LENGL6254 Final Project: Comparative Literature Dissertation Course Descriptor

Course Overview

This course embraces interdisciplinarity by questioning, and inviting students to look beyond, the linguistic and disciplinary barriers suggested by the subject title: English. The dissertation requires students to bring an Anglophone work of literature into critical comparison with at least one other cultural object – literary or otherwise – and to identify, evaluate and choose between various potential methodologies to achieve this. The course is predicated on, and seeks to inculcate, ethical principles and practices that are inherent in cultural comparativism, and which foster citizenship and self-actualisation: impartiality, empiricism, openness to  unfamiliar modes of thinking and feeling, mediation between different cultures and languages (taking those terms both more and less literally – as a novel, for example, may have a ‘culture’ and a ‘language’ of its own), the placing of everything in its own contexts, the perception of both commonality between things which are apparently different and of differences between things which are apparently similar, and the disposition both to celebrate commonality and to respect difference, whilst holding in relationship a simultaneous sense of both.

Learning Outcomes

On successful completion of the course, students will be able to:

Knowledge and Understanding

Subject Specific Skills

Transferable and Employability Skills

Teaching and Learning

This course has a dedicated Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) page with a range of resources to orientate the student and provide support for their directed study.

The teaching and learning activities for this course are: 14 scheduled hours. 

Indicative example:

• 12 hours of seminars / workshops 
• 2 hours of 1:1 or small-group meetings
• Office Hours (up to 4 short meetings)

Faculty hold regular ‘office hours’, which are opportunities for students to drop in or sign up to explore ideas, raise questions, or seek targeted guidance or feedback, individually or in small groups. 

Students are to attend and participate in all the scheduled teaching and learning activities for this course and to manage their directed learning and independent study.

Indicative total learning hours for this course: 300 

Assessment

Both formative and summative assessment are used as part of this course, with purely formative opportunities typically embedded within interactive teaching sessions or office hours. 

Summative Assessments

The presentation requires students to present – and answer questions – on their work in a manner that persuades the audience of the interest of their chosen project, and of the validity of the critical methodology selected to bring the cultural objects concerned into relationship. The dissertation (submitted as a portfolio) requires students to critically co-examine two or more cultural objects (at least one of which must be an Anglophone literary text) by reflecting on their respective relevant contexts, similarities, differences, and mutual relationship, with the aid of appropriate selected methodology.

Further information about the assessments can be found in the Course Syllabus.

Feedback

Students will receive formative and summative feedback in a variety of ways, written (e.g. marked up on drafts or through email) or oral (e.g. as part of interactive teaching sessions or in office hours). 

Indicative Reading

Note 1: the required and recommended reading and any other resources will be agreed in writing based on an initial discussion between the student and their supervisor.

Note 2. The indicative additional reading list provided below is for a general guide and part of the approval/modification process only.

• Apter, E.S., The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006)
• Bassnett, S., Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993)
• Bernheimer, C. (ed.), Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995)
• Greetham, B. How to Write Your Undergraduate Dissertation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)

Indicative Topics

Note: the topic and provisional title will be agreed in writing based on an initial discussion between the student and their supervisor.