M.St. Course in Comparative Criticism
READING LIST
This list is selective, and the focus is on titles in English. Please ask subject
specialists for advice on further titles in other languages or disciplines relevant to your work.
Anthologies
Damrosch, David, Natalie Melas and Mbongiseni Buthelezi (eds), The Princeton Sourcebook in
Comparative Literature. From the European Englightenment to the Global Present
(Princeton/N.J. and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2009)
Leitch, Vincent B. (ed.), The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York and London: Norton,
2001)
Walder, Dennis (ed.), Literature in the Modern World: Critical Essays and Documents , 2nd rev. ed.
(Oxford: OUP, 2004)
General
Auerbach, Erich, ‘Odysseus’s Scar’, in E. Auerbach, Mimesis. The Representation of Reality in
Western Literature, trsl. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1953), chapter 1; see also
50th ed. with introduction by Edward W. Said (2003) [German: ‘Die Narbe des Odysseus’, in
Mimesis. Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur (1946)]
Beer, Gillian, Malcolm Bowie, and Beate Perry (eds), In(ter)discipline. New Languages for Criticism
(London: Legenda, 2007)
Felski, Rita, and Susan Stanford Friedman (eds), New Literary History, special issue on Comparison,
40.3 (2009)
Reynolds, Matthew, Mohamed-Salah Omri, Ben Morgan and Céline Sabiron (eds), Comparative
Criticism: Histories and Methods, special issue of Comparative Critical Studies, 12.2 (2015),
147-281
Walkowitz, Rebecca L., Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2015)
Wellek, René, ‘The Crisis of Comparative Literature’, in: R. Wellek, Concepts of Criticism, ed. Stephen
G. Nichols (New Haven: Yale UP, 1963), pp. 282-95
‘What Does the Comparative Do?’, PMLA, 128, No. 3 (May 2013), 608-697 [collection of articles]
1. National Literature – World Literature
Core Reading
Apter, Emily, Against World Literature. On the Politics of Untranslatability (London: Verso, 2013), esp.
Introduction
Auerbach, Erich, ‘Philology and Weltliteratur’, trsl. By Maire and Edward Said, Centennial Review 13.1
(1969), 1-17 [German: ‘Philologie der Weltliteratur’, in Weltliteratur. Festgabe für Fritz Strich
[…], ed. W. Muschg and E. Staiger (Berne: Francke, 1952), 39-50]
Culler, Jonathan, ‘Whither Comparative Literature?’, Comparative Critical Studies 3.1-2 (2006), 85-97
Jameson, Fredric, ‘Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’, Social Text 15 (1986),
65-88
Moretti, Franco, ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, New Left Review 1 (2000), 54-68 (see also ‘More
Conjectures’, New Left Review 20 (2003), 73-81)
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia UP, 2003), ch. 1: ‘Crossing
Borders’
Damrosch, David, What is World Literature? (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2003), ch. 1:
‘Goethe Coins a Phrase’ (1-36)
Further Reading
Bhabha, Homi (ed.), Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990)
Casanova, Pascale, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge/Mass.:
Harvard UP, 2004) [French: La république mondiale des lettres, 1999]
Cooppan, Vilashini, ‘World Literature and Global Theory: Comparative Literature for the New
Millennium’, symplokē, vol. 9, No. 1/2: Globalism & Theory (2001), 15-43
Damrosch, David (ed.), World Literature in Theory (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2014)
Glissant, Édouard, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan
Press, 1997)
2. Intermediality and Performance
Core Reading
Auslander, P. (ed. 2008), Theory for Performance Studies. London
Counsell, C. and L. Wolf (eds.), Performance Analysis. London
Davis, T.C. and T.E. Postlewait (ed. 2004), The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies. Cambridge
Fischer-Lichte, E. (2008), The Transformation Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. London
Hall, E. and S. Harrop (eds. 2010), Theorizing Performance; Greek Drama, Cultural History and Critical Practice.
