COMPLIT 9752

Exam in Literary Theory for Comparative Literature

General Outline
1. CORE READINGS
(60% of exam)
[a]
Six to ten titles with the history, method, and theory of Comparative Literature

[b]
A list of ‘landmark’ titles in Literary Theory and the Philosophy of Literature

2. MODULES
(40% of exam)

In this second part, students will be examined on four ‘modules’ of their choosing.
Each module will consist of a number [8 to 10] canonical readings in specific schools
of and approaches to Literary Theory. The object of this part of the exam is breadth as
opposed to depth.

Literary Theory Literary Theory Literary Theory Literary Theory

and Society and Psychology and Gender and […]
Modules Modules Modules Modules

Marxist Literary Psychoanalytic Feminist Literary Semiotics and

Theory Theory Theory Structuralism

Post-Colonial Theories of Queer Theory Deconstruction

Theory Cognition
Possible Worlds and
Sociology of Literary Semantics
Literature

Structuralism, Semiotics, and Ekphrastic Theory

Literature and Theology
Hermeneutics and Phenomenology
Deconstruction

THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO

GRADUATE PROGRAM IN COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

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 COMPREHENSIVE EXAM IN LITERARY THEORY FOR COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE

Students preparing this exam should keep the following two reference books on hand:

The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, eds. Alex Preminger & T.V.F.
Brogan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993)
The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism, eds. Michael Groden & Martin
Kreiswirth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, second edition 2005)

1. CORE READINGS
a. History, Definitions, Method, and Theory of Comparative Literature

BERNHEIMER, Charles (ed.), Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995): 207pp.
GUILLEN, Claudio, The Challenge of Comparative Literature, tr. Cola Franzen (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993): 450pp.
KOELB, Clayton, & Susan NOAKES (eds.), The Comparative Prospective on Literature:
Approaches to Theory and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988): 378pp.
SAUSSY, HAUN, ed., Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins UP, 2006: 261 pp.
SPIVAK, Gayatri Chakravorty, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press,
2003): 128pp.

b. Theory and Criticism from Antiquity to the Middle Ages

ARISTOTLE [384-322 B.C.E.], The Poetics, in Poetics I. With The Tractatus Coislinianus. A
Hypothetical Reconstruction of Poetics II. The Fragments of the On Poets, tr. Richard
Janko (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987): 1-42.
PLATO [428(7)-348(7) B.C.E.], Ion, tr. Lane Cooper, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato,
ed. Edith Hamilton & Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1963): 215-228.
______, Phaedrus, tr. R. Hackforth, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato: 475-525.
______, Republic, tr. Paul Shorey, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato: 575-844 [books 2 &
10]
PSEUDO-LONGINUS (first century), On the Sublime, tr. D.A. Russell, in Ancient Literary
Criticism: The Principal Texts in New Translations, ed. D.A. Russell & M.
Winterbottom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972): 460-503.
HORACE [65-8 B.C.E.], The Art of Poetry [10 (?) B.C.E.] tr. D.A. Russell, in Ancient
Literary Criticism: The Principal Texts in New Translations, ed. D.A. Russell & M.
Winterbottom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972): 279-291.
ST. AUGUSTINE [354-430], The Teacher, in Against the Academicians; The Teacher, tr. &
intro. Peter King (Indianapolis: Hackett, c1995): 94-146.
ALIGHIERI, Dante [1265-1321], “The Letter to Can Grande” [1319 (?)], tr. Robert Haller, in
Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, c. 1100-1375: The Commentary Tradition,
ed AJ Minnis & A.B. Scott (Oxford University Press, 1988): 458-469.
BOCCACCIO, Giovanni, [1313-1375], Boccaccio on Poetry; being the 14th and 15th Books
of Genealogia Deorum Gentilium [1350-1362], tr. Charles G. Osgood (Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill, 1956): 213pp.

