Gender, Language, and Visual Culture in 21st Century Comparative Literature

This cluster examines the role of Comparative Literature in the 21st century to respond to the ever-more urgent need for cross-cultural understanding under globalization. Discussions will focus on intersections among language, visual culture, literary production, and gender as potential categories of analysis for comparative studies across national cultures. Having emerged in the post-WWII era, Comparative Literature’s commitment to the study of discourses across national boundaries enabled the flourishing of “theory” in the 1970s and 1980s, and favored the development of cultural, post-colonial, and global studies in the 1990s. This cluster considers the persistence of the national and of multiple linguistic formations in the context of various global processes (mass media, electronic technologies, and multinational economies) and of increasingly overlapping cultural traditions, in which gender plays a central role.