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Comparative Literature Theses and Dissertations

Theses/dissertations from 2024 2024.

Emerson and Nietzsche: Appropriation, Translation, and Experimentation , Maximilian Gindorf

Theses/Dissertations from 2023 2023

Constructing Selfhood Through Fantasy: Mirror Women and Dreamscape Conversations in Olga Grushin’s Forty Rooms , Grace Marie Alger

Eugene O’Neill Returns: Theatrical Modernization and O’Neill Adaptations in 1980s China , Shuying Chen

The Supernatural in Migration: A Reflection on Senegalese Literature and Film , Rokhaya Aballa Dieng

Breaking Down the Human: Disintegration in Nineteenth-Century Fiction , Benjamin Mark Driscol

Archetypes Revisited: Investigating the Power of Universals in Soviet and Hollywood Cinema , Iana Guselnikova

Planting Rhizomes: Roots and Rhizomes in Maryse Condé’s Traversée de la Mangrove and Calixthe Beyala’s Le Petit Prince de Belleville , Rume Kpadamrophe

Violence, Rebellion, and Compromise in Chinese Campus Cinema ----- The Comparison of Cry Me a Sad River and Better Days , Chunyu Liu

Tracing Modern and Contemporary Sino-French Literary and Intellectual Relations: China, France, and Their Shifting Peripheries , Paul Timothy McElhinny

Truth and Knowledge in a Literary Text and Beyond: Lydia Chukovskaya’s Sofia Petrovna at the Intersections Between Selves, Culture, and Paratext , Angelina Rubina

From Roland to Gawain, or the Origin of Personified Knights , Clyde Tilson

Theses/Dissertations from 2022 2022

Afro-Diasporic Literatures of the United States and Brazil: Imaginaries, Counter-Narratives, and Black Feminism in the Americas , David E. S. Beek

The Pursuit of Good Food: The Alimentary Chronotope in Madame Bovary , Lauren Flinner

Form and Voice: Representing Contemporary Women’s Subaltern Experience in and Beyond China , Tingting Hu

Geography of a “Foreign” China: British Intellectuals’ Encounter With Chinese Spaces, 1920-1945 , Yuzhu Sun

Truth and Identity in Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov and Prince Myshkin , Gwendolyn Walker

Theses/Dissertations from 2021 2021

Postcolonial Narrative and The Dialogic Imaginatio n: An Analysis of Early Francophone West African Fiction and Cinema , Seydina Mouhamed Diouf

The Rising of the Avant-Garde Movement In the 1980s People’s Republic of China: A Cultural Practice of the New Enlightenment , Jingsheng Zhang

Theses/Dissertations from 2020 2020

L’ Entre- Monde : The Cinema of Alain Gomis , Guillaume Coly

Digesting Gender: Gendered Foodways in Modern Chinese Literature, 1890s–1940s , Zhuo Feng

The Deconstruction of Patriarchal War Narratives in Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War , Liubov Kartashova

Pushing the Limits of Black Atlantic and Hispanic Transatlantic Studies Through the Exploration of Three U.S. Afro-Latio Memoirs , Julia Luján

Taiwanese Postcolonial Identities and Environmentalism in Wu Ming-Yi’s the Stolen Bicycle , Chihchi Sunny Tsai

Games and Play of Dream of the Red Chamber , Jiayao Wang

Theses/Dissertations from 2019 2019

Convertirse en Inmortal, 成仙 ChéngxiāN, Becoming Xian: Memory and Subjectivity in Cristina Rivera Garza’s Verde Shanghai , Katherine Paulette Elizabeth Crouch

Between Holy Russia and a Monkey: Darwin's Russian Literary and Philosophical Critics , Brendan G. Mooney

Emerging Populations: An Analysis of Twenty-First Century Caribbean Short Stories , Jeremy Patterson

Time, Space and Nonexistence in Joseph Brodsky's Poetry , Daria Smirnova

Theses/Dissertations from 2018 2018

Through the Spaceship’s Window: A Bio-political Reading of 20th Century Latin American and Anglo-Saxon Science Fiction , Juan David Cruz

The Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Arab Women’s Literature: Elements of Subversion and Resignification. , Rima Sadek

Insects As Metaphors For Post-Civil War Reconstruction Of The Civic Body In Augustan Age Rome , Olivia Semler

Theses/Dissertations from 2017 2017

Flannery O’Connor’s Art And The French Renouveau Catholique: A Comparative Exploration Of Contextual Resources For The Author’s Theological Aesthetics Of Sin and Grace , Stephen Allen Baarendse

The Quixotic Picaresque: Tricksters, Modernity, and Otherness in the Transatlantic Novel, or the Intertextual Rhizome of Lazarillo, Don Quijote, Huck Finn, and The Reivers , David Elijah Sinsabaugh Beek

Piglia and Russia: Russian Influences in Ricardo Piglia’s Nombre Falso , Carol E. Fruit Diouf

Beyond Life And Death Images Of Exceptional Women And Chinese Modernity , Wei Hu

Archival Resistance: A Comparative Reading of Ulysses and One Hundred Years of Solitude , Maria-Josee Mendez

Narrating the (Im)Migrant Experience: 21st Century African Fiction in the Age of Globalization , Bernard Ayo Oniwe

Narrating Pain and Freedom: Place and Identity in Modern Syrian Poetry (1970s-1990s) , Manar Shabouk

Theses/Dissertations from 2016 2016

The Development of ‘Meaning’ in Literary Theory: A Comparative Critical Study , Mahmoud Mohamed Ali Ahmad Elkordy

Familial Betrayal And Trauma In Select Plays Of Shakespeare, Racine, And The Corneilles , Lynn Kramer

Evil Men Have No Songs: The Terrorist and Literatuer Boris Savinkov, 1879-1925 , Irina Vasilyeva Meier

Theses/Dissertations from 2015 2015

Resurrectio Mortuorum: Plato’s Use of Ἀνάγκη in the Dialogues , Joshua B. Gehling

Two Million "Butterflies" Searching for Home: Identity and Images of Korean Chinese in Ho Yon-Sun's Yanbian Narratives , Xiang Jin

The Trialectics Of Transnational Migrant Women’s Literature In The Writing Of Edwidge Danticat And Julia Alvarez , Jennifer Lynn Karash-Eastman

Unacknowledged Victims: Love between Women in the Narrative of the Holocaust. An Analysis of Memoirs, Novels, Film and Public Memorials , Isabel Meusen

Making the Irrational Rational: Nietzsche and the Problem of Knowledge in Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita , Brendan Mooney

Invective Drag: Talking Dirty in Catullus, Cicero, Horace, and Ovid , Casey Catherine Moore

Destination Hong Kong: Negotiating Locality in Hong Kong Novels 1945-1966 , Xianmin Shen

H.P. Lovecraft & The French Connection: Translation, Pulps and Literary History , Todd David Spaulding

Female Representations in Contemporary Postmodern War Novels of Spain and the United States: Women as Tools of Modern Catharsis in the Works of Javier Cercas and Tim O'Brien , Joseph P. Weil

Theses/Dissertations from 2014 2014

Poetic Appropriations in Vergil’s Aeneid: A Study in Three Themes Comprising Aeneas’ Character Development , Edgar Gordyn

