<p>Sorry not to have seen this additional question before. I’ll take a stab at answering it, and maybe unalove or another student will notice and correct any errors.</p>
<p>Comparative Literature is one of the things I meant by “special programs outside the English Department that offer majors that are in many ways indistinguishable from an English major”. I think it is not a department, per se, but rather a program with a committee drawn from a variety of departments, and that slaps its brand on what looks like almost a random collection of courses offered by other departments, and which maybe constitute half of the courses it might have branded. Some of the people on the committee are famous, some are good teachers, some are both, and some may be neither . And it’s probably irrelevant, because you don’t actually have to take any of their classes.</p>
<p>Comparative Literature is one of those ill-defined, Rorschach-like terms that can mean different things to different people. At Yale, when I was in college, there was an undergraduate major called Comparative Literature which was essentially nothing but a way to do a double-major in two different literatures without having to meet all the requirements of both departments. There was also a Department of Comparative Literature, which offered no undergraduate courses at all, was concerned exclusively with literary theory and philosophy, and which was the strongest collection of lit-crit professors anywhere in the world at the time. Then there was a different undergraduate major called simply “Literature”, which had begun as something of a pop-culture alternative to highbrow stuffiness in the English Department, but which was in the process of transforming itself into the college manifestation of the Comp Lit Department.</p>
<p>There are two points to that digression: (1) The Chicago Comp Lit major has little traces of all of those things in it. It can clearly be a double-major substitute, a theory major, a pop culture major, or any number of other things. (2) It’s really hard to tell the players without a program. You have to read the catalog carefully to pick up clues (as I have), but in the end the only way to find out what’s actually going on is to talk to current students, and not just one or two of them. If you think you are interested in Comp Lit, it may be that in local terms what you are really interested in is Fundamentals, Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities, Law Letters and Society, Gender Studies, Balkan Studies, Romance Languages, or . . . English. I can’t tell, and neither can you, without a lot of being there and kicking tires.</p>
<p>The obvious great benefit of Comp Lit is that it doesn’t actually have any required courses, just a general outline that you discuss with the faculty when you are planning what to study. And that general outline seems to consist of (A) Look like you have some sort of focus on something, (B) and convince us that you have a secondary focus on something else, (C) learn a foreign language and read some of its literature as part of your program, and (D) take at least a couple of theory courses (you choose which theories). So, if you don’t want to meet all the English Department requirements – say, you hate the 19th Century – you can come here to get out of them. Or, a kid I know was total Latin poetry jock and Classics major since birth, but what she really liked was medieval poetry, and they wouldn’t let her do her BA on that (not classic enough), and she didn’t want to take all the Roman history requirements for Classics, so, presto!, Comp Lit major. (Most universities are full of little escape-hatches and secret passageways like that.)</p>
<p>“Relative strength of departments” really isn’t relevant here, since Comp Lit draws from all the other departments (although, unsurprisingly, there is something of a slant towards Central Europe), and since it is clear that non-Comp Lit courses can be applied towards the major requirements (once you and your advisor figure out what to require of yourself).</p>