Literary Relations

Greek/Latin: Antiquity. Connections between ancient and modern literature.

Chinese/Japanese: classical poetry and fiction. East Asian and European narrative forms.

French/Provençal/Italian/English/German/Norse/Neo-Latin: Middle Ages, Renaissance.

American/English/French/German/Russian/Scandinavian/Spanish American: 18th, 19th, 20th centuries.

Arabic/Western: oral art, performance, literary adaptation.

Literary Theory

Western literary criticism and theory: ancient to contemporary.

Philosophy and literary theory: Western classical and modern; modern Japanese.

Poetics: comparative poetics; poetics and literary innovation from Antiquity to the Renaissance; modern aesthetics and criticism.

Theory of genres: literary conventions; thematics; formation of anthologies and literary canons.

Narrative theory: Antiquity to 20th century; comparative theory of the novel; contemporary metafiction; fiction and history

Literary semiotics: Antiquity to 20th century.

Psychoanalysis and literary criticism/theory.

Cultural criticism of literature: Middle Ages, Renaissance, 19th-20th centuries; Marxist criticism; ethnography and criticism; literature as a social institution.

Women's studies: feminist theory; representation of women; gender construction, medieval to modern; women and dramatic performance.

Studies of movements: Romanticism; Modernism; Postmodernism; Islamic literature.

Studies of modes: oral performance; court literature (medieval Western/Japanese); the grotesque; the uncanny; literature of the city and urban art.

Modern Western music and literature.

Literature, the visual arts, and film: Nordic Europe; North America; Arab world.

Drama

Comedy: Antiquity to present.

History of the European Theatre.

European drama: Western medieval to 18th century; Russian theatre and drama.

Japanese drama: 17th-18th centuries.

Arabic drama and oral performance: 20th century.

Narrative

Epic: Western classical, medieval (Germanic, French); modern oral Arabic.

Romance and tale: Western medieval; classical Chinese and Japanese.

Novel: philosophy and the novel; ancient comedy and the novel; European fiction (Antiquity to present); North and Latin American fiction (18th century to present); Nordic novel; the Japanese novel and film; Marx and modern fiction; political history of the novel; familial life in the modern novel; contemporary best-seller fiction; Arabic novel.

Moral narrative: Western and East Asian allegory; medieval mystics.

Poetry

Lyric: Western classical, medieval, romantic; Arabic classical and vernacular; classical Japanese; classical and modern Chinese.

Moral poetry: Western classical philosophical; Western medieval polemical; Islamic folk poetry.

Visionary poetry: Western medieval; Western 18th-20th centuries.
Translation

Literary translation: theory and practice.

Translation as art.