthetic forms that travel the world. They also come to recognize deep cultural contrasts: to see that birth, love, community, happiness and death are all experienced and represented differently from region to region and era to era. In these ways, they start to see their own culture differently in the light of the new ones they encounter.

Advisers

Maria Banerjee, Anna Botta, Margaret Bruzelius, Justin Cammy, Craig Davis, Dawn Fulton, Sabina Knight, Reyes Lazaro, Malcolm McNee, Katwiwa Mule, Thalia Pandiri, Janie Vanpée, Joel Westerdale

Requirements

Twelve semester courses:

Basis: TWO courses chosen from among the following four:

FYS (with a comparative literature focus)
CLT 100 Introduction to Comparative Literature
CLT 202 Western Classics: Homer to Dante
CLT 203 Western Classics: Cervantes to Tolstoy

Two additional courses with a primary listing or cross-listed in comparative literature
Three courses in a non-English-language literature. For literatures in which Smith offers few or no courses taught in the original language, majors may fulfill this requirement by taking courses in English translation while reading some course texts in the original language.

Three related courses in either:

An additional literature, which may be in translation, or

A literary or artistic theme, genre or interdisciplinary topic in CLT or other departments or programs (e.g. film, history, philosophy, art history), chosen with the adviser's approval

And the

Senior sequence:

CLT 300 Foundations of Contemporary Literary Theory
CLT 340 Problems in Literary Theory

Students who graduate with a major in comparative literature should have studied both modern and pre-modern literatures written in more than one genre. They should also have taken courses in literatures from geographically or ethnically distinct cultures from across the globe and from beyond the European/American mainstream.