Ekphrasis and Skepticism in Three Works of Shakespeare , Robert P. Irons

Theses/Dissertations from 2013 2013

The Role of the Trickster Figure and Four Afro-Caribbean Meta-Tropes In the Realization of Agency by Three Slave Protagonists , David Sebastian Cross

Putting Place Back Into Displacement: Reevaluating Diaspora In the Contemporary Literature of Migration , Christiane Brigitte Steckenbiller

Using Singular Value Decomposition in Classics: Seeking Correlations in Horace, Juvenal and Persius against the Fragments of Lucilius , Thomas Whidden

Theses/Dissertations from 2012 2012

Decolonizing Transnational Subaltern Women: The Case of Kurasoleñas and New York Dominicanas , Florencia Cornet

Representation of Women In 19Th Century Popular Art and Literature: Forget Me Not and La Revista Moderna , Juan David Cruz

53x+m³=Ø? (Sex+Me=No Result?): Tropes of Asexuality in Literature and Film , Jana -. Fedtke

Argentina in The African Diaspora: Afro-Argentine And African American Cultural Production, Race, And Nation Building in the 19th Century , Julia Lujan

Male Subjectivity and Twenty-First Century German Cinema: Gender, National Idenity, and the Problem of Normalization , Richard Sell

Theses/Dissertations from 2011 2011

Blue Poets: Brilliant Poetry , Evangelin Grace Chapman-Wall

Sickness of the Spirit: A Comparative Study of Lu Xun and James Joyce , Liang Meng

Dryden and the Solution to Domination: Bonds of Love In the Conquest of Granada , Lydia FitzSimons Robins

Theses/Dissertations from 2010 2010

The Family As the New Collectivity of Belonging In the Fiction of Bharati Mukherjee and Jhumpa Lahiri , Sarbani Bose

Lyric Transcendence: the Sacred and the Real In Classical and Early-Modern Lyric. , Larry Grant Hamby

Abd al-Rahman Al-Kawakibi's Tabai` al-Istibdad wa Masari` al-Isti`bad (The Characteristics of Despotism and The Demises of Enslavement): A Translation and Introduction , Mohamad Subhi Hindi

Re-Visions: Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy In German and Italian Film and Literature , Kristina Stefanic Brown

Plato In Modern China: A Study of Contemporary Chinese Platonists , Leihua Weng

Making Victims: History, Memory, and Literature In Japan's Post-War Social Imaginary , Kimberly Wickham

Theses/Dissertations from 2009 2009

The Mirrored Body: Doubling and Replacement of the Feminine and androgynous Body In Hadia Said'S Artist and Haruki Murakami'S Sputnik Sweetheart , Fatmah Alsalamean

Making Monsters: The Monstrous-Feminine In Horace and Catullus , Casey Catherine Moore

Not Quite American, Not Quite European: Performing "Other" Claims to Exceptionality In Francoist Spain and the Jim Crow South , Brittany Powell

Developing Latin American Feminist Theory: Strategies of Resistance In the Novels of Luisa Valenzuela and Sandra Cisneros , Jennifer Lyn Slobodian

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Recent PhD Dissertations

Postdramatic African Theater and Critique of Representation Oluwakanyinsola Ajayi

Troubling Diaspora: Literature Across the Arabic Atlantic Phoebe Carter

The Contrafacta of Thomas Watson and Simon Goulart: Resignifying the Polyphonic Song in 16th-century England and France Joseph Gauvreau

Of Unsound Mind: Madness and Mental Health in Asian American Literature Carrie Geng

Cultural Capitals: Postwar Yiddish between Warsaw and Buenos Aires Rachelle Grossman

Blindness, Deafness, and Cripping the Grounds of Comparison in Comparative Literature Kathleen Ong

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Red Feminism: The Politics and Poetics of Liberation Botagoz Ussen Correlative Object Ontology: Pragmatism and Objects of Literary Interpretation Mehmet Yildiz

‘Through the Looking Glass’: The Narrative Performance of Anarkali Aisha Dad

Indeterminate “Greekness”: A Diasporic and Transnational Poetics Ilana Freedman

Imagined Mothers: The Construction of Italy, Ancient Greece, and Anglo-American Hegemony Francesca Bellei

The Untimely Avant-Garde: Literature, Politics, and Transculturation in the Sinosphere (1909-2020) Fangdai Chen

Recovering the Language of Lament: Modernism, Catastrophe, and Exile Sarah Corrigan

Beyond Diaspora:The Off Home in Jewish Literature from Latin America and Israel Lana Jaffe Neufeld

Artificial Humanities: A Literary Perspective on Creating and Enhancing Humans from Pygmalion to Cyborgs Nina Begus

Music and Exile in Twentieth-Century German, Italian, and Polish Literature Cecily Cai

We Speak Violence: How Narrative Denies the Everyday Rachael Duarte Riascos

Anticlimax: The Multilingual Novel at the Turn of the 21st Century Matylda Figlerowicz

Forgetting to Remember: An Approach to Proust’s Recherche Lara Roizen

The Event of Literature:An Interval in a World of Violence Petra Taylor

The English Baroque:The Logic of Excess in Early Modern Literature Hudson Vincent

Porte Planète; Ville Canale –parisian knobs /visually/ turned to \textual\ currents Emma Zofia Zachurski

‘…not a poet but a poem’: A Lacanian study of the subject of the poem Marina Connelly The Tune That Can No Longer Be Recognized: Late Medieval Chinese Poetry and Its Affective Others Jasmine Hu The Invention of the Art Film: Authorship and French Cultural Policy Joseph Pomp Apocalypticism in the Arabic Novel William Tamplin The Sound of Prose: Rhythm, Translation, Orality Thomas Wisniewski

The New Austerity in Syrian Poetry Daniel Behar

Mourning the Living: Africa and the Elegy on Screen Molly Klaisner

Art Beyond the Norms: Art of the Insane, Art Brut, and the Avant-Garde from Prinzhorn to Dubuffet (1922-1949) Raphael Koenig

Words, Images and the Self: Iconoclasm in Late Medieval English Literature Yun Ni

Europe and the Cultural Politics of Mediterranean Migrations Argyro Nicolaou

Voice of Power, Voice of Terror: Lyric, Violence, and the Greek Revolution Simos Zenios

Every Step a New Movement: Anarchism in the Stalin-Era Literature of the Absurd and its Post-Soviet Adaptations Ania Aizman

Kino-Eye, Kino-Bayonet: Avant-Garde Documentary in Japan, France, and the USSR Julia Alekseyeva

Ambient Meaning: Mood, Vibe, System Peli Grietzer

Year of the Titan: Percy Bysshe Shelley and Ancient Poetry Benjamin Sudarsky

Metropolitan Morning: Loss, Affect, and Metaphysics in Buenos Aires, 1920-1940 Juan Torbidoni

Sophisticated Players: Adults Writing as Children in the Stalin Era and Beyond Luisa Zaitseva

Collecting as Cultural Technique: Materialistic Interventions into History in 20th Century China Guangchen Chen

Pathways of Transculturation: Chinese Cultural Encounters with Russia and Japan (1880-1930) Xiaolu Ma

