The places

http://www.dcu.ie/salis/
http://www.tcd.ie/langs-lits-cultures/postgraduate/
http://www.ucc.ie/french/taughtpg.html
http://www.ul.ie/~lcs
http://www.ucd.ie/sllf/

The overview

In recent years the discipline of Comparative Studies has gained a progressively higher profile in Irish academic life, as universities and academics have come to recognise the potential benefits of comparative approaches across a broad range of disciplines encompassing literature, film, languages and the Arts. This recognition led to the founding of a School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies at Dublin City University in 2003, with a range of postgraduate courses including Comparative Literature. Subsequently, the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies at Trinity College Dublin set up an M. Phil in Comparative Literature; the French department of University College Cork an MA in French and Comparative Literature; the Department of Languages and Cultural Studies in the University of Limerick an MA in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies; and University College Dublin has developed its own Comparative Literature Master's programme. Details of these courses will be featured on these pages; meanwhile, please click the links above.

These new courses facilitate Irish graduates who may wish to study the possible links between subjects they have studied at undergraduate level at postgraduate level. Equally, the Comparative Literature programmes also offer opportunities for non-Irish students from Europe, the US, South America, Africa, Australia and Asia, regions of the world where Comparative Literature has been studied and researched for decades, to continue their comparative research in Ireland and engage in cross-cultural dialogue with Irish culture.

More about the UCD course

UCD's MA in Comparative Literature is taught by staff members from the School of Languages and Literatures and the School of English, Drama and Film. The MA can be taken as a one-year full-time or a two-year part-time programme. It is designed around core modules with a strong theoretical and interdiscplinary focus; these are complemented by a range of optional comparative modules on fiction, autobiography, film and drama. For further information please consult: http://www.ucd.ie/sllf/Postgraduate/Comparative_Lit.html

The rationale

Comparative Literature adds a critical and methodological framework to the study of the various elements that come together in the production of literary works. It examines the various relations between cultures and between literature and the Arts, music, painting and cinema in particular, while also drawing on the disciplines of sociology, politics and philosophy. Comparatists also integrate literary experience with other cultural phenomena, such as historical change and social movements. In a nutshell, Comparative Literature is the discipline of studying literature internationally, across political boundaries, time periods, languages, genres, and across the lines of demarcation between literature and other cultural productions. When studying literature internationally, Comparative Literature endeavours to demonstrate the links between cultures and individual writers within those cultures — it doesn't simply create parallels. For example, it looks for evidence of readings, encounters and criticism of writers and artists of one another, and what they subsequently set about to create themselves. At the core of Comparative Literature is the investigation of literature and of specific literary qualities, an investigation deeply engaged in cross-cultural study and recognizing the constructive role of the historical, sociological, ideological, etc., in the production of literature.