A transnational and transdisciplinary program

“National literature is losing its significance; this is the era of world literature, and everyone should hasten its development”

Goethe, “On World Literature”, 1827.

By combining the resources of a broad spectrum of departments, programs, and research institutes at the University of Notre Dame, the Ph. D. in Literature Program provides students with the opportunity to engage in an academic community that values the study of literature in more than one language from transnational, transdisciplinary, and theoretical perspectives.

More than ever before, literature circulates across national and cultural boundaries helping reshape relations among peoples. For Edward W. Said, “Weltliteratur transcends national literatures without, at the same time, destroying their individualities.” Milan Kundera, has argued for the need “to embrace the larger context of world literature.” The concept of Weltliteratur enables us to supersede national approaches, to examine new relations between Europe and the globe, between antiquity and modernity, between the mass culture and elite productions, as David Damrosch explained it. The various forms of displacement that characterize literature today form the basis for continuing theoretical approaches, from “Global literature” (Jameson) to “cosmopolitanism” (Robbins, Brennan, Appiah) to “transnationalism” (Spivak) and the “postcolonial sphere” (Said, Bhabha, Lionnet).

Combining the resources of a number of departments, programs and Institutes—Classics (Arabic, Greek, Latin, Syriac), East Asian Studies, French and Francophone Studies, German, Iberian and Latin American Studies (Portuguese, Spanish), Irish Studies, Irish Language & Literature, Italian Studies, English and American Literature, Film Theater and Television, Philosophy, and Theology, Nanovic Institute for European Studies, Medieval Institute, Keough Institute for Irish Studies, the Kellog Institute for International Studies, the Kroc Institute for International and Peace Studies—the Ph.D. in Literature brings together outstanding faculty and resources to enable doctoral students to study literature both within traditional disciplines and across disciplinary and national boundaries.
Designed for the intellectually creative student, the doctorate in Literature requires both breadth and depth of language study while offering students curricular flexibility in the fashioning of a degree responsive to their own interests and ambitions.
(Note: This is not the English literature Ph.D. If you would like to apply to English, please click here.)