Comparative Literature

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Visiting Students study key works of literature (either in English translation or in the original, depending on their language skills) with Fellows and Tutors in each of the Modern Languages offered at St Edmund Hall: French, Russian, German, Spanish, and Czech.

Visiting Students may choose to focus on a particular genre, ‘problem’ or set of questions (e.g. philosophical fiction, unreliable narrators, ‘realism’, the European city, ‘what is justice?’), and pursue these across a range of different texts and languages. Students could also decide to focus on the work of one or two authors, and/or engage in theoretical thinking about the grounds for comparison between different ‘national’ or linguistically inflected literatures.

Visiting Students can take Comparative Literature as a Primary course (major; 8 tutorials) or Secondary course (minor; 4 tutorials). A tutorial is a one-hour teaching session, for which students have normally prepared an essay, in English, in advance. Visiting students may be taught as part of the undergraduate cohort at Oxford, in small groups with other visiting students, or individually.

A list of topics is provided below – any of these could be taken as a stand-alone Secondary course or two could be combined to make up a Primary course.

Students wishing to pursue specific texts/topics/themes not outlined below should contact the course convenor, Dr Alex Lloyd (alexandra.lloyd@seh.ox.ac.uk), to discuss their preferences before applying to the programme.

The Nineteenth-Century Novel

Outline and Texts: Honoré de Balzac (Old Goriot); Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary); Émile Zola (Thérèse Raquin); Joris-Karl Huysmans (Against Nature).

Early Modern French fiction

Outline and Texts: Marguerite de Navarre (The Heptameron), François Rabelais (Gargantua and Pantagruel), Mme de Lafayette (The Princesse de Clèves), Isabelle de Charrière (The Nobleman and Other Romances)

Introduction to French neo-classical theatre

Outline and Texts: Pierre Corneille (The Illusion ; Le Cid), Molière (School for Wives, Don Juan), Jean Racine (Britannicus, Phèdre)

Early Modern French Thought

Outline and Texts: Jean de Léry (History of a voyage to Brazil), Michel de Montaigne (Essays), Blaise Pascal (Pensées/Thoughts), Denis Diderot (Supplement to the Travels of Bougainville).

Avant-garde theatre

Outline and Texts: Maurice Maeterlinck (one act plays); Alfred Jarry (Ubu Roi) and Guillaume Apollinaire (Breasts of Tiresias); Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot, Endgame); Eugène Ionesco (The Chairs, The Bald Soprano)

What is Literature? Theory and Practice

Outline and Texts: Jean-Paul Sartre (Nausea, What is Literature?); Maurice Blanchot (Thomas the Obscure, Death Sentence, selected essays); Nathalie Sarraute (Tropisms, The Age of Suspicion)

Aimé Césaire (Notebook of a return to the Native Land, Discourse on Colonialism).

Algerian literature

Outline and Texts: Albert Camus (The Stranger/Outsider); Kateb Yacine (Nedjma); Assia Djebar (Women of Algiers in Their Apartment); Kamel Daoud (The Meursault Investigation).

Life Writing

Outline and Texts: Topics to be discussed include existentialism, factory poetry, writing class and sexuality.

Simone de Beauvoir (Memoires of a Dutiful Daughter) and Sartre (The Words); Nathalie Sarraute (Childhood) and Georges Perec (W, or The Memory of Childhood); Leslie Kaplan (Excess – The Factory) and Joseph Ponthus (On the Line); Didier Eribon (Return to Reims) and Edouard Louis (End of Eddy).

Women Writing Place and Time - Francophone

Outline and Texts: Topics to be discussed include the genre of ‘autofiction’, memory, and the role of place/setting.

Marguerite Duras (The Lover)

Assia Djebar (So Vast the Prison)

Maryse Condé (Tales from the Heart)

Annie Ernaux (The Years).

Women Writing Place and Time - Germanophone

Outline and Texts: Topics to be discussed include the genre of ‘autofiction’, memory, and the role of place/setting.

Christa Wolf, The Quest for Christa T. (1968)

Elfriede Jelinek, Women as Lovers (1975)

Jenny Erpenbeck, Visitation (2010)

Katja Petrowskaja, Maybe Esther (2014)

Franz Kafka (1883-1924)

Outline and Texts:

Metamorphosis (1912)

The Penal Colony (1919)

The Trial (1925)

Collected Stories (1971)

War and its Legacies

Outline and Texts:

Key questions include how traumatic pasts and difficult histories (in this case, World War I and World War II) are portrayed and examined in literary texts.

Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)

Bernhard Schlink, The Reader (1995)

Uwe Timm, In My Brother’s Shadow (2003)

Marcel Beyer, The Karnau Tapes (1995)

Literature and the Mind

Outline and Texts:

We explore how writers have sought to understand and depict the workings of the mind. Students will be expected to read excerpts from the works of Sigmund Freud, as well as a range of primary texts.

Thomas Mann, Death in Venice (1912)

Arthur Schnitzler, Dream Story (1926)

E.T.A. Hoffmann, The Sandman (1817)

Georg Büchner, Lenz (1836)

The 20th-Century Novel in German

Outline and Texts:

We examine novels published during the Weimar Republic, the German Democratic Republic, the Federal Republic, and post-reunification Germany.

Irmgard Keun, After Midnight (1937)

Günter Grass, The Tin Drum (1959)

Ulrich Plenzdorf, New Sorrows of Young W. (1972)

W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz (2001)

Comics and Graphic Literature