The first is a 30-minute lecture in which the candidate justifies the subject treated and the methods employed, accounts for any new contributions made to literary history and criticism, and projects plans for future scholarship and publication based upon the dissertation. The second part is a series of questions growing out of subjects presented in the lecture and relating to both the criticism and teaching of literary material dealt with in the dissertation. This course provides a general introduction to the theory and methods of comparative literature, with an emphasis on issues of interdisciplinarity. The aim is to discover within and among these diverse and formidable fields some promising avenues for comparative literary research. 522 Historicity, Topoi, and Genre Alban K. Forcione An advanced seminar in the methodology of comparative literature.
Readings are literary, historical, theoretical, and exemplary.
The study of literary and aesthetic theory and the production of critical theory from the relationship between them. Readings primarily in Lessing, Diderot, Baudelaire, Benjamin. Robert Fagles Criticism as an applied art and as an autonomous discipline. Exploration of its place in intellectual history and a theoretical analysis of its basic assumptions. The norms of classicism as they evolve within two ruling forms of poetry.