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Comparative Literature: Course Outline

The course is divided into 6 main topics & these topics will be studied critically by drawing insights from well-known critics and understanding them in the contemporary context of Britain and Pakistan.

Course Learning Objectives (CLOs)

What is Comparative Literature (CL)?

  • Introduction to the discipline of CL
  • The issue of definition
  • Purposes of CL

Developments in CL:

  • Historical development in CL
  • Politics of history
  • The discrepancies in theory and practice/ideological blind spots of CL
  • Universalism and Eurocentric bias
  • French and American Comparatism
  • CL in the Age of Globalization and Multiculturalism:
  • History of CL leading to contemporary debates
  • CL against the backdrop of multiculturalism and globalization
  • Critique of multiculturalism
  • Politics of Eurocentrism
  • Politics of tolerance

World Literature (WL):

  • Understanding WL
  • History of WL
  • Politics of global market and WL
  • WL and capitalism
  • WL and orientalism
  • Erasure of vernaculars
  • Nation thinking

CL and Culture Studies

  • Culture and ideological interpellation
  • Mass culture
  • Gendered bodies
  • Culture as resistance
  • Subculture/counterculture

CL and Feminism:

  • Postcolonial transnational feminism
  • Diversity of experience
  • Creation of liminal space
  • Tradition as liberating
  • Pious Muslim women and western agency
  • Pakistani women’s consciousness

CL to Translation Studies:

  • Trajectory and transformation of ideas from one culture to another
  • Politics of translation
  • Colonization of ideas
  • Translation of Islamic culture in modern scholarship
  • Discussion of Rumi’s works
  • Travelling of ideas from local to global cultures

Essential Reading

Riphah Research Repository