Literature can be dangerous stuff. Books can provoke or frighten rulers and lead to censorship and death-threats. Literature can move forwards and backwards through time, leap from place to place, explore experiences which are possible only in the imagination, and describe people’s thoughts, feelings and ideas.
The point of departure of the Comparative Literature programme is reading as a pleasure-driven experience. But not all literature is equally accessible. Our courses are designed to enhance the quality of your experience of literature, providing you with an increased competence in understanding, explaining and interpreting literary works.
You will study literature from Antiquity to the present
You will analyse short stories, novels, poems and plays
You will interpret enigmatic narratives
You will decode pictures, diagrams and symbols
You will work with literary concepts, theories and methodologies
You will explore literature in its historical, sociological and cultural contexts
You will learn how to communicate you insights to others.
Comparative Literature will be the Major subject of your B.A. degree, encompassing all of the first two years and part of the third. The programme is built on the following five foundations:
1. the analytical part, which develops your competence in the close reading and interpretation of literature in its three major modes of narrative, lyric and drama;
2. the methodological-theoretical part, which explains the concepts basic to comparative literature studies, the methodological approaches deployed in textual analysis, and the general literary theories;
3. the literary and cultural history part, providing a general survey of literary history from Antiquity to the present time;
4. the socio-literary part, which provides empirical information on literature in specific times and places and the historical, cultural and social auspices under which it operated, enabling an enhanced appreciation of literary works in the context of the ambient social conditions, mentalities and cultural systems;
5. the language part, in which you acquire a reading proficiency in German and French adequate for the understanding of (not overly obscure) German and French works in the original.
-- the programme also includes an introduction to the theory of science and a number of elective courses on a variety of topics relevant to the Comparative Literature field.
Most of the teaching is in Danish, and the same applies to exams and assignments.