WELCOME TO COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
A world of texts awaits.
Comparative Literature is an interdisciplinary program that sits at the intersection of CMLL, English, and range of other disciplines at CCNY. When you major in Comparative Literature, you study multiple forms of creative and critical expression not as a collection of isolated works, but as a network of voices speaking across languages, cultures, and centuries. A novel written in Spanish from the Caribbean in dialogue with one from the American South. A Bollywood film interrogating the same myth as a Greek poem written twenty-five hundred years earlier. Comparative Literature is the practice of reading those conversations and understanding what changes when meaning crosses a border.
WHY CHOOSE COMPARATIVE LITERATURE?
Did you know that the student body at CCNY collectively speaks more than 30 languages and lays claim to more than 150 different countries of origin? Comparative Literature offers students the opportunity to study literature and other forms of creative and critical expression originally written in many of these languages and produced in many of these countries. If you're curious about literature and art from across the world, Comparative Literature may be the major for you!
FEATURED COURSES
CL28000/ENGL28000
Introduction to Comparative Literature
(generally offered every Spring semester)
This is a required gateway course for the major and it also counts towards the Pathways Flexible Common Core requirements under the World Cultures and Global Issues – Literature category. It is usually offered in the Spring semester. In this class, we will examine what it means to cross temporal and geographic boundaries in order read texts from different national, linguistic, and cultural traditions in relation to one another as well as in relation to other art forms. This kind of exploration lends itself to a broad range of works including the poems, plays, novels, films, paintings and more that will ground our discussions. We will also read literary theory and criticism as a way of thinking more deeply about the role that language, history, philosophy and social movements have played in the production and circulation of literary texts. Along the way, we will ask and try to answer questions about the relationship between politics and aesthetics, or, more specifically, how gender, race, religious belief, and sexuality have each shaped how and what we read as world literature.
CL 31156/ARAB 301
Global Arab Writers
(Fall 2026)
In this class, we will examine the Arab migrant experience from the late nineteenth century to the present. Most of the authors in our list settled in the Americas, or Western Europe. They do not necessarily write in Arabic but chose to write in English, French, or Spanish to rethink their Arab heritage. They also seek to critique the social and political circumstances of the countries where they lived. In doing so, they offer a different view that challenges the dominant nationalist narratives. They also shed light on the wider global Arab literary and social experience that spans various languages and geographies.
Last Updated: 07/31/2026 14:27