Beyond the Formal Law: Making Cases in Roman Controversiae and Tang Literary Judgments Tony Qian

Alternative Diplomacies: Writing in Early Twentieth-Century Shanghai, Istanbul, and Beyond? Alice Xiang

The Literary Territorialization of Manchuria: Rethinking National and Transnational Literature in East Asia from the Frontier Miya Qiong Xie World Literature and the Chinese Compass, 1942-2012 Yanping Zhang

Anatomy of ‘Decadence’ Henry Bowles

Medicine As Storytelling: Emplotment Strategies in Doctor-Patient Encounters and Beyond (1870-1830) Elena Fratto

Platonic Footnotes: Figures of Asymmetry in Ancient Greek Thought Katie Deutsch

Children’s Literature Grows Up Christina Phillips Mattson

Humor as Epiphanic Awareness and Attempted Self-Transcendence Curtis Shonkwiler

Ethnicity, Ethnogenesis and Ancestry in the Early Iron Age Aegean as Background to and through the Lens of the Iliad Guy Smoot

The Modern Stage of Capitalism: The Drama of Markets and Money (1870-1930) Alisa Sniderman

Repenting Roguery: Penance in the Spanish Picaresque Novel and the Arabic and Hebrew Maqāma Emmanuel Ramírez Nieves

The “Poetics of Diagram” John Kim

Dreaming Empire: European Writers in the Fascist Era Robert Kohen

The Poetics of Love in Prosimetra across the Medieval Mediterranean Isabelle Levy

Renaissance Error: Digression from Ariosto to Milton Luke Taylor

The New Voyager: Theory and Practice of South Asian Literary Modernisms Rita Banerjee

Be an Outlaw, Be a Hero: Cinematic Figures of Urban Banditry and Transgression in Brazil, France, and the Maghreb Maryam Monalisa Gharavi

Bāgh-e Bi-Bargi: Aspects of Time and Presence in the Poetry of Mehdi Akhavān Sāles Marie Huber

Freund-schaft: Capturing Aura in an Unframed Literary Exchange Clara Masnatta

Class, Gender and Indigeneity as Counter-discourses in the African Novel: Achebe, Ngugi, Emecheta, Sow Fall and Ali Fatin Abbas

The Empire of Chance: War, Literature, and the Epistemic Order of Modernity Anders Engberg-Pedersen

Poetics of the unfinished: illuminating Paul Celan’s “Eingedunkelt” Thomas Connolly

Towards a Media History of Writing in Ancient Italy Stephanie Frampton Character Before the Novel: Representing Moral Identity in the Age of Shakespeare Jamey Graham

Transforming Trauma: Memory and Slavery in Black Atlantic Literature since 1830 Raquel Kennon

Renaissance Romance: Rewarding the Boundaries of Fiction Christine S. Lee

Psychomotor Aesthetics: Conceptions of Gesture and Affect in Russian and American Modernity, 1910s-1920s Ana Olenina

Melancholy, Ambivalence, Exhaustion: Responses to National Trauma in the Literature and Film of France and China Erin Schlumpf

The Poetics of Human-Computer Interaction Dennis Tenen

Novelizing the Muslim Wars of Conquest: The Christian Pioneers of the Arabic Historical Novel Luke Leafgren

Secret Lives of the City: Reimagining the Urban Margins in 20th-Century Literature and Theory, from Surrealism to Iain Sinclair Jennifer Hui Bon Hoa

Archaic Greek Memory and Its Role in Homer Anita Nikkanen

Deception Narratives and the (Dis)Pleasure of Being Cheated: The Cases of Gogol, Nabokov, Mamet, and Flannery O’Connor Svetlana Rukhelman

Aesthetic Constructs and the Work of Play in 20th Century Latin American and Russian Literature Natalya Sukhonos

Stone, Steel, Glass: Constructions of Time in European Modernity Christina Svendsen

See here for a full list of dissertations since 1904 .

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Department of Comparative Literature

You are here, recent dissertations in comparative literature.

Dissertations in Comparative Literature have taken on vast number of topics and ranged across various languages, literatures, historical periods and theoretical perspectives. The department seeks to help each student craft a unique project and find the resources across the university to support and enrich her chosen field of study. The excellence of student dissertations has been recognized by several prizes, both within Yale and by the American Comparative Literature Association.

2012 – Present

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Comparative Literature Theses and Dissertations

Theses and Dissertations for the Comparative Literature department.

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• 20 Bachelors Thesis
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• 1 17th century
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"Half-read Wisdom": Classics, Modernism and the Celtic Fringe

(The) Behind (of) Time

A Family Affair: Representations of the Family Through the French-Algerian War

A Literature for All Its Citizens: Communism, Commitment, and the Development of a Democratic Palestinian-Jewish Literature in Israel/Palestine [1948-1961]

A translation of Anne Savelli’s Saint- Germain-en-Laye

After the Animal: Predatory Pursuits in Antebellum America

Alter Egos: Women, Identity and Transcultural Encounters in the Colonial Maghreb

Being in Communities in 20th- and 21st- Century French, British, Canadian, and Francophone Novels

Beyond the Poetic Principle: Psychoanalysis and the Lyric

Black and Balkan: A Comparison of Caribbean, African, African-American and Balkan History, Theory and Art

Commitment as Traveling Theory: Politics in Modern Arabic Literature

Constructing the Caribbean: Regional Discourse and Literary Practice on the Edge of World War II

Creating Something from Nothing: the Economics of Risk and Ethics of Value in James, Zola, Dreiser, and Norris, 1869-1927

Creaturely Constellations: Animals, Literature, and Critical Thought after Auschwitz

Critical Fictions in Latin America

Dislocations: Space, Nation and Identity in Lebanese Fiction 1970-2003

Disunities of Being: The Tension between Transcendence and History in the Formal Aspects of Yeats, Rilke, and Stevens

Economies of the Infinite: Between Hegel and Borges

Fatal Femininity: Transgressive Wives and the Tainted Female Body in William Shakespeare's Hamlet and Lope de Vega's El castigo sin venganza

Foreign Correspondences: Nineteenth-Century News and Literature in Latin America and the United States

• Honors Theses - Examples

1.   A Carne e a Navalha :  Self-Reflective Representation of Marginalized Characters in Brazilian Narrative by Clarice Lispector, Eduardo Coutinho, and Racionias MCs by Corina Ahlswede, 2018

2.   The Travel of Clear Waters: A Case Study on the Afterlife of a Poem by Kaiyu Xu, 2019

3.   Examining Blurring: An Anti-anthropocentric Comparative Study of European Vampirism and Shuten Dōji by Yisheng Tang, 2018

4.  The Revolutionary Potential of Mythology  by Zachary Morgan, 2017

5.  “Use your authority!”: Pedagogy in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest by Wesley Boyko, 2018

6.  Train of Thought by Yana Zlochistaya, 2017

7.   “Between here and there”:  Assertion of the Poetic Voice in the Poetry of Rita Bouvier and Marilyn Dumont by Molly Kearnan, 2020

8.  Unveiling the Invaluable:  Female Voices, Affective Labor, and Play in Reḵẖtī Poetry by Elizabeth Gobbo, 2020

9.  The Prospect Garden of Forking Paths: Reading Jorge Luis Borges’s Fiction through Cao Xueqin’s Honglou meng and Buddhism by Jenny Chen, 2023

10.  La Politisation du Féminisme Littéraire et de la Différence Sexuelle chez Woolf et Cixous by Samantha Bonadio, 2023

11.  AENEAS’ EMPIRE AND CÉSAIRE’S EVASION: BLACK POETICS AS REFUSAL AND REDACTION IN CAHIER D’UN RETOUR AU PAYS NATAL   by des jackson, 2023

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Comparative Literature Theses and Dissertations

This collection contains theses and dissertations from the Department of Comparative Literature, collected from the Scholarship@Western Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Theses/Dissertations from 2024 2024

Politics of the Female Body: Middle Eastern Female Refugee Writers in Canada and the US , Sepideh Hatami Ms.