London
Krasner, D. (ed. 2008)), Theatre in Theory 1900-2000. Oxford
Milling, Jane, and Graham Ley, Modern Theories of Performance. From Stanislavski to Boal
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001)
Further Reading
Bal, Mieke, The Mottled Screen. Reading Proust Visually, trsl. Anna-Louise Milne (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1997)
Clarke, Eric, Nicola Dibben and Stephanie Pitts, Music and Mind in Everyday Life (Oxford: OUP, 2010)
Debord, Guy, Society of the Spectacle, trsl. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994)
[French original: La Société du Spectacle, 1967]
Elkins, James, On Pictures and the Words that Fail Them (New York: CUP, 1998)
Gordon, Robert, The Purpose of Playing. Modern Acting Theories in Perspective (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2006)
Grant, Kim, Surrealism and the Visual Arts. Theory and Reception (Cambridge: CUP, 2005)
McFarlane, Brian, Novel to Film. An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1996)
Meyer, Michael J., Literature and Musical Adaptation (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002)
Richmond, Farley P., Darius L. Swann and Phillip B. Zarrilli (eds), Indian Theatre. Traditions of
Performance (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993)
Witt, Mary Ann Frese, Metatheatre and Modernity. Baroque and Neobaroque (Madison: Fairleigh
Dickinson UP, 2013)
Wood, Paul, ‘Modernism and the Idea of the Avant-Garde’, in A Companion to Art Theory, ed. by Paul
Smith and Carolyn Wilde (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 215-228
3. The Ancients and the Moderns – the Role of the Canon
Core Reading
Eliot, T. S., ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1999),
13-22 [first publ. 1919], and ‘What is a Classic?’, in On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber and
Faber, 1979), pp. 53-71 [first publ. 1944]
Frye, Northrop, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (New York: Harcourt, 1982)
Horace, The Art of Poetry (Ars Poetica) (bilingual edition: Horace, Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica,
trsl. by R. Rushton Fairclough (Loeb classical library) (London: Heinemann, 1932)
Kermode, Frank, ‘Canon and Period’, in F. Kermode, History and Value (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1988), pp. 113-170
Swift, Jonathan, The Battle of the Books (1704)
Further Reading
Armogathe, Jean Robert, and Anne-Marie Lecoq, La querelle des anciens et des modernes. XVIIeXVIIIe siècles (Paris: Gallimard, 2001)
Assmann, Jan, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization. Writing, Remembrance, and Political
Imagination (Cambridge: CUP, 2011)
Auden, W.H., ‘The Greeks and Us’ (1948) and ‘Augustus to Augustine’ (1944), in W.H. Auden,
Forewords and Afterwords (London: Faber and Faber, 1973), pp. 3-32 and 33-39
Beard, Mary, and John Henderson, Classics. A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: OUP, 22000)
Bloom, Harold, ‘Shakespeare, Center of the Canon’, in The Western Canon. The Books and School of
the Ages (New York: Harcourt 1994), 45-75
Butler, Marilyn, ‘Repossessing the Past: The Case for an Open Literary History’, in M. Levinson et al.
(eds), Rethinking Historicism: Critical Readings in Romantic History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989),
64-84
Calinescu, Matei, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, decadence, Kitsch,
Postmodernism (Durham/N.C.: Duke, 1987)
Calvino, Italo, Why Read the Classics?, trsl. Martin McLaughlin (London: Vintage, 2000) [Italian:
Perché leggere i classici (1991)]
Curtius, Ernst Robert, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trsl. William R. Trask
(Princeton: Princeton UP) [German: Europäische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter (1948)],
esp. Chapters 1-4
Guillory, John, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1993)
Kallendorf, Craig W. (ed.), A Companion to the Classical Tradition (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007)
Kilito, Abdelfattah, The Author and his Doubles: Essays on Classical Arabic Culture (Syracuse/N.Y.:
Syracuse UP, 2001)
Levine, Joseph M., The Battle of the Books. History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca and
London: Cornell UP, 1991)
4. Genre and Tradition
Core Reading
Aristotle, The Poetics [e.g. The Poetics of Aristotle. Translation and Commentary, ed. and trsl. by
Stephen Halliwell (London: Duckworth, 1987); see also Plato, The Republic [esp. Book X]
David Duff (ed.), Modern Genre Theory (Harlow, 2000)
Genette, Gérard, The Architext. An Introduction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992)
Harrison, Stephen, Generic Enrichment in Vergil and Horace (Oxford: 2007) [esp. chapter 1)]
