Humanities and Social Science Program

Comparative Literature and World Literature: How Literature Shaped History, Society, and Civilization​

Faculty Advisor: Adjunct Professor, New York University

Research Program Introduction

This program introduces students to several essential works of World Literature and the discipline of Comparative Literature, with a focus on human experience. Students will read and discuss great works and examine love, memory, friendship, family, and selfhood themes. Readings may include The Epic of Gilgamesh, selections from the Bible, and texts by Plato, Sophocles, Ovid, William Wordsworth, Virginia Woolf, Lu Xun, Salman Rushdie, and Derek Walcott. This program will emphasize close and careful reading, critical thinking, analytical writing, and research skills.

Through this program, students will become familiar with literary traditions worldwide. They will also learn to develop evidence-based arguments and conceive, shape, and execute writing projects.

Students will also learn general and subject-specific research and academic writing methods used in universities and scholarly publications. After completing the program, they will focus on individual topics and generate their own work products.

Possible Topics For Final Project:

  • The hero’s journey in the Epic of Gilgamesh

  • Tragic collision in Sophocles’ Antigone

  • The contemporary relevance of Sophocles’ Antigone

  • Love as mediation in Plato’s Symposium

  • Nature, memory, and crisis in William Wordsworth’s poetry

  • Other professor-approved research topics in this subject area that you are interested in

Program Assessment Standards:

Students will write brief response papers for our group meetings and then have the option of developing any of those papers into their final project. To complete this program, students must participate in group discussions, complete all reading and writing assignments, participate in activities such as group annotation, and write a successful final paper. Achieving "excellence" in this program will mean producing excellent written work and discussing literary texts at a high level.

Program Details

  • Cohort size: 3 to 5 students

  • Workload: Around 4 to 5 hours per week (including class and homework time)

  • Target students: 9 to 12th graders interested in comparative literature, world literature, and/or English writing.