Publication: A Princeton Companion
Comparative Literature, The Department of, has enjoyed a brief but substantial history at Princeton. The graduate program, which began under an interdepartmental committee in the Council of the Humanities in 1962, gathered a nucleus of four faculty members from 1966 to 1970 and emerged as an independent department in 1975. Its formation was requested by both graduate and undergraduate students, and strengthened by faculty members, who had taught comparative courses in other departments of literature for several years.
At present they form a faculty of fifteen members -- thirteen full professors, and two assistant professors supported by funds from the Mellon Foundation. In addition to English, the linguistic coverage of the department consists of the major European languages -- French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish, Latin and Classical Greek; Near and Far Eastern languages will be more effectively represented in the future. The historical range of the faculty leads from antiquity to the modern period.
The department offers an enlarged graduate program and undergraduate concentration in Comparative Literature. The purpose of the graduate program is essentially to train new teachers in the field, that of the undergraduate program to provide a liberal, humanizing discipline for the study of language and literature as a whole. In relation to the Humanities at Princeton, Comparative Literature draws on the specialities of surrounding departments and lends them broad, generalizing kinds of strength. All students are asked to major, in effect, in one literature, and so benefit from the other departments, their faculties, and courses; their students, in turn, are invited to enroll in courses in Comparative Literature, forums where central literary issues regardless of national boundaries, may be discussed.
More specifically, the strengths of the department include the history, theory, and practice of literary criticism, the study of literary forms -- particularly narrative forms, the epic, and the novel -- the classical tradition, and the main chronological periods, all considered from an international, intercultural, perspective.
Robert Fagles
From Alexander Leitch, A Princeton Companion, copyright Princeton University Press (1978).