Literature is a universal fact, worldwide in scope and transhistorical in scope, albeit in extremely diverse forms : the study of its variations is the object of this Chair, in line with the teaching of comparative literature that began in Europe and America in the 19th century. Reading texts of all origins and status, literary analysis and essential contextualization are all part of this immobile journey and the change of scenery that accompanies it. The exercise of admiration is not forbidden either.

The aim is to open the door of the world library and browse its shelves, so as to make us unlimited readers, capable of reading beyond literature, freeing ourselves from our own historicity, in a process of defamiliarization. For it is in fact the very notion of literature that is problematic, with all that it implies in terms of historically dated and geographically localized presuppositions and usages : roughly speaking, the Europe of the last two centuries. This is why the title of the chair has been changed to the plural, and why it proposes the study not of literature, but of literatures, whose diversity - not only linguistic, but also cultural and anthropological - must be postulated first and foremost.

Research at the Comparative Literatures Chair focuseson the long-term evolution of aesthetic systems and the status of literature from Antiquity to the present day, and on how these vary from one culture to another, with work on Greek tragedy, Japanese Noh and Asian literatures, medieval and Renaissance humanism, the Enlightenment, the classical and romantic arts, European modernism and contemporary literature. Genetic criticism and manuscript editing are also used, with works on Paul Valéry and T. S. Eliot.