Untangling the Threads: A Comparative Literary Journey Through Female Guilt and Shame , Shahrzad Izadpanah

The Other Is Speaking: Aesthetics and Politics of Desublimation in the Reconstruction of the Past by Contemporary Mainland Chinese and Chinese North American Women Writers , Hui Wang

Theses/Dissertations from 2023 2023

CIVILIZING THE STAGE: Reform and Theatrical Aesthetics in Colonial Western India (1850-1914) , Abhimanyu Acharya

Unfolding Infinity: Expressionism in Sufi Cosmopoiesis and the Poetics of Islamic Art and Architecture , Amany Dahab

A Haven of Peace: Justice and Hesed in the Book of Ruth and its Retellings in Spanish Drama, European Visual Arts, and Latin American Poetry , Luigi De Angelis Soriano

Indian and British Women’s Contributions to Modern Theatre in Punjab: 1830s -1940s , Ramanpreet Kaur

The Limits of the Law: Recent Fiction on the West German Prosecution of Nazi Atrocities , Pascal Michelberger

Theses/Dissertations from 2022 2022

The Poetics of Environmental Destruction, Care, and Insurgency: Socio-Environmental Crisis in Women’s Contemporary Novels and Films in The Americas , Victoria Jara

Theses/Dissertations from 2021 2021

Veni, Pati, Scripsi: The Maghrebi Diaspora in Driss Chraïbi’s Les Boucs and Salah Methnani-Mario Fortunato’s Immigrato , Mohamed Baya

Theses/Dissertations from 2020 2020

Embodiment of Creative Thought and Visual Logic in Bookmaking: An Example of Intermediality in Word-Picture Adaptation , Diana Bychkova

Between a Harmless Game and a Bittersweet Disease: Forms of Nostalgia in Post-Socialist Central and Eastern Europe , George A. Condrache

Shame and Its Other Family Members in Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater and Everyman and Pierre Lemaitre's Au revoir là-haut , Shahrzad Izadpanah

I Ran to Write: Travel, Translation, and Journalism on Persian Spaces , Emadeddin Naghipour

Theses/Dissertations from 2019 2019

Moloch's Children: Monstrous Techno-Capitalism in North American Popular Fiction , Alexandre Desbiens-Brassard

Re-presenting Violence in the works of Jorge Amado, Gabriel García Márquez, and Ariel Dorfman , David Mongor-Lizarrabengoa

Postcolonial Trauma in the Mediterranean: The Italian-Libyan Transnational Community , Rosario Pollicino

The Amphibian, Melioristic Agenda for Dividuals: Tropological Oscillations versus Tropological Settlements , Donatas Sinkunas

Kurdish Narratives of Identity: A Comparative Reading of Novels from Turkey and Iraq , Persheng Yari

Theses/Dissertations from 2018 2018

Subjectivity in Young Adult Literature (Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis , Zohre Javaheri

Cultural Memory and the Traumatic Past: Examining the Voids in Contemporary German and Uruguayan Literature, Museums, and Film , Jessica Paola Marino

Romance, Politics and Minor Art: A Nomadology of Inamoramento de Orlando and Star Wars , Andrea Privitera

Theses/Dissertations from 2017 2017

Let Me Tell You What It Means: Reading Beyond Humor in Selected Iranian-American Memoirs, Stand-up Comedy, and Film in the Post-9/11 Era , Reza Ashouri Talooki

“Walking around with broken hearts on their hands:” Intimate Writings in Contemporary Comics , Gabriella Colombo Machado

Being Gender/Doing Gender, in Alice Munro and Pedro Almadovar , Bahareh Nadimi Farrokh

Exploring Kitsch: Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five , Parastoo Nasrollahzadeh

Theses/Dissertations from 2016 2016

Organizations of Knowledge about the Orient in German and British Romanticism 1780-1820 , Naqaa Abbas

"I" am not "I" anymore: Negation, Doubling and Identity in Roman Polanski's The Tenant and Max Frisch's Stiller , Parastoo Alaeddini

Saturnine Constellations: Melancholy in Literary History and in the Works of Baudelaire and Benjamin , Kevin Godbout

Representing Modern Female Villain: On Feminine Evil, Perverse Nationhood, and Opposition in Rómulo Gallegos’ Doña Bárbara and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children , Barbara Guerrero

The Entelechial Thinker in Space: ‘Worlds within Worlds’ in Durrell, Flaubert, and Carroll , Sheena M. Jary

Cosmography and Topography: A Comparison of André Thevet’s "Les Singularités de la France Antarctique" and Jean de Léry’s "Histoire d’un Voyage Faict en la Terre du Brésil" , Driton Nushaj

From Dispossession to the Grotesque: Deterritorializing Human Identity in Cobra, El obsceno pájaro de la noche and The Unnamable , Sandra Paola Preciado

Inhuman and Heroic Women: Femininity in the Odyssey and the Arthurian Vulgate , Alexandra Salyga Reynolds

Discussions of Diaspora: Cultural Production and Identity in Contemporary Chinese Canadian Literature , Rachel L. Wong

Theses/Dissertations from 2015 2015

In the Thick of National Consciousness: Difference and the Critique of Identity in Elias Khoury’s Little Mountain and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children , Karim Abuawad

"More or Less" Refugee?: Bengal Partition in Literature and Cinema , Sarbani Banerjee

Politics, Ethics, and Aesthetic Play in Diasporic Iranian Visual Literature: Neshat, Satrapi, Bashi, Soltani , Mehraneh Ebrahimi-Eshratabadi

Who's the Fairest of Them All? Defining and Subverting the Female Beauty Ideal in Fairy Tale Narratives and Films through Grotesque Aesthetics , Leah Persaud

Peri Algeos: Pain in Aeschylus and Sophocles , Anda Pleniceanu

Paradise Lost: Astronomy, Scepticism, Perspective , Yanxiang Wu

Scintillating Scotoma: Migraine, Aura, and Perception in European Literature, 1860-1900 , Janice Y. Zehentbauer

Theses/Dissertations from 2014 2014

The Ha-Ha Holocaust: Exploring Levity Amidst the Ruins and Beyond in Testimony, Literature and Film , Aviva Atlani

Unmasking the Protester: The Meanings and Myths of Collective Civil Resistance Movements in African American and Polish Postresistance Prose Fiction , Agnieszka Herra

