American University of Central Asia - AUCA

MINOR REQUIREMENTS

Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies Minor

What is Comparative Literature?
The following description, from the Undergraduate Catalog of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, 2000-2001, defines the field of study.

Comparative Literature is a discipline dedicated to the study of literature in its many aspects without national or linguistic restrictions. The student of comparative literature may study problems in genre, mode, literary development, period or movement. The comparatist may also analyze the mechanics of literary form, as well as existing theoretical and critical approaches. Of equal importance to the comparatist are questions of the interaction of literature with other arts and disciplines. Similarly, the comparatist may study the political, social, and intellectual contexts of literature. In each instance, however, emphasis on the comparative and the literary will be encouraged.

Requirements for Minor in Comparative Literature
In order to qualify for a minor in Comparative Literature, the student is required to pass with a grade of C or better seven courses in Comparative Literature (21 credit hours). Three of the seven courses could be lower-level (100-200) and a minimum of four must be upper-level (300-400). At least one of the upper-level courses must be designated 400.

Course Descriptions

CLC 101 Introduction to Literary Studies
3 credits
Anthropological, historical, legal, political, and social perspectives on literature. Issues of race, gender, class, sexuality. Language and literature regarded as forms of social process. This course is the prerequisite for all other CLC courses except CLC 110, 111 (See below).

CLC 110, 111 World Literature (two semesters)
6 credits
Each of these two courses may be taken separately; i.e., they are not sequential. In addition, they do not require CLC 101 as a prerequisite and, therefore, with CLC 101, fulfill the humanities portion of the General Education requirements.
Major works of literature from a wide variety of cultures; as for example: The Pentateuch, The Bhagavad-Gita, The Analects of Confucius, The Tao Te Ching, Rumi’s Masnavi, Oedipus Rex, The Iliad, and also modern literature.

CLC 240 Women in Literature
3 credits
Fiction by contemporary women authors from the United States, Canada, England, Africa, and the Caribbean, and the Middle East, with three general themes: patriarchal oppression, resistance, creative self-affirmation.

Course Title

CLC 280 Literature of the Islamic Middle East

CLC 281 Classical (or Modern) Spanish Literature

CLC 282 Classical (or Modern) French Literature

CLC 283 Classical (or Modern) German Literature

CLC 284 Classical (or Modern) Russian Literature

CLC 285 Classical (or Modern) English Literature

CLC 286 Classical (or Modern) Kyrgyz Literature

CLC 310 Modern Drama

CLC 330 The Twentieth Century in English

CLC 401 Nationalism, Culture and Identity
3 credits
A variety of texts could be used in this regard from German Romanticism (Schelegl, Schleiermacher, Fichte, Heredr), to modern theorists of nationalism (Gellner, Fanon, Anderson) to African, Asian and Latin American nationalists (Guevara, Galleano, Garcia-Marquez, Soyinka, Achebe, Gordimer, Gandhi, Naipul, Walcott, Said, Borges, Roy, Ashrawi).

CLC 420 Intellectual Prose Texts
3 credit hours
Darwin, On the Origin of Species; Marx, The Communist Manifesto; Freud, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life; Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolution; Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art; Ellul, Propaganda.

CLC 450 Literary Theory and Criticism.
3 credits
Study of the texts of modern literary theorists of formalism, structuralism, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism and cultural studies.