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Comparative Literature and Comparative Arts Majors

Flexibility to Design Your Program

Because comparatists must make choices about which languages and which national literatures they will study, you will find that the requirements for both majors encourage students to plan individualized programs of study in consultation with their advisors.

Help Making Your Choices

Course programs are planned by you and your faculty advisor, who will help you decide which literature courses to take, whether to start a third language, and where you would like to go if you study abroad. Your advisor will also help make arrangements for study abroad, get you together with other students who have studied abroad or are going to do so in order to share the experience.

Language Study

At Washington University you can take courses for four years in these languages:

  • Arabic
  • Chinese
  • French
  • German
  • Greek
  • Italian
  • Japanese
  • Korean
  • Latin
  • Modern Hebrew
  • Russian
  • Spanish

You can also take courses in Hindi, Portuguese, Swahili, and Swedish.

Senior Honors

All students in Arts and Sciences must have a GPA of 3.65 or higher and satisfy the requirements of their major department to receive Latin Honors (summa cum laude, magna cum laude, cum laude). To earn Latin Honors in Comparative Literature or Comparative Arts, majors choose a topic for a thesis, often with the help of their advisor, preferably before the end of the junior year. The topic must be approved by the Director of Comparative Literature or the Director of Undergraduate Studies. During the senior year students research and write a thesis (typically a sixty- or seventy-page essay) under the guidance of a professor whose field of specialization includes the student's topic. Majors eligible to write an Honors thesis are encouraged to discuss the possibility with their advisor at least as early as the fall semester of the junior year.

Topics that students have chosen recently include:

Comparative Literature:

  • The sCANDAL of Translating a Hybrid Poet: The Foreign Presence in the Works of Yi Sang
  • Glitches, Mistranslations, and Errors: Disruptions of Official Memory in Contemporary Argentine Cultural Production
  • Beyond the Border: A Commemorative Approach to Contemporary Women’s Fiction about Migration between Morocco and Spain

Comparative Arts:

  • (Im)possible Spaces: Invisible Cities in an Age of Urban Crisis
  • The 'Racist' Camera: Photographic Technologies and the Aesthetic Politics of Lensing Skin Colors
  • Local Communities, Cross-Cultural Connections: Jazz-Flamenco in Spain and El Sistema in Venezuela

All students whose GPA is 3.6 or higher and who do not receive Latin Honors will be awarded College Honors. 
 

Capstone Project

All students majoring in Comparative Literature/ Comparative Arts have several options for Capstone experiences.  See the Discovery Guide's description of capstone projects for more details.