The Evolution of Indifference: Locating Stoic Influence in Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly's "Du Dandysme et de Georges Brummell" and Charles Baudelaire's "Le Peintre de la vie moderne" , Aurie Zeran

Theses/Dissertations from 2013 2013

From Nizam to Nation: The Representation of Partition in Literary Narratives about Hyderabad, Deccan , Nazia Akhtar

Enunciation and Plurilingualism in the Francophone and Anglophone African Novel , Ndeye F. Ba

Beyond the Suffering of Being: Desire in Giacomo Leopardi and Samuel Beckett , Roberta Cauchi-Santoro

Mobilizing Insurgent Pasts Toward Decolonial Futures , Patrick Crowley

Magic(infra)realism: Jetztzeiten of Believability and Latin American History in García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad and Otoño del patriarca. , Katarzyna Jasinski

Through the Carnival Looking Glass: A Carnivalesque Reading of Bruno Schulz's A Street of Crocodiles and Guy Davenport's A Table of Green Fields , Tamara A. Kowalski

Theses/Dissertations from 2012 2012

Burying Dystopia: the Cases of Venedikt Erofeev, Kurt Vonnegut, and Victor Pelevin , Natalya Domina

Human Automata, Identity and Creativity in George Du Maurier's Trilby and Raymond Roussel's Locus Solus , Adrienne M. Orr

The Gospel According to José Saramago: a Comparative Study of Critical Reception in Portugal, United States, and Canada , Bruna Reis

Playing with the Other: The Stories of Mu Xin and Vladimir Nabokov , Meng Wu

Theses/Dissertations from 2011 2011

Myth, Language, Empire: The East India Company and the Construction of British India, 1757-1857 , Nida Sajid

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Home > Academic departments > Comparative Literature > Comparative Literature Senior Theses

Comparative Literature Undergraduate Senior Theses

Theses/dissertations from 2024 2024.

Loving 바리데기: A Traveler's Guide to Anthologizing the 여성 시인 , Tiffany Hyunkyung Chang

Apocalyptic Surpluses , Hannah Kadin

From History to Memory: Comparative Discourse of Proust's Le Temps Retrouvé and Michelet's Histoire de la Révolution Française , Jose F. Lopez Cochachi

Theses/Dissertations from 2023 2023

Postcolonial Hauntology of Modernity: Exploring Legacies of Enlightenment Thought in the Understanding of the 'Human' through Intertextualities in Heart of Darkness and Hunter x Hunter , Pumho Karimi

Theses/Dissertations from 2022 2022

State Power and Body Politics in Neoliberal Times: Diamela Eltit's Sumar and Basma Abdel Aziz's al-Ṭābūrs , Ryan Ellis

Theses/Dissertations from 2021 2021

Witnessing and Remembrance: The Rhetoric of Loss in the Old Testament and Latin-American, Jewish Memoir Writers , Theodore Friedman

An Arrangement: Music and Literature in Diderot, Rousseau, and Rameau , Julianne Mehra

The Displaced Poet: Forced Cosmopolitanism and the Reimagining of Nation in Transatlantic Exile Poetry , Abigail Mihaly

Post Diluvial Man and the Origins of Humanitarianism , Raam Tambe

Theses/Dissertations from 2020 2020

Time regained in the great war , Joseph Estrada

Theses/Dissertations from 2019 2019

The Question of Aesthetic Newness in Joyce and Apollinair , Hannah Gallen

Tawada Yoko and Bae Suah , Ji Hyun Shin

Reinventing the Wagnerian Aesthetic: the Leitmotif in Proust's À la recherche du temps perduand Musil's Der Mann ohne Eigenschten , Madeleine Walker

Theses/Dissertations from 2018 2018

Fragments of a Babble-onion Analysis Interminable "Dora Bruder" and "Notes from the Underground" , Timothy Messen

Through Hell and High Water: The Southern Louisiana Trickster Narrative as an Ontology of Resilience , Ava Tichnor

Theses/Dissertations from 2017 2017

That Corpse You Planted: An Agrarian Perspective on the Mortality of Texts , Malcolm Salovaara

Third Night: An Original Play with Dramaturgical Analysis , Elise S. Wien

Theses/Dissertations from 2015 2015

Entering the Mind of a Genius: Yi Sang , Paul C. Chang

The Stories They Tell: Fictional Representations of the Spanish Civil War , Gabriela Josebachvili

Spatial Fictions: Contemporary Representations and Theorizations of Urban Space , Tom Owen

Toward a Decolonial Critical Theory , Benjamin Randolph

Theses/Dissertations from 2014 2014

Fictional Character in Alain Robbe-Grillet's La Jalousie and Julio Cortázar's 62: Modelo para amor , Pedro Hurtado Ortiz

But the Color Stayed: 'Afro Türk' Presence within the Turkish Nation Construction , Olumayowa A. Willoughby

Theses/Dissertations from 2013 2013

Intellectual Masculinity and Masculine Intellectuals , Andrew Huh

"Abstract Painting is Abstract": A Semiotic Analysis of Abstraction in Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art , Alexis Monroe

Writing Art in Latin America: The Spectacular Society and Movie Stars in Cortázar and Puig , Krista Oehlke

Insufficient Utopias: The Politics of Participatory Art from Post-1997 Thailand , Chanon Praepipatmongkol

Theses/Dissertations from 2012 2012

The Tensions of Literary Space: Janet Flanner's New York, Colette's Provinces, and the Paris They Shared , Hilary C. Krutt

Hunting the Spanish Civil War: An Exploration of the "Human" and the "Animal" in Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and Carlos Saura's La Caza , Maxwell A. Moran

The Ideal of Hybridity: Rethinking the Theory within the Context of Albert Camus, José Luandino Vieira and their Selected Works , Renee L. Phillip

Crafting a New Political and Social History: A Study of Christine de Pizan , Madeline L. Sims

Theses/Dissertations from 2011 2011

Paradoxes of the Postwar Body in The Face of Another , Cannon Biggs

Debilitating Dichotomies: The Fragmented Nationalist Endeavor of the Gaucho Literary Genre , Wallace (Ned) Jones

Überzähliges Dasein: Language and Being in the Poetry of Rilke and Mallarmé , Therese Korndorf

William Methwold and the Great Palaces of Europe , Rahul Malik

Schiller Als Arzt: The Theater as Clinic, Pharmacy and Madhouse , Johanna Meyer

On the Threshold of the Archive: The Madeleine and the Bartlett Pears , Matthew Rodriguez

Theses/Dissertations from 2010 2010

Adventures in Writing: Extraordinary Voyages with E.A. Poe and J.Verne , Abigail R. Alexander

Into the Cave with the Marquis de Sade: From Degradation to Translation , Hermanjit S. Bajwa

Unveiled Stories: Desire, Representation and Resistance in Feminist Counter-Cinema , Emily K. Kane

Revolutionary Late-Weimar Objectivity and the "State of Exception" , Alexander J. Lambrow

Nisi Vinceris: Parody and Intertextuality in Titus Andronicus , Maya C. Nathan

Theses/Dissertations from 2009 2009

Narratives of the Desiring Subject: An Analysis of Gender, Desire and Agency in Marguerite Duras' The Love and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway , Ying Cheng

Four Authors in Quest of Utopia: Cortazar, Duras, Carpentier, Perec , Amaury Boscio Colon

Resistance from Within: Literary Negotiations of Female Identity in the Space of the Postcolonial Home , Silvia Ferreira

In No Unmediated Terms: History, Memory, and Representation in MAUS and W ou le Souvenir d'Enfance , Alexander Fidel

Being and Beauty: Mystical Experience and Poetic Self-Affirmation , Andrew Gates

The Cities of St. Petersburg , Kirby Liu

The Passionate Spectator: Cinematic 'Flânerie' in Bennett Miller's The Cruise and Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin's Chronique d'un Été , Annabel Seymour

Utopia and Revolution , Marisa Taney

Theses/Dissertations from 2001 2001

A "Poesis of Loss": The Centrality of Fragment in the Imagist Reception of Sappho , Davey Danielle

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Gen ed writes, writing across the disciplines at harvard college.

