In literary histories written in both Iran and the West it has generally be assumed that early modern Persian literary works are (technically inferior) copies of Western literary works. This has been and is still a claim. Almost no academically and scientifically sound works has substantiated this claim. While there is no point in denying a European influence on early modern Persian literature,...

It was once believed that the ancients invented and perfected certain genres and that the works they left might serve as models for later writers. Today belief in ideal patterns is a distant memory, and our interest in genre takes other forms. Classicists, by engaging with the specific problems presented by Greek and Roman literature and with the speculative discourse taking place throughout li...

Literary studies and the cognitive sciences, pursuing common interests in language, mental acts, and linguistic artifacts, have developed markedly different approaches to similar phenomena of reading, imaginative involvement, and textual patterning. Until quite recently, the distance between them has drawn more attention than their possible convergence (Franchi and Güzeldere ). A number of ...

In his article "E-Literature, New Media Art, and E-Literary Criticism" Janez Strehovec explores the commonalities between electronic literature and new media art. Rather than deploying the traditional conceptual apparatus of e-literary criticism directed first and foremost to the new media elements of e-literature, Strehovec takes into account approaches from current theories in the social scie...

In his article "Literary Geography and Comparative Literature" César Domínguez analyzes the relevance of political and linguistic frameworks for comparative literary historiography in the context of the European Union. Domínguez's discussion is based on the notion of geoculture whose theorization from Immanuel Wallerstein's perspective presents paradigms of interest to comparative literature. T...

The article rescues and analyzes the work done in 1960 by Antonio Gómez Alfaro, the first Spanish author that carried out a study on relations between journalism and literature using a multidiscipline perspective. The tradition documents the emergence of comparative approaches at the end of the 1990s, but the revision of Gómez Alfaro’s proposal is an exceptional advance, because this intellectu...

Department Website: http://fundamentals.uchicago.edu About Fundamentals The Fundamentals program enables students to concentrate on fundamental questions by reading classic texts that articulate and speak to these questions. It seeks to foster precise and thoughtful pursuit of basic questions by means of (1) rigorous training in the interpretation of important texts, supported by (2) extensive ...

Department Website: http://fundamentals.uchicago.edu About Fundamentals The Fundamentals program enables students to concentrate on fundamental questions by reading classic texts that articulate and speak to these questions. It seeks to foster precise and thoughtful pursuit of basic questions by means of (1) rigorous training in the interpretation of important texts, supported by (2) extensive ...