About CCLCS...
Welcome to the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies! The Centre is an interdisciplinary and interdepartmental unit administered from the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics. Some of its core academic staff are employed in whole or in part by the School of LCL, but also associated with the Centre are people teaching and researching in schools across the Faculty of Arts, making it an unusually wide-ranging group. See the Academic Staff page for further details of the teaching and supervisory staff involved with the Centre.
Staff associated with the Centre have interests in interdisciplinary teaching, supervision and research in three main areas of work: comparative literature, cultural studies, and critical theory. For more on the current main research interests of the Centre and fields in which the Centre encourages applications from postgraduates, see the Postgraduate page. For particulars of areas in which individual staff wish to supervise, see the entries branching from the Academic Staff page.
At postgraduate level the Centre offers MA and MQual programs in Critical Theory, as well as PhD programs by Research or by Coursework and Research. Currently about 60 full-time and part-time doctoral candidates are supervised in the Centre. They are working on a wide range of topics in areas of critical theory, comparative literature and cultural studies. See the Postgraduate pages for more details on the MA and the PhD programs, for links to the Postgraduate Handbook entries, and also for information on what our postgraduates are doing.
Primarily a research and postgraduate unit, the Centre for CLCS also has responsibility for co-ordinating an undergraduate program in the School of Literary, Visual and Performance Studies which links subjects originated by the Centre and School with subjects cross-listed from other areas of the Faculty of Arts. The result is a uniquely varied interdisciplinary sequence. Undergraduates can take a full major sequence and an Honours year in CLS subjects. See also the Undergraduate pages.
The Director of the Centre is Dr Chris Worth .
The Centre has some very lively interdisciplinary undergraduate units available for discriminating students. For details of the Centre's Bachelor of Arts and Honours programmes see the Undergraduate page.
The Centre has an international reputation for its postgraduate research training and graduate education. For details of the Centre's PhD, MA and MQual programmes see the Postgraduate page - and see also the Centre's Research page and the Academic Staff page for the research interests of individual members of staff.
Our programmes in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies deal with three main areas of work: comparative literature; cultural studies; and critical theory.
Comparative Literature
Comparative literature at Monash is the study of literature in ways that go beyond particular national or linguistic boundaries. We study literary texts written in other languages - especially French, German, Russian, Chinese and Spanish - as well as in English. In the BA degree, all texts are studied in English translation, but the people teaching them will normally know the original. In the postgraduate programmes, students are expected to read literary texts in the original language.
Cultural Studies
Cultural studies at Monash is the study of literature in its political and social contexts and in relation to other arts and media, especially newspapers and magazines, film and television. We study the interrelationships between texts and codes, both 'artistic' and 'popular', verbal and visual. We look at the connections between social institutions like international media conglomerates, cultural technologies like printing and film, and cultural forms such as the novel and the soap opera.
Critical Theory
Critical theory is an umbrella term for a whole series of contemporary approaches to literary and cultural criticism, for example hermeneutics, semiotics, post-structuralism, ideology critique, psychoanalysis, ecocriticism, and so on. Such theories are central to recent work in both comparative literature and cultural studies. We have a particularly strong postgraduate programme in Critical Theory.
The Centre's Constitution
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