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 c. Theory and Criticism from the Renaissance to the end of the Nineteenth
Century

BOILEAU-DESPEREAUX, Nicolas [1636-1711], The Art of Poetry [1674], tr. Sir William
Soames (revised by John Dryden), in The Art of Poetry: The Poetical Treatises of
Horace Vida and Boileau, ed. A.S. Cook (Boston: Ginn & Co., 1892): 159-222.
VICO, Giammbatista [1668-1744], “Bk. 2: Poetic Wisdom,” Bk. 3: Discovery of the True
Homer,” in The New Science [1744 (third edition)], tr. Thomas Goddard Bergin &
Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968): 108-297, 299-332.
HUME, David [1711-1776], “Of the Standard of Taste,” in Four Dissertations [1757] (New
York: Garland, 1970): 201-240.
KANT, Immanuel [1724-1804], Critique of Judgment [1790], tr. Werner S. Pluhar
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987): book 1: “Analytic of the Beautiful” & book II:
“Analytic of the Sublime,” 43-140.
SCHILLER, Friedrich von, [1759-1805], On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of
Letters [1795], tr. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson & L.A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1967). Letters 4,6,7,13,14,15,16,19, and 22.
STAEL, Germaine Necker de [1776-1817], ‘Essays on Fictions’ [1795], in An Extraordinary
Woman: Selected Writings of Germaine de Stael, tr. Vivian Folkenflik (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1987): 60-78.
SCHLEGEL, Friedrich [1772-1829], Philosophical Fragments, tr. Peter Firchow
(Minneapolis: U. Of Minnesota P., 1991): 1-93.
HEGEL, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich [1770-1831], Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art [1835-
1838], tr. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975): in particular, volume I,
“Introduction” (1-90), and 299-322, 398-402, 427-442, 517-529.
POE, Edgar Allen [1809-1849], “The Philosophy of Composition” [1846], in Literary Theory
and Criticism, ed. Leonard Cassuto (New York: Dover, 1999): 100-110.
BAUDELAIRE, Charles [1821-1888], “The Painter of Modern Life” [1863], in The Painter
of Modern Life and Other Essays, tr. & ed. Jonathon Mayne (London: Phaidon Press,
1964): 1-40.
NIETZSCHE, Friedrich Wilhelm, [1844-1900], The Birth of Tragedy [1872], in The Birth of
Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967): 1-
17 (33-109).
_______, Will to Power, tr. Walter Kaufmann & R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968):
466-529 (262-286).
WILDE, Oscar [1854-1900], “The Decay of Lying” [1890], in Intentions (London: Methuen,
1913): 1-54.

d. Modern and Contemporary Theory and Criticism

ADORNO, Theodor W. [1903-1969], “The Essay as Form” [1954-1958], in Notes to

Literature, tr. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, ed. Rolf Tiedmann (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1991): vol. I. 3-23.
_______, “On Lyric Poetry and Society” [1957], in Notes to Literature: vol. I, 37-54.
_______, “Commitment” [1962], in Notes to Literature, tr. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, ed. Rolf
Tiedmann (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992): vol. II, 76-94.
AGAMBEN, Giorgio [b. 1942], Idea of Prose [1985], tr. Michael Sullivan & Sam Whitsitt
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995): 138pp.

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BAKHTIN, Mikhail Mikhailovich [1895-1975], “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in
the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, tr. Caryl Emerson & Michael
Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981): 84-258.
_______, “Epic and Novel” [1941], in The Dialogic Imagination: 3-40.
BARTHES, Roland [1915-1980], “The Death of the Author” [1968], in Image, Music Text, tr.
Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977): 138-142.
_______, The Pleasure of the Text (1973), tr. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang,
1975): 67pp.
BAUDRILLARD, Jean, “The Precession of Simulacra.” In Cultural Theory and Popular
Culture: A Reader (4th ed.), ed. J. Storey (Harlow: Pearson, 2009): 409-415.
BENJAMIN, Walter [1892-1940], “The Task of the Translator” [1921], tr. Harry Zohn in
Selected Writings Vol. 1: 1913-1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings
(Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1996): 253-263.
______, “Epistemo-Critico Prologue” & “Allegory and Trauerspiel,” in The Origin of
German Tragic Drama [1925], tr. John Osborne (London: New Left Books/Verso,
1977): 27-56, 159-235.
______, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” [1935-1936], tr.
Edmund Jephcott & Harry Zohn, in Selected Writings Vol. 3: 1935-1938, ed. Marcus
Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2002): 101-133.
_______, “The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov” [1936], in
Selected Writings Vol. 3: 1935-1938: 143-166.
BLANCHOT, Maurice, “Literature and the Right to Death,” in The Gaze of Orpheus, tr.
Lydia Davis, ed. with an afterword by P. Adams Sitney (Barrytown, New York:
Station Hill Press, 1981).
_______, “The Essential Solitude” and “Death as Possibility,” in The Space of Literature, tr.
with an intro. by Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982): 19-34.
BUTLER, Judith, “Subjects of Sex, Gender, Desire,” in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the
Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999): 3-44.
______, “Introduction,” in Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York:
Routledge, 1993): 1-26.
CIXOUS, Helene, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” tr. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1.4
[Summer, 1976]: 875-893.
DE MAN, Paul [1919-1983], “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” in Aesthetic Ideology
(Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota P, 1996): 70-90.
______, “Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics,” in Aesthetic Ideology: 91-104.
DERRIDA, Jacques [b. 1930], “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human
Sciences” [1966], in Writing and Difference [1967], tr. Alan Bass (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1978): 278-293.
______, “Difference” [1968], in Margins of Philosophy [1972], tr. Alan bass (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1986): 1-27.
FOUCAULT, Michel [1926-1984], The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human
Sciences [1966] (New York: Vintage Books, 1970): xv-xxix, 3-13.
______, “What is an Author?” [1969], tr. Josue V. Harari, in Essential Works by Foucault:
1954-1984, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1998), vol. 2: “Aesthetics,
Method, and Epistemology,” ed. James D. Faubion: 205-222.
______, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” [1971], tr. Donald F. Brouchard & Sherry Simon, in
Essential Works by Foucault, vol. 2: 369-391.
GADAMER, Hans Georg [1900-2002], Truth and Method [1960], tr. Joel Weinsheimer &
Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2000): in particular, Part I: “The
Question of Truth as it Emerges in the Experience of Art,” 1-169.

