Comparative Literature and Humanities
Comparative Literature Degrees MA, PhD
Humanities Degree BA
Bachelor's Degree Program +
Humanities is an interdepartmental major that offers an interdisciplinary and comparative approach to the study of the arts within their historical and cultural context. As a direct result of its encouragement of interdisciplinary approaches to the analysis and interpretation of literature, music, film, art, and modern media, humanities offers an opportunity for students and faculty to pursue a wide variety of modes of reflection.
Humanities is committed to a profoundly comparative perspective enabling students and faculty to bring together not only different arts, but works drawn from different eras and cultures, Western and non-Western alike. At the same time as it uses historical and generic categories as a means of organizing material, it also provides an opportunity for critically examining these categories, sometimes challenging them, at other times bringing their latent content more fully to light.
The undergraduate degree in humanities emphasizes knowledge and awareness of:
- the ways cultures and traditions define both themselves and each other;
- the formal, rhetorical, and ideological properties of cultural texts in a variety of forms and media (literature, history, philosophy, film, music, visual arts, architecture, dance, theatre, performance);
- the dynamic relations between texts and their social and historical contexts;
- the genres and modes of texts and their production, transformation, and reception; and
- the theoretical and ideological underpinnings and implications of one's own and others' interpretive approaches and assumptions.
In addition, students completing the degree in humanities are expected to acquire the ability and skills to:
- analyze and interpret texts in a variety of forms and media;
- articulate such analyses and interpretations at a sophisticated level in both written and oral form;
- discern similarities and differences among individual works, artistic media, historical periods, and cultural traditions;
- reason critically; and
- explore the connections between contemporary issues and academic work.
| Required Courses | Semester Hours |
| HUMN 1010 and 1020 Introduction to Humanities 1 and 2 | 12 |
| HUMN 2000 Methods and Approaches to the Humanities | 3 |
| Upper-division humanities courses | 15 |
| Area of concentration: either a single language/literature (English or a foreign language, ancient or modern; first-year language courses may not be counted) or a field related to the humanities, such as history, art history, anthropology, etc. | 18 |
| (At least 12 of these 18 hours must be taken at the upper-division level.) | |
| Secondary field: courses chosen from one other humanities-related discipline such as fine arts, music, dance, theatre, film, philosophy, foreign language literature (first-year language courses may not be counted), or other discipline | 12 |
Graduating in Four Years +
Consult the Four-Year Guarantee Requirements for information on eligibility. Because the Department of Comparative Literature and Humanities is unique in requiring courses from a number of different departments in addition to its own courses, it is imperative that students wishing to graduate in four years declare the major early and meet regularly with a departmental advisor. The concept of "adequate progress" as it is used here only refers to maintaining eligibility for the four-year guarantee; it is not a requirement for the major. To maintain adequate progress in humanities, students should meet the following requirements:
| Complete the lower-division sequence HUMN 1010-1020 by the end of the fourth semester. | |
| Complete at least two lower-division courses in the secondary field and/or area of concentration by the end of the fourth semester. | |
| Complete 15 of the remaining 42 credit hours at the upper-division level by the end of the sixth semester - at least two of these must be upper-division humanities courses. | |
| Complete all remaining required courses (no more than 27 credits) by the end of the eighth semester. |
Graduate Degree Programs +
Comparative Literature +
The program of comparative literature enables students to study the production, reception, and interpretation of written texts and related media from a comprehensive perspective. Comparative literature has long crossed national linguistic frontiers. The discipline today questions the very basis of such boundaries, exploring the construction of national literatures, languages, and traditions and, insofar as this can be read in and out of verbal and other media, of nations and national consciousness itself. Extending its reflections on limits still further and in dialogue with other disciplines, the interpretive perspectives of comparative literature are not only crossdisciplinary, multimedia, and multilingual, but global. The aim is to analyze the world's cultures both as expressions of the various interdependent histories that have framed them, and as manifestations of the multifacetedness inscribed in the different forms by which human beings shape and communicate their experience. These forms can range from a single literary genre, period, movement or tradition to larger concepts and constructs such as gender, sexuality, theory, or culture. Areas of analysis may also include authorship and the literary work, literacy, genre, literary history, and the canon. Students wishing to pursue graduate work in comparative literature should read the guidelines for the MA and PhD degrees in this field. These are available at www.colorado.edu/comparativeliterature.
Master's Degree +
Prerequisites. In addition to an undergraduate major in a relevant field, students applying for admission to the MA program in comparative literature should have completed three years of college-level study or its equivalent in one foreign language. Students are also encouraged to begin study of a second foreign language before applying.
Course Work Requirements. Candidates for the MA in comparative literature must take a total of 10 courses (representing 30 credit hours). Half the required credit hours are in courses offered by the Program in Comparative Literature. At least 9 hours are in the department of the student's primary literature, and an additional 6 hours are in the department of the secondary literature.
Examinations and Thesis. Candidates for the MA in comparative literature must submit and defend orally a master's thesis.
Doctoral Degree +
Prerequisites. Students are accepted for doctoral study in comparative literature directly from the BA or after completion of an MA in comparative literature, a national literature, or a related discipline. All students seeking admission to doctoral study must show evidence of advanced knowledge in one foreign language (ability to take fourth year college literature courses in this language) and intermediate knowledge (at least two years of course work at the college level) of a second foreign language.
Course Work Requirements. Students who receive their MA in comparative literature from CU-Boulder are required to take a minimum of 48 hours of graduate course work, including 30 hours completed during the preparation for the MA and 18 hours completed during the first year of doctoral studies. Students receiving the MA from another institution are required to take a minimum of 36 credit hours (12 courses) at CU-Boulder. Students who enter the PhD program directly from a BA program are required to take a minimum of 48 hours of graduate course work.
Examinations and Thesis. All PhD candidates take a comprehensive examination and a final examination. The final examination is an oral defense of the doctoral dissertation, and is conducted by the student's advisory committee after all other requirements for the PhD have been completed.
