Master of Arts in Comparative Literature

Comparative Literature is the study of the world through its literatures and cultures. Critical theory and translation provide frameworks for making moves: across languages, media, geographic borders, and political visions. In the Department of Comparative Literature, graduate and undergraduate students immerse themselves in national and regional literatures—of Asia, Africa, Latin America, North America, and Europe—while simultaneously placing those cultural practices within dynamic global exchanges, both historical and contemporary. Through courses, conferences, collaborative projects, and digital media, Comparative Literature at UCI advances critical cosmopolitanism—a kind of worldliness cultivated by creative engagements with power, peoples, and their symbolic practices. From novel to poetry, drama to film, monuments to political protest, comics to audio, urban space to visual culture—Comparative Literature introduces students to global cultures in the widest sense, and to the theoretical lenses essential for putting them in perspective. Writing, speaking, visualizing, blogging, social networking: through multiple media, Comparative Literature students at every level interpret and engage with other academics and publics outside the academy. Together, students of Comparative Literature strive for a continually evolving practice of critical awareness and political action: a global literacy and citizenship through which to face the challenges of life and work in the 21st century. The Department seeks to foster and maintain a lively community that includes undergraduates, graduates, and faculty, and to that end holds a variety of meetings and activities so that majors can get to know one another and other members of the Department.Two features give Comparative Literature at UC Irvine its distinctive character. First, the department is committed to a conception of transnational comparatism in which the Euro-American zone is not accorded any privileged position while literatures and cultures of the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Latin America - the literatures of the colonized more generally - are accorded their rightful place. Second, the department trains its students in a range of theoretical perspectives that have been transforming scholarship over the past few decades. Ph.D. students in Comparative Literature pursue research that values lines of inquiry over pre-set national and genre categories.The program views literary texts as one among many contexts of cultural production, such as environmental practices, rural and urban space production, and film images and visual representation. The interdisciplinary nature of the program involves reciprocal and mutually transformative relations with critical theory, informed by such well-established modes of thought as Marxism and psychoanalysis. Intensive, sustained work in critical theory is as important a part of the Ph.D. program as the study of literatures and literary pedagogies.The M.A. is considered to be a step toward the Ph.D.; only students intending to complete the doctorate are admitted to the program. Applicants must hold a B.A. or equivalent degree and should normally have majored in Comparative Literature or another major involving cultural study. Majors in other disciplines (e.g., philosophy or history) will be considered seriously, provided that a sufficient background in literary and cultural studies and in at least one foreign language is demonstrated.