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News
Read stories and articles for and about current and prospective students and faculty in the Comparative Literature Program.
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You can also browse an archive of books published by program faculty and scholars.
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Recent News
Apr 28, 2022
Marvin A. Carlson Is Elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences
The distinguished professor is best known for his scholarship on dramatic theory and theater history.
- Faculty News
- GC Stories
Apr 26, 2022
Fulbright Fellow Explores the Future of Moroccan Storytelling
Ryan Milov-Córdoba, a 2022 Fulbright Fellow, will travel to Morocco to talk to artists about the possibilities of a threatened tradition.
- GC Stories
- Student News
Mar 31, 2022
The Poems We Should Read Now
For Poetry Month, Graduate Center scholars and authors highlight poems that speak to our times.
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- Student News
- GC Stories
Feb 8, 2022
Lincoln As You’ve Never Seen Him
"Lincoln’s Dilemma," a four-part Apple TV+ documentary, is based on Professor David Reynolds’ book "Abe."
- Faculty News
- GC Stories
Recent Books
View all Comparative Literature Books
The Acoustic Self in English Modernism and Beyond
Writing Musically
By Zoltan Varga (Ph.D. '13, Comparative Literature)
Drawing on the analogy between musical meaning-making and human subjectivity, this book develops the concept of the acoustic self, exploring the ways in which musical characterization and structure are related to issues of subject-representation in the modernist English novel. The volume is framed around three musical topics—the fugue, absolute music, and Gesamtkunstwerk—arguing that these three modes of musicalization address modernist dilemmas around selfhood and identity. Varga reflects on the manifestations of the acoustic self in examples from the works of E.M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, and Virginia Woolf, and such musicians as Bach, Beethoven, Handel, and Wagner. An additional chapter on jazz and electronic music supplements these inquiries, pursuing the acoustic self beyond modernism and thereby inciting further discussion and theorization of musical intermediality, as well as recent sonic practices.
Published February 2022
Routledge

Reimagining History in Contemporary Spanish Media
This book offers a new perspective via visual culture of the reimagining of history for contemporary Spanish media audiences. It gives close readings of major recent texts in a number of media (theater, cinema, television, and streaming) which have yet to receive scholarly attention and are closely connected to each other. And it stresses the intermediality of the visual by calling attention to connections between those media and others such as painting. From Picasso to the Javis and from the classic serial to Netflix, this book shows how Spanish history is radically reimagined through recent visual culture.
Published December 2021
Modern Humanities Research Association

Mexican Genders, Mexican Genres: Cinema, Television and Streaming Since 2010
This book focusses on gender and the audio-visual landscape of Mexico since 2010, examining popular culture as expressed in the still distinct but rapidly converging media forms of cinema, television, and streaming platforms. It tracks how changes in producers and genres coincide with changes in gender representations and engages with depictions of feminism, women's sexuality, masculinity, and teen homosexuality. It aims to move beyond the art, auteur or specialist film that is vaunted by film festivals but little seen by Mexicans at home, focussing instead on a wider world of media content and practices available in Mexico itself. Close attention is also paid to the social media footprint of the productions studied and the way it is used for promotion and engagement with the target audience. The book proposes a new approach to audio-visual studies, combining textual analysis with field surveys and the useof industrial sources perhaps unfamiliar to scholars in Anglo-American Hispanism and Latin American media studies in the UK and USA
Published April 2021