Such authors as Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Mallarme, Ibsen, Hauptmann, Strindberg, Chekhov. Such authors as Thomas Mann, Proust, Rilke, Pirandello, Joyce, Kafka, Pound, Eliot, Valery, Lorca, Brecht, Faulkner, Borges, Beckett, and Robbe-Grillet. The search for new forms and a new language to express the twentieth-century writer's views of art and reality. Comparative analysis of characters who reappear in literature from different periods and cultures. These include the quester, the lover, the artist, the trickster, the rebel, and the outsider.
Readings come from diverse genres and national traditions.
Comparative analysis of themes and motifs that reappear in literature from different periods and cultures. These include friendship, madness, self-sacrifice, the relationship of parents and children, the relationship of men and women, and the relationship of individuals and society. Readings come from diverse genres and national traditions. Such considerations as the individual in society, the outcast as hero, and the artistic sensibility examined in selected works of occidental and oriental literature from ancient to modern times. Study of literature by women from different ages and societies.