Literature offers us opportunities to experience worlds beyond our own circumstances and situation. Literature is always larger than the interpretations it inspires in us and challenges us to meet the text by expanding our own frame of reference. In this programme literature is studied as a culturally and historically diverse field, as a historical praxis and as an historically shifting canon. In studying literature as an intercultural phenomenon, the course adopts a comparative point of view. The two-year Research programme in Literary Studies offers a theoretically and historically informed survey of the diversity and diachronic complexity of literature.

Studying Literary Studies at the University of Amsterdam

The programme benefits from the University of Amsterdam's (UvA) wide-ranging expertise in numerous European languages such as Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Icelandic, Bulgarian, Finnish and Portuguese. It also draws from the UvA's strong interdisciplinary tradition in ‘area studies' and its tradition of integrated analysis of literary, cultural and historical processes, especially in the field of international relations.