Further Reading
Bakhtin, M. M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and other late essays, trsl. by Michael Holquist and Caryl
Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986)
Cave, Terence, Mignon’s Afterlives: Crossing Cultures from Goethe to the twenty-first century (Oxford:
OUP, 2011)
Forster, E.M., Aspects of the Novel [1927], ed. with an introduction by Oliver Stallybrass, preface by
Frank Kermode (London: Penguin, 2005)
Kerrigan, John, Revenge Tragedy. Aeschylus to Armageddon (Oxford: OUP, 1996)
Moretti, Franco, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London: Verso,
1987)
Warner, Marina, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers (London: Chatto &
Windus, 1995)
5. Translation, Adaptation, Version
Core Reading
Jakobson, Roman, ‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translation’, in Language in Literature
(Cambridge/Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1987), 428-435
Paterson, Don, ‘Afterword’, in: Rainer Maria Rilke, Orpheus. A Version of Rilke’s Die Sonette an
Orpheus by Don Paterson (London: Faber and Faber, 2006)
Eco, Umberto, Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation (London: Phoenix, 2004)
Reynolds, Matthew, The Poetry of Translation: From Chaucer & Petrarch to Homer & Logue (Oxford:
OUP, 2011)
Scott, Clive, Literary Translation and the Rediscovery of Reading (Cambridge: CUP, 2012)
Further Reading
Bermann, Sandra, and Catherine Porter (eds), A Companion to Translation Studies (Chichester:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2014)
Hamburger, Michael, ‘Preface’, in Friedrich Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments, trsl. M. Hamburger, bilingual edition (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), ix-xviii
Tim Parks Translating Style: A Literary Approach to Translation; A Translation Approach to
Literature. 2nd edn, St Jerome, 2007
Peter Robinson Poetry and Translation: The Art of the Impossible. Liverpool University Press, 2010
Scott, Clive, Channel Crossings. French and English poetry in dialogue 1550-2000 (Oxford: Legenda,
2002)
Steiner, George, After Babel. Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: OUP, 21992)
Venuti, Lawrence, ed. The Translation Studies Reader, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2004)
Walcott, Derek, Omeros (London: Faber, 1990)
Weissbort, Joseph, and Astradur Eysteinsson (eds), Translation: Theory and Practice – A
Historical Reader (Oxford: OUP, 2006)
6. Place and Displacement
Core Reading
Apter, Emily, The Translation Zone. A New Comparative Literature (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton
UP, 2006), ch. 3: ‘Global Translatio’
Bhabha, Homi K., The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994) [see also 2nd ed., 2004, with a
new preface by the author]
Davenport, Guy, The Geography of the Imagination. Forty essays (San Francisco: North Point, 1981),
Chapters 1 and 2
Kronfeld, Chana, On the Margins of Modernism. Decentering Literary Dynamics (Berkeley and
London: U of California Press, 1996), Introductory chapter
Ramazani, Jahan, A Transnational Poetics (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2009), Introductory chapter
Further Reading
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (eds), The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 2nd ed
(London and New York: Routledge, 2006)
Fanon, Frantz, Black skin, white masks, trsl. by Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto, 2008 [and
earlier editions]) [French: Peau noire, masques blancs (1952)]
Lefebre, Henri, and Donald Nicholson-Smith, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991)
Moretti, Franco, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900 (London: Verso 1998) [Italian: Atlante del
romanzero europeo 1800-1900 (1997)]
Naipaul, V.S., India: a Wounded Civilization (London: André Deutsch, 1977 [and later editions])
Rushdie, Salman, Imaginary Homelands. Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 (London: Granta 1991)
Said, Edward, Orientalism (London: Routledge, 1978 [and later editions in Penguin])
Soyinka, Wole, Myth, Literature, and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1976)
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York and London:
Methuen, 1987)
Tuan, Yi-fu, Space and Place. The Perspective of Experience (London: Arnold, 1977); 2nd ed.
Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001)
Williams, Patrick, and Laura Chrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory. A Reader
(New York: Columbia UP, 1994)
Young, Robert, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West, Routledge (London: Routledge,
1990, 22004)
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