• Comparative Analysis

What It Is and Why It's Useful

Comparative analysis asks writers to make an argument about the relationship between two or more texts. Beyond that, there's a lot of variation, but three overarching kinds of comparative analysis stand out:

• Coordinate (A ↔ B): In this kind of analysis, two (or more) texts are being read against each other in terms of a shared element, e.g., a memoir and a novel, both by Jesmyn Ward; two sets of data for the same experiment; a few op-ed responses to the same event; two YA books written in Chicago in the 2000s; a film adaption of a play; etc. 
• Subordinate (A  → B) or (B → A ): Using a theoretical text (as a "lens") to explain a case study or work of art (e.g., how Anthony Jack's The Privileged Poor can help explain divergent experiences among students at elite four-year private colleges who are coming from similar socio-economic backgrounds) or using a work of art or case study (i.e., as a "test" of) a theory's usefulness or limitations (e.g., using coverage of recent incidents of gun violence or legislation un the U.S. to confirm or question the currency of Carol Anderson's The Second ).
• Hybrid [A  → (B ↔ C)] or [(B ↔ C) → A] , i.e., using coordinate and subordinate analysis together. For example, using Jack to compare or contrast the experiences of students at elite four-year institutions with students at state universities and/or community colleges; or looking at gun culture in other countries and/or other timeframes to contextualize or generalize Anderson's main points about the role of the Second Amendment in U.S. history.

"In the wild," these three kinds of comparative analysis represent increasingly complex—and scholarly—modes of comparison. Students can of course compare two poems in terms of imagery or two data sets in terms of methods, but in each case the analysis will eventually be richer if the students have had a chance to encounter other people's ideas about how imagery or methods work. At that point, we're getting into a hybrid kind of reading (or even into research essays), especially if we start introducing different approaches to imagery or methods that are themselves being compared along with a couple (or few) poems or data sets.

Why It's Useful

In the context of a particular course, each kind of comparative analysis has its place and can be a useful step up from single-source analysis. Intellectually, comparative analysis helps overcome the "n of 1" problem that can face single-source analysis. That is, a writer drawing broad conclusions about the influence of the Iranian New Wave based on one film is relying entirely—and almost certainly too much—on that film to support those findings. In the context of even just one more film, though, the analysis is suddenly more likely to arrive at one of the best features of any comparative approach: both films will be more richly experienced than they would have been in isolation, and the themes or questions in terms of which they're being explored (here the general question of the influence of the Iranian New Wave) will arrive at conclusions that are less at-risk of oversimplification.

For scholars working in comparative fields or through comparative approaches, these features of comparative analysis animate their work. To borrow from a stock example in Western epistemology, our concept of "green" isn't based on a single encounter with something we intuit or are told is "green." Not at all. Our concept of "green" is derived from a complex set of experiences of what others say is green or what's labeled green or what seems to be something that's neither blue nor yellow but kind of both, etc. Comparative analysis essays offer us the chance to engage with that process—even if only enough to help us see where a more in-depth exploration with a higher and/or more diverse "n" might lead—and in that sense, from the standpoint of the subject matter students are exploring through writing as well the complexity of the genre of writing they're using to explore it—comparative analysis forms a bridge of sorts between single-source analysis and research essays.

Typical learning objectives for single-sources essays: formulate analytical questions and an arguable thesis, establish stakes of an argument, summarize sources accurately, choose evidence effectively, analyze evidence effectively, define key terms, organize argument logically, acknowledge and respond to counterargument, cite sources properly, and present ideas in clear prose.

Common types of comparative analysis essays and related types: two works in the same genre, two works from the same period (but in different places or in different cultures), a work adapted into a different genre or medium, two theories treating the same topic; a theory and a case study or other object, etc.

How to Teach It: Framing + Practice

Framing multi-source writing assignments (comparative analysis, research essays, multi-modal projects) is likely to overlap a great deal with "Why It's Useful" (see above), because the range of reasons why we might use these kinds of writing in academic or non-academic settings is itself the reason why they so often appear later in courses. In many courses, they're the best vehicles for exploring the complex questions that arise once we've been introduced to the course's main themes, core content, leading protagonists, and central debates.

For comparative analysis in particular, it's helpful to frame assignment's process and how it will help students successfully navigate the challenges and pitfalls presented by the genre. Ideally, this will mean students have time to identify what each text seems to be doing, take note of apparent points of connection between different texts, and start to imagine how those points of connection (or the absence thereof)

• complicates or upends their own expectations or assumptions about the texts
• complicates or refutes the expectations or assumptions about the texts presented by a scholar
• confirms and/or nuances expectations and assumptions they themselves hold or scholars have presented
• presents entirely unforeseen ways of understanding the texts

—and all with implications for the texts themselves or for the axes along which the comparative analysis took place. If students know that this is where their ideas will be heading, they'll be ready to develop those ideas and engage with the challenges that comparative analysis presents in terms of structure (See "Tips" and "Common Pitfalls" below for more on these elements of framing).

Like single-source analyses, comparative essays have several moving parts, and giving students practice here means adapting the sample sequence laid out at the " Formative Writing Assignments " page. Three areas that have already been mentioned above are worth noting:

• Gathering evidence : Depending on what your assignment is asking students to compare (or in terms of what), students will benefit greatly from structured opportunities to create inventories or data sets of the motifs, examples, trajectories, etc., shared (or not shared) by the texts they'll be comparing. See the sample exercises below for a basic example of what this might look like.
• Why it Matters: Moving beyond "x is like y but also different" or even "x is more like y than we might think at first" is what moves an essay from being "compare/contrast" to being a comparative analysis . It's also a move that can be hard to make and that will often evolve over the course of an assignment. A great way to get feedback from students about where they're at on this front? Ask them to start considering early on why their argument "matters" to different kinds of imagined audiences (while they're just gathering evidence) and again as they develop their thesis and again as they're drafting their essays. ( Cover letters , for example, are a great place to ask writers to imagine how a reader might be affected by reading an their argument.)
• Structure: Having two texts on stage at the same time can suddenly feel a lot more complicated for any writer who's used to having just one at a time. Giving students a sense of what the most common patterns (AAA / BBB, ABABAB, etc.) are likely to be can help them imagine, even if provisionally, how their argument might unfold over a series of pages. See "Tips" and "Common Pitfalls" below for more information on this front.

