“The world separates. Night coagulates.” WorldNightPoemContrastAnalogyUkPlymouthComparative Literature Author:Sneha Subramanian Kanta
“If Borges’s constant vaivén (between politics and metaphysics, between north and south, between the small and the vast, between the universal and the insular) proves something, it is that literature’s relationship to borders of any kind is an arbitrary imposition. Nationalities, hemispheres, periods, schools, genres, and themes are artificial boundaries that may be useful for taxonomical purposes, but literature, as Borges repeatedly shows, should be read and written with a joyful disregard for these classifications.” BorgesComparative Literature Book:Borges, Between History and Eternity Source: Borges, Between History and Eternity
“World literature is not an object, it’s a problem, and a problem that asks for a new critical method; and no one has ever found a method by just reading more texts” World LiteratureComparative Literature Author:Franco Moretti
“I like to be surrounded by books. My wife Evelyn has a PhD in comparative literature so we have a lot of her Spanish and German literature books which are wasted on me, plus a lot of novels and books on art and architecture shared by us both. Evelyn used to edit an art magazine called FMR, so we have a common interest in design.” ArtBookUsedLiteratureInterestCommonNovelWifeDesignMy WifeArchitectureMagazinesPlusEditsCommon InterestsComparative Literature Author:David Chipperfield
“I went to college at Harvard, then did three years of graduate school at Yale. At both places I studied comparative literature. People find it odd that I went to both Harvard and Yale, and I guess it is odd, but that's just what people did where I grew up.” PeopleYearsSchoolThreeLiteratureCollegeGrewGrew UpOddThree YearsGraduatesHarvardYaleGraduate SchoolComparative Literature Author:Lev Grossman
“The phrase I like to use to describe my sense of time-a play on comparative literature - is comparative time.” PlayUseLiteraturePhrasesComparative Literature Author:Yehuda Amichai
“What I teach is literary criticism and comparative literature and so on and that's my function, but from time to time it's possible for me actually to help a writer. I read something and something strikes me then, I feel I can talk to that writer about it.” FeelsI CanHelpingLiteratureTeachCriticismFunctionStrikesLiterary CriticismComparative Literature Author:Wole Soyinka
“Every great political campaign rewrites the rules; devising a new way to win is what gives campaigns a comparative advantage against their foes.” WayGivingPoliticalWinningAdvantageCampaignsNew WaysFoePolitical CampaignDevisingGreat PoliticalComparative AdvantageComparative Literature Author:John Podhoretz
“I studied Comparative Literature at Cornell. Structuralism was real big then. The idea of reading and writing as being this language game. There's a lot of appeal to that. It's nice to think of it as this playful kind of thing. But I think that another way to look at it is "Look, I just want to be sincere. I want to write something and make you feel something and maybe you will go out and do something." And it seems that the world is in such bad shape now that we don't have time to do nothing but language games. That's how it seems to me.” ThinkingWorldWayWantFeelsWritingLooksKindIdeasRealBigsSeemsReadingLiteratureGamesLanguageNiceShapesAppealsSincereAnother WayReading And WritingComparative LiteratureStructuralism Author:William T. Vollmann
“God bless my father, but he always spoke in this continental, literary accent, probably because he was a professor of comparative literature and he made the decision to speak with distinction.” MadeFatherLiteratureSpeakDecisionDistinctionSpokesBlessProfessorsAccentsGod BlessContinentalComparative Literature Author:Nicolas Cage
“English is, from my point of view as an Americanist, an ethnicity. And English literature should be studied in Comparative Literature. And American literature should be a discipline, certainly growing from England and France, Germany, Spain, Denmark, and the Native traditions, particularly because those helped form the American canon. Those are our backgrounds. And then we'd be doing it the way it ought to be done. And someday I hope that it will be.” WayShouldDoneFormLiteratureViewsGrowingOughtDisciplineTraditionEnglandPoint Of ViewBackgroundsFranceGermanyNativeSomedaySpainEthnicityAmerican LiteratureCanonDenmarkEnglish LiteratureComparative Literature Author:Paula Gunn Allen
“One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name.” TwoFactsLiteratureNamesLanguageFictionKnownWesternRateAbsenceProseLatenessComparative Literature Book:The English Novel Source: The English Novel
“If a comparative-literature major had existed at Harvard College for undergraduates I would have surely gone in that direction.” IfsLiteratureGoneCollegeMajorsHarvardComparative Literature Author:Louis Begley