Why study Comparative Literature?

Understanding literatures—and their place within cultures and histories—means initiating dialogues between disparate literatures as well as between literature and its neighbouring cultural spheres. The Centre for Comparative Literature enables research that is among the best and most exciting at the University and that, because it crosses languages and national borders, cannot be done in any other venue.  Often the research is among the best and most exciting because it exceeds what can be done in a national literature department or a discipline. Working across languages is the only way to properly appreciate medieval Spain, travel writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Eastern European samizdat publishing, popular culture in Nigeria, or life in Toronto.  But all literature has always been transnational. To properly appreciate phenomena like the nation-state, modern subjectivity, cultural exchange, or capitalist crisis, it is necessary to work across languages.  And how else can one begin to understand Canada?