Sample Exercises and Links to Other Resources

• Common Pitfalls
• Advice on Timing
• Try to keep students from thinking of a proposed thesis as a commitment. Instead, help them see it as more of a hypothesis that has emerged out of readings and discussion and analytical questions and that they'll now test through an experiment, namely, writing their essay. When students see writing as part of the process of inquiry—rather than just the result—and when that process is committed to acknowledging and adapting itself to evidence, it makes writing assignments more scientific, more ethical, and more authentic. 
• Have students create an inventory of touch points between the two texts early in the process.
• Ask students to make the case—early on and at points throughout the process—for the significance of the claim they're making about the relationship between the texts they're comparing.
• For coordinate kinds of comparative analysis, a common pitfall is tied to thesis and evidence. Basically, it's a thesis that tells the reader that there are "similarities and differences" between two texts, without telling the reader why it matters that these two texts have or don't have these particular features in common. This kind of thesis is stuck at the level of description or positivism, and it's not uncommon when a writer is grappling with the complexity that can in fact accompany the "taking inventory" stage of comparative analysis. The solution is to make the "taking inventory" stage part of the process of the assignment. When this stage comes before students have formulated a thesis, that formulation is then able to emerge out of a comparative data set, rather than the data set emerging in terms of their thesis (which can lead to confirmation bias, or frequency illusion, or—just for the sake of streamlining the process of gathering evidence—cherry picking). 
• For subordinate kinds of comparative analysis , a common pitfall is tied to how much weight is given to each source. Having students apply a theory (in a "lens" essay) or weigh the pros and cons of a theory against case studies (in a "test a theory") essay can be a great way to help them explore the assumptions, implications, and real-world usefulness of theoretical approaches. The pitfall of these approaches is that they can quickly lead to the same biases we saw here above. Making sure that students know they should engage with counterevidence and counterargument, and that "lens" / "test a theory" approaches often balance each other out in any real-world application of theory is a good way to get out in front of this pitfall.
• For any kind of comparative analysis, a common pitfall is structure. Every comparative analysis asks writers to move back and forth between texts, and that can pose a number of challenges, including: what pattern the back and forth should follow and how to use transitions and other signposting to make sure readers can follow the overarching argument as the back and forth is taking place. Here's some advice from an experienced writing instructor to students about how to think about these considerations:

a quick note on STRUCTURE

     Most of us have encountered the question of whether to adopt what we might term the “A→A→A→B→B→B” structure or the “A→B→A→B→A→B” structure.  Do we make all of our points about text A before moving on to text B?  Or do we go back and forth between A and B as the essay proceeds?  As always, the answers to our questions about structure depend on our goals in the essay as a whole.  In a “similarities in spite of differences” essay, for instance, readers will need to encounter the differences between A and B before we offer them the similarities (A d →B d →A s →B s ).  If, rather than subordinating differences to similarities you are subordinating text A to text B (using A as a point of comparison that reveals B’s originality, say), you may be well served by the “A→A→A→B→B→B” structure.  

     Ultimately, you need to ask yourself how many “A→B” moves you have in you.  Is each one identical?  If so, you may wish to make the transition from A to B only once (“A→A→A→B→B→B”), because if each “A→B” move is identical, the “A→B→A→B→A→B” structure will appear to involve nothing more than directionless oscillation and repetition.  If each is increasingly complex, however—if each AB pair yields a new and progressively more complex idea about your subject—you may be well served by the “A→B→A→B→A→B” structure, because in this case it will be visible to readers as a progressively developing argument.

As we discussed in "Advice on Timing" at the page on single-source analysis, that timeline itself roughly follows the "Sample Sequence of Formative Assignments for a 'Typical' Essay" outlined under " Formative Writing Assignments, " and it spans about 5–6 steps or 2–4 weeks. 

Comparative analysis assignments have a lot of the same DNA as single-source essays, but they potentially bring more reading into play and ask students to engage in more complicated acts of analysis and synthesis during the drafting stages. With that in mind, closer to 4 weeks is probably a good baseline for many single-source analysis assignments. For sections that meet once per week, the timeline will either probably need to expand—ideally—a little past the 4-week side of things, or some of the steps will need to be combined or done asynchronously.

What It Can Build Up To

Comparative analyses can build up to other kinds of writing in a number of ways. For example:

• They can build toward other kinds of comparative analysis, e.g., student can be asked to choose an additional source to complicate their conclusions from a previous analysis, or they can be asked to revisit an analysis using a different axis of comparison, such as race instead of class. (These approaches are akin to moving from a coordinate or subordinate analysis to more of a hybrid approach.)
• They can scaffold up to research essays, which in many instances are an extension of a "hybrid comparative analysis."
• Like single-source analysis, in a course where students will take a "deep dive" into a source or topic for their capstone, they can allow students to "try on" a theoretical approach or genre or time period to see if it's indeed something they want to research more fully.
• DIY Guides for Analytical Writing Assignments

• Types of Assignments
• Unpacking the Elements of Writing Prompts
• Formative Writing Assignments
• Single-Source Analysis
• Research Essays
• Multi-Modal or Creative Projects
• Giving Feedback to Students

Assignment Decoder

How to Write a Comparative Analysis Dissertation: Useful Guidelines

Writing a dissertation involves more than just demonstrating your expertise in your chosen field of study. It also requires using important skills, such as analytical thinking. Without it, developing sound theories, introducing arguments, or making conclusions would be impossible. And nowhere is this ability more prominently showcased than in writing comparative analysis dissertations.

Comparative analysis is a helpful method you can use to do research. Remember writing compare-and-contrast essays at school? It’s actually very similar to conducting this type of analysis. But it also has plenty of peculiarities that make it a unique approach. Keep reading to learn more about it!

What Is a Comparative Analysis Dissertation?

Comparative analysis types.

• Possible Difficulties
• Elements of Comparative Analysis
• How to Write a Comparative Analysis Dissertation

Comparative analysis boils down to studying similarities and differences between two or more things, be it theories, texts, processes, personalities, or time periods. This method is especially useful in conducting social sciences , humanities, history, and business research.

Conducting a comparative analysis helps you achieve multiple goals:

• It allows you to find parallels and dissimilaritie s between your subjects and use them to make broader conclusions.
• Putting two or more things against each other also helps to see them in a new light and notice the usually neglected aspects.
• In addition to similarities and differences, conducting a comparative analysis helps to determine causality —that is, the reason why these characteristics exist in the first place.

Depending on your research methods, your comparative analysis dissertation can be of two types:

• Qualitative comparative analysis revolves around individual examples. It uses words and concepts to describe the subjects of comparison and make conclusions from them. Essentially, it’s about studying a few examples closely to understand their specific details. This method will be especially helpful if you’re writing a comparative case study dissertation.
• Quantitative comparative dissertations will use numbers and statistics to explain things. It helps make general statements about big sample groups. You will usually need a lot of examples to gather plenty of reliable numerical data for this kind of research.

There are no strict rules regarding these types. You can use the features of both in your comparative dissertation if you want to.

