Comparative Literature Quotes:

One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name.

- George Saintsbury

source: George Saintsbury (2012). “The English Novel”, p.11, tredition

topic: Names, Two, Facts, Comparative Literature, Lateness

Every great political campaign rewrites the rules; devising a new way to win is what gives campaigns a comparative advantage against their foes.

- John Podhoretz

topic: Winning, Giving, Political, Devising, Comparative Advantage

The phrase I like to use to describe my sense of time-a play on comparative literature - is comparative time.

- Yehuda Amichai

source: "Amichai, Israel´s Most Important and Influential Poet, Dies at 76". www.nytimes.com. September 22, 2000.

topic: Play, Phrases, Use, Comparative Literature

What I teach is literary criticism and comparative literature and so on and that's my function, but from time to time it's possible for me actually to help a writer. I read something and something strikes me then, I feel I can talk to that writer about it.

- Wole Soyinka

source: Source: www.nobelprize.org

topic: Criticism, Literature, Helping, Literary Criticism, Comparative Literature

If a comparative-literature major had existed at Harvard College for undergraduates I would have surely gone in that direction.

- Louis Begley

topic: College, Gone, Literature, Comparative Literature

English is, from my point of view as an Americanist, an ethnicity. And English literature should be studied in Comparative Literature. And American literature should be a discipline, certainly growing from England and France, Germany, Spain, Denmark, and the Native traditions, particularly because those helped form the American canon. Those are our backgrounds. And then we'd be doing it the way it ought to be done. And someday I hope that it will be.

- Paula Gunn Allen

topic: Views, Ethnicity, Discipline, American Literature, Comparative Literature

I studied Comparative Literature at Cornell. Structuralism was real big then. The idea of reading and writing as being this language game. There's a lot of appeal to that. It's nice to think of it as this playful kind of thing. But I think that another way to look at it is "Look, I just want to be sincere. I want to write something and make you feel something and maybe you will go out and do something." And it seems that the world is in such bad shape now that we don't have time to do nothing but language games. That's how it seems to me.

- William T. Vollmann

topic: Real, Nice, Reading, Structuralism, Reading And Writing

I went to college at Harvard, then did three years of graduate school at Yale. At both places I studied comparative literature. People find it odd that I went to both Harvard and Yale, and I guess it is odd, but that's just what people did where I grew up.

- Lev Grossman

topic: School, College, Years, Comparative Literature

I like to be surrounded by books. My wife Evelyn has a Ph.D. in comparative literature, so we have a lot of her Spanish and German literature books which are wasted on me, plus a lot of novels and books on art and architecture shared by us both. Evelyn used to edit an art magazine called 'FMR,' so we have a common interest in design.

- David Chipperfield

source: "My space". Interview with Andy Barker, www.theguardian.com. September 6, 2008.

topic: Art, Book, Wife, Comparative Literature

God bless my father, but he always spoke in this continental, literary accent, probably because he was a professor of comparative literature and he made the decision to speak with distinction.

- Nicolas Cage

topic: Father, Decision, Literature, Comparative Literature