Comparative Literature

Overview

Comparative Literature from University of California, Berkeley provides students with tools for engaging, analyzing, and interpreting texts; and for writing, editing, translating, and thinking across disciplinary and national boundaries. Our graduates take up various literary traditions, historical periods and genres, modalities, forms, and contexts, from, for example, Latin American concrete poetry, to discourses of political and race theory, to Yiddish experimental fiction.  

Students at Comparative Literature from University of California, Berkeley will:

• develop new historical and theoretical frameworks, and rethink those we have inherited, opening new perspectives on social and cultural forms and relations.

• pursue rigorous research in a variety of literary and cultural fields, undertake team‐based projects, participate in discussions about political, aesthetic, and social issues, and develop a nuanced cross‐cultural understanding of historical and social processes.