Comparative Literature, as a field, offers a multidisciplinary and diverse approach that equips us with critical tools to better understand cultural artifacts such as novels, short stories, films, comics, art, music, or architecture—just to name a few. Comparing provides a language that helps us access the unfamiliar through what we know and understand. Translation—key in Comparative Literature—not only from one language to another but between and within genres and media, opens a space of intertextuality and dialogism: a text helps us understand another text as we trace connections and differences between them.
This is the work our students have embarked on over the past three semesters. This volume, which includes essays written in Fall 2019, Spring 2020, and Fall 2020, is Writing the World’s most ambitious and diverse representation of student writing in Comparative Literature courses. For this edition, we have received submissions representative of the most varied range of courses from 100 to 300 levels. The writing centers topics and themes that go from autobiography to coloniality, from politics to architecture. These essays analyze medieval writing, comics, stand-up comedy, and contemporary film. In addition, this is the first time Writing the World includes a series of creative writing: original pieces produced by students that represent other ways to engage with the content and materials of Comparative Literature courses.
The range and breadth as well as the quality of the writing is testament to the resiliency of the students who produced these pieces. The particular conditions the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has created for students and editors alike, has made their work particularly challenging and all the more meaningful. Given these challenges that affected us at a global level, the editorial committee cannot help but present this anthology with a celebratory attitude that does not take away from the quality of the works included.
The editors
Juan Carlos Cabrera Pons, Gennifer Dorgan, and Elena Igartuburu
