Resources: Comparative Literature at Kent

These resources have been created with our applicants in mind and aims to support your journey towards studying at the University of Kent. We encourage students to explore and deepen their subject knowledge beyond the school curriculum, developing the necessary thinking and problem solving skills – and the ability to conduct independent study – associated with university study. Find out more about your first year modules here.

Resources for Comparative Literature applicants:

We asked staff in the School to recommend their favourite books, films and podcasts to see you through the summer period and give you an insight into some of the topics you may encounter in your chosen degree programme. We hope you enjoy their recommendations!

Anna Katharina Schaffner, Reader in Comparative Literature says:

This year, I really enjoyed reading Sally Rooney’s brilliant, perceptive and productively disturbing coming of age tale Normal People (2018), as well as Deborah Levy’s quirky and beautifully surreal Hot Milk (2016). I also loved Lauren Groff’s magnificent new short story collection Florida (2018) – evocative and often eerie, it is teeming with insight and compelling lyricisms.

Patricia Novillo-Corvalán, Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature, goes back to an old favourite:

I’m planning to reread Gabriel García Márquez’s epic novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) this summer. I loved this novel when I first read it at the age of 18 and I now feel that I’m ready to read it again! I look forward to immersing myself in its 100 years of magic and despair, joy and solitude, truth and superstition.

Jo Pettitt, Lecturer in Comparative Literature, takes a trip into childhood with her recommendation:

In the summer, I love to go back to my childhood favourites! This year, I plan on journeying back to Fantasia with the young Bastian Bux in Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story. I hope you all love it as much as I do!

Katja Haustein, Lecturer in Comparative Literature, takes a trip even further back:

One of the texts I rediscovered this term is a novella by the Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist: The Marquise von O… The story opens with a rather unusual advertisement in a local newspaper: A lady announces that she has become pregnant without her realising, and that the father to her unborn child should make himself known so that they could marry. It’s a weird story, very beautiful but also deeply disturbing and, although written more than 200 years ago, of an uncanny timeliness in the age of ‘#MeToo’.

Apart from these recommendations, below you will find a list with additional introductory texts.

Useful introductions

  • Susan Bassnett: Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction (1993)
  • Ben Hutchinson: Comparative Literature: A Very Short Introduction (2018). Fun, accessible and Comp Lit in a nutshell!

Primary texts (in alphabetical order)

  • Anon: The Arabian Nights (selected tales from master storyteller Scheherazade, including the frame narrative, will be studied in our stage 1 module The Tale)
  • Charlotte Brontë: Wuthering Heights (you will study this classic gothic text in our stage 2 module, Rethinking Gender: From the Brontë Sisters to Eimear McBride)
  • Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (essential reading to experience Canterbury’s rich literary heritage. Selected tales, including ‘The Miller’s Tale’ and the ‘Clerk’s Tale’, feature in The Tale)
  • Angela Carter: The Bloody Chamber (this is another text you will study in The Tale. Carter simultaneously sums up and tears apart the fairy tale tradition)
  • Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary (an influential novel of the nineteenth-century tradition of female adultery. It features in our stage 3 module The Book and the Film).
  • Fyodor Dostoevsky: “The Grand Inquisitor”, a chapter from The Brothers Karamazovstudents are welcome to read on if they would like to – and/or Notes from the Underground (One of the most distinguished voices in Russian literature)
  • Julio Cortázar: Blow-Up and Other Stories (the weirdest, most wondrous tales you will ever read! You will study a selection of short stories: ‘Axolotl’, ‘The House Taken Over’, ‘Letter to a Young Lady in Paris’ in ‘The Tale’ and our stage 2 module Latin American Fiction).
  • Homer: The Odyssey, a foundational epic that features in our stage 1 module, The Tale, especially Books 9-11: Odysseus’ voyages through wonderland
  • Elfriede Jelinek: The Piano Teacher,  a dazzling novel by Austrian Nobel laureate features in Rethinking Gender: From the Brontë Sisters to Eimear McBride).
  • Franz Kafka: The Metamorphosis (essential reading, a unique literary imagination. Included in our stage 1 option modules. Recommended by all members of staff!)
  • Silvina Ocampo: (Re-discovered female author from Argentina). Selected stories from Thus were their Faces: ‘The House Made of Sugar’, ‘The Velvet Dress’, and ‘Mimoso’ feature in Latin American Fiction
  • Ovid: Metamorphoses (a unique Roman classic! Selected stories feature in The Tale: ‘Pygmalion’, Pyramus and Thisbe’, ‘Arachne’, ‘Tiresias’)
  • Arundhati Roy: The God of Small Things (award-winning Indian novel included in our stage 3 module Postcolonial Images of Africa, Asia, and Latin America).
  • William Shakespeare: any tragedy, comedy, or romance. Selected plays are taught in our stage 3 module, Shakespeare’s Afterlives that traces the Bard’s global impact
  • Hwang Sok-yong: Princess Bari (contemporary novel by South Korean author is included in our new stage 3 module In Search of Shelter: Refugees Narratives)
  • Sophocles: Oedipus King or Antigone (proto-feminist tragedy Antigone features in our stage 3 module Fiction and Power)
  • Virginia Woolf: A Room of One’s Own (pioneering feminist bible. It features in in our stage 2 module, Rethinking Gender: From the Brontë Sisters to Eimear McBride)

Reading list for first year compulsory module, The Tale:

  • Week 1 Introduction to the module: Shrek and the idea of intertextuality
  • Week 2 The Epic of Gilgamesh
  • Week 3 Homer’s Odyssey (extracts)
  • Week 4 Ovid’s Metamorphoses (extracts)
  • Week 5 ‘The Shipwrecked Sailor’
  • Week 6 Essay writing workshop and drop-in session
  • Week 7 Enhancement week
  • Week 8 The Arabian Nights (extracts)
  • Week 9 The Arabian Nights and Disney’s Aladdin
  • Week 10 The Lais of Marie of France (extracts)
  • Week 11 A Midsummer Night’s Dream
  • Week 12 Essay writing week
  • Christmas break
  • Week 13 Roots of the European tale: ‘Little Red Riding Hood’
  • Week 14 ‘Cinderella’
  • Week 15 ‘Snow White’
  • Week 16 Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird
  • Week 17 ‘Beauty and the Beast’
  • Week 18 Introduction to the short story: Edgar Allen Poe, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher
  • Week 19 Enhancement week
  • Week 20 J.L.Borges: selection
  • Week 21 Julio Cortazar: selection
  • Week 22 Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories
  • Week 23 Class summary and revision session
  • Week 24 Essay Writing week

From all of us, have a happy and restorative summer and we hope to see you soon!

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