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HEIDEGGER, Martin [1889-1976], “The Origin of the Work of Art” [1935-1936], in Off the
Beaten Track [Holzwege (1950)], tr. Julian Young & Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002): 1-56.
_______, “The Age of the World Picture” [1938], in Off the Beaten Track: 57-85.
_______, “Language” [1950], in Poetry, Language, Thought, tr. Albert Hofstadter (New
York: Harper & Row, 1971): 187-210.
IRIGARAY, Luce, “Psychoanalytic Theory Another Look,” “The Power of Discourse and the
Subordination of the Feminine,” “The Mechanics of Fluids,” “When Our Lips Speak
Together,” “Women in the Market,” and “Commodities Among Themselves,” in This
Sex Which is Not One, tr. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1985): 34-67, 68-85, 106-118, 205-218, 170-191, 192-197.
JAUSS, Hans Robert [b. 1921], “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory” [1969],
tr. Timothy Bahti, in Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1982): 3-45.
______, “Sketch of a Theory and History of Aesthetic Experience,” in Aesthetic Experience
and Literary Hermeneutics [1977], tr. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1982): 3-151.
KRISTEVA, Julia [b. 1941], “The Semiotic and the Symbolic,” in Revolution in Poetic
Language [1974], tr. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984):
19-106.
LYOTARD, Jean-François, Discourse, Figure, tr. Antony Hudek, Mary Lydon (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
MILLER, Joseph Hillis, “Tropes, Parables, Performatives: Essays on the 20th Century
Literature” (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990).
NANCY, Jean-Luc [b. 1940], The Muses [1994], tr. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1996): 118pp.
RICŒUR, Paul [b. 1913], A Ricœur Reader: Reflection and Imagination, ed. Mario Valdes
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991): 216-299.
_______, “Narrative Identity,” in On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation, ed. David
Wood (London: Routledge, 1991): 188-199.
SONTAG, Susan, “The Aesthetics of Silence,” in Styles of Radical Will [1969] (New York,
Picador, 2002): 3-34.
SZONDI, Peter [1929-1971], On Textual Understanding, tr. Harvey Mendelsohn
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987): 3-22, 57-94.
_______, Introduction to Literary Hermeneutics, tr. Martha Woodmansee (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995): 144pp.

MODULES

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 DECONSTRUCTION

BATAILLE, Georges [1897-1962], “The Labyrinth,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings,

1927-1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, tr. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt, Donald M. Leslie
(Minneappolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985): 171-177.

BLANCHOT, Maurice [1907], “The Absence of the Book,” in The Gaze of Orpheus and
Other Literary Essays, ed. P. Adams Sitney, tr. Lydia Davis (New York: Station Hill
Press, 1981): 145-160.

CULLER, Johnathan, “Meaning and Iterability,” On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism

after Structuralism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, [1982] 2007): 110-134.

DE MAN, Paul [1919-1983], “The Rhetoric of Temporality” [1969], in Blindness and

Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1986): 187-228.

______, “Semiology and Rhetoric,” in Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in

Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust [1979] (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1979): 3-19.

DERRIDA, Jacques [b. 1930], Of Grammatology, tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976): 1-93, 269-316.
______, Memoires: For Paul de Man, tr. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathon Culler, & Eduardo Cadava
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) : 153pp.

GASCHÉ, Rodolphe [b. 1940], “Toward the Limit of Reflection,” and “Literature or
Philosophy?” in The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986): 13-105, 255-318.

LEVINAS, Emmanuel [1906-1995], “The Trace of the Other,” tr. Alphonso Lingis, in
Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy, ed. Mark C. Talyor (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1986): 345-359.

HERMENEUTICS AND PHENOMENOLOGY

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GADAMER, Hans Georg [1900-2002], “Art and Imitation,” “On the Contribution of Poetry
to the Search for Truth,” “Poetry and Mimesis,” and “Philosophy and Poetry,” in The
Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1986): 92-104, 105-115, 116-122, 131-139.

HUSSERL, Edmund [1859-1938], “Phenomenology,” in Shorter Works, ed. Peter

McCormick & Frederick A. Elliston (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,
1981): 22-55.

JAMESON, Fredric, “On Interpretation: Literature as a Socially Symbolic Act,” in The

Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1982): 17-102.

MARGOLIS, Joseph, “Aesthetic Appreciation and the Imperceptible,” in The British Journal
of Aesthetics, Volume 16, Issue 4, 1976: 305-312.

MERLEAU-PONTY, Maurice [1908-1961], “Eye and Mind” in The Primacy of Perception.

Northwestern University Press, 1964. pp. 159-190. “Cezanne’s Doubt” in Sense and
Non-Sense. [Evanston, Ill.] Northwestern University Press, 1964. pp. 9-24.

RICŒUR, Paul, Time and Narrative, tr. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, vol.II
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985): 112-152.

SCHUTZ, Alfred [1988-1959], “Don Quixote and the Problem of Reality,” in Collected
Papers, Vol. 2: Studies in Social Theory, ed. and introduced by Maurice Natanson,
with a pref. by H.L. van Breds (The Hague, M. Nijhoff, 1962-): 135-158.

SCHLEIERMACHER, Friedrich, “Hermeneutics,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and

Criticism, ed. Vincent Leitch (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001): 613-625.

SEMIOTICS AND STRUCTURALISM (& ICONOLOGY, EKPHRASIS,

IMAGE-TEXT RELATIONS)

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BARTHES, Roland, Image, Music, Text, (London: Fontana Press, Harper Collins Publishers,
2010).

BATEMAN, John A., Text and Image: A Critical Introduction to the Visual/Verbal Divide.
(New York: Routledge, 2014).

CULLER, Jonathan, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of

Literature. (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975).

GREIMAS, Algirdas Julien, On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory.

(Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1987): 63-83, 106-139.

JAKOBSON, Roman, “Linguistics and Poetics: Closing Statement,” Style in Language

(ed. Thomas Sebeok, 1960). “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of
Aphasic Disturbances,” Fundamentals of Language (by Jakobson and Morris
Halle, 1956).

KALYVA, Eve, Image and Text in Conceptual Art: Critical Operations in Context, (Cham:
Springer International Publishing, 2017).

MITCHELL, W J. T. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,

2009).

PEIRCE, C.S., Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic, ed. James Hoopes (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991): 141-143; 180-202; 212-230;

LITERATURE AND THEOLOGY

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CALASSO, ROBERTO [b. 1941], Literature and the Gods [2001], tr. Tim Parks. New York:
Knopf, 2001

FRYE, NORTHROP [1912-1991], The Great Code: The Bible and Literature, Toronto:
Academic Press Canada, 1982

GIRARD, RENÉ [b. 1923], The Scapegoat, tr. Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1986

_______, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, tr. James G. Williams. New York: Orbis Books,
2001

Violence and the Sacred [1972], tr. Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
____________________,

University Press, 1977, chapters 1 & 2

HARTMAN, GEOFFREY H. [b. 19291 (& SANFORD BUDICK [b. 19421), eds., Midrash
and Literature. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986, selected essays.

LAWLER, JUSTUS GEORGE, Celestial Pantomime: Poetic Structures of Transcendence.

New York: Continuum, 1994 [expanded edition]

MILLER, J. Hillis, The Disappearance of God: Five 19th Century Writers (Champaign:
University of Illinois Press): 1-17.

SELLS, Michael, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1994).