Possible Difficulties of Writing a Comparative Analysis Dissertation

As you can see, comparison is an excellent research method that can be a great help in dissertation writing . But it also has its drawbacks and challenges. It’s essential to be aware of them and do your best to overcome them:

• Your chosen subjects of comparison may have very little in common . In that case, it might be tricky to come up with at least some similarities.
• Sometimes, there may not be enough information about the things you want to study. This will seriously limit your choices and may affect the accuracy of your research results. To avoid it, we recommend you choose subjects you’re already familiar with.
• Choosing a small number of cases or samples will make it much more challenging to generalize your findings . It may also cause you to overlook subtle ways in which the subjects influence each other. That’s why it’s best to choose a moderate number of items from which to draw comparisons, usually between 5 and 40.
• It’s also essential that your dissertation looks different from a s high school compare-and-contrast essay. Instead, your work should be appropriately structured. Read on to learn how to do it!

Elements of Dissertation Comparative Analysis

Do you want your dissertation comparative analysis to be successful? Then make sure it has the following key elements:

• Context Your comparative dissertation doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It has historical and theoretical contexts as well as previous research surrounding it. You can cover these aspects in your introduction and literature review .
• Goals It should be clear to the reader why you want to compare two particular things. That’s why, before you start making your dissertation comparative analysis, you’ll need to explain your goal. For example, the goal of a dissertation in human science can be to describe and classify something.
• Modes of Comparison This refers to the way you want to conduct your research. There are four modes of comparison to choose from: similarity-focused, difference-focused, genus-species relationship, and refocusing.
• Scale This is the degree to which your study will be zooming on the subjects of comparison. It’s similar to looking at maps. There are maps of the entire world, of separate countries, and of smaller locations. The scale of your research refers to how detailed the map is. You will need to use similar scale maps for each subject to conduct a good comparison.
• Scope This criterion refers to how far removed your subjects are in time and space. Depending on the scope, there are two types of comparisons:
• Research Question This is the key inquiry that guides your entire study. In a comparative analysis thesis, the research question usually addresses similarities and differences, but it can also focus on other patterns you’ll be exploring. It can belong to one of the following types, depending on the kind of analysis you want to apply:

Want to write your research question quickly and easily? Try our thesis statement generator ! It has four modes depending on your type of writing, which helps it produce customized results.

• Data Analysis Here, you analyze similarities, differences, and relationships you’ve identified between the subjects. Make sure to provide your argumentation and explain where your findings come from.
• Conclusions This element addresses the research question and answers it. It can also point out the significance of similarities and differences that you’ve found.

How to Write a Comparative Analysis Dissertation

Now that you know what your comparative analysis should include, it’s time to learn how to write it! Follow the steps, and you’ll be sure to succeed:

• Select the Subjects This is the most critical step on which your entire dissertation will depend. To choose things to compare, try to analyze several important factors, including your potential audience , the overall goal of the study, and your interests. It’s also essential to check whether the things you want to discuss are sufficiently studied. While you research possible topics, you may stumble upon untrustworthy AI-generated content. Unfortunately, it’s getting increasingly difficult to differentiate it from human-made writing. To avoid getting into this trap, consider using an AI detection tool . It provides 100% accurate results and is completely free.
• Describe Your Chosen Items Before you can start comparing the subjects, it’s necessary to describe them in their social and historical contexts. Without taking a long, hard look at your topic’s background, it would be impossible to determine what you should pay attention to during your research. To describe your subjects properly, you will need to study plenty of sources and convey their content in your dissertation. Want to simplify this task? Check out our excellent free summarizer tool !
• Juxtapose Now, it’s time to do the comparison by checking how similar and different your subjects are. Some may think focusing on the resemblances is more critical, while others find contrasts more exciting. Both these viewpoints are valid, but the best approach is to find the right balance depending on your study’s goal.
• Provide Redescription Unlike previous steps, this one is optional. It involves looking at something for the second time after conducting the comparison. The point is that you might learn new things about your subjects during your study. They may even help shed light on each other (it’s called “ reciprocal illumination .”) This knowledge will likely deepen your understanding or even change it altogether. It’s a good idea to point it out in your comparative case study dissertation.
• Consider Rectification and Theory Formation These two processes are also optional. They involve upgrading your writing and theories after conducting your research. This doesn’t mean changing the topic of you study. Instead, it refers to changing how you think about your subjects. For example, you may gain some new understanding and realize that you weren’t using the right words to properly describe your subjects. That’s when rectification comes into play. Essentially, you revise the language used in your discussion to make it more precise and appropriate. This new perspective may even inspire you to come up with a new theory about your topic! In that case, you may write about it, too. Usually, though, rectification is enough. If you decide to do it, feel free to use our paraphrasing tool to help you find the right words.
• Edit and Proofread After you’re done writing the bulk of your text, it’s essential to check it and ensure it passes the plagiarism check. After all, even if you haven’t directly copied other people’s texts, there may still be some percentage of accidental plagiarism that can get you in trouble. To ensure that it doesn’t happen, use our free plagiarism detector .

And this is how you write a comparative analysis dissertation! We hope our tips will be helpful to you. Read our next article if you need help with a  literature review in a dissertation . Good luck with your studies!

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• ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global This link opens in a new window ProQuest database providing the electronic equivalent of Dissertation Abstracts International. Beginning with the first U.S. dissertation in 1861, represents the work of authors from North American and European universities on a full range of academic subjects. Indexes and provides access to Georgetown-authored theses and dissertations. more... less... Includes abstracts for doctoral dissertations beginning July 1980 and for Master's theses beginning Spring 1988. Citations for dissertations published from 1980 forward include 350-word abstracts. Citations for Master's theses from 1988 forward include 150-word abstracts. Most dissertations published since 1997, and some from prior years, are available for free download; others may be requested via Interlibrary Loan.
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• EThoS: Electronic Theses Online This link opens in a new window The British Library's database of digitized theses from UK higher education institutions. Free registration and login is required.
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• Open Access Theses & Dissertations The number of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) openly available via institutional repositories has grown dramatically in recent years, increasing the need for a centralized service to search for this unique material. Open Access Theses and Dissertations (OATD), launched in early 2013, is on the path to fulfill that need. Not as large as the commercial subscription service ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Database, OATD distinguishes itself by providing access to more than 1.6 million open-access theses and dissertations freely available from over 800 institutions worldwide. The simplified interface allows searching across all fields or, in advanced search, by specific field (Title, Author Name, Abstract, University/Publisher, or Subject/Keywords). In addition, users may limit searches to a specific language or date range. Search results may be sorted by relevance, author, university, or date. more... less... Depending on the search, results may be further limited by date, university, department, degree, level (e.g., doctoral vs. master's), or language. The number of hits for entries under each limit is conveniently displayed in the left column. Links to the full text residing on the home institution's site are provided for each record. In many instances, several pages of the thesis or dissertation are available for viewing. Though other sites cover similar material, e.g., PQDT Open http://pqdtopen.proquest.com and Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations, OATD focuses exclusively on open-access ETDs, and serves as an excellent resource for students and researchers. Its usefulness will continue to increase as more ETDs are made freely available
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