Bachelor in Comparative Literature

at Smith College

The Program in World Literatures (formerly comparative literature) enables students to learn languages and engage with at least two literary and cultural traditions studied in their original languages or in translation. World literatures majors explore images, ideas and aesthetic forms that travel the world. They also come to recognize deep cultural contrasts: to see that birth, love, community, happiness and death are all experienced and represented differently from region to region and era to era. In these ways, they start to see their own culture differently in the light